Ransomware as a Service: the Mindset of Cyber Criminals Has Changed

The second part of our series on the ongoing professionalization of attacks on IT systems deals with changes in the attackers’ mindset. Automation, commercialization and cloud computing have also left their mark on the typical profile of cyber criminals that admins and vulnerability management have to deal with. Contrary to common Hollywood clichés, the threat of Ransomware as a Service is usually not (anymore) posed by highly talented script kiddies with a lot of time on their hands or anarchistic world improvers in hoodies. Nor from highly qualified intelligence agencies equipped with seemingly endless resources.

Attacks Are Commissioned Work Today

Today’s most dangerous attacks are increasingly working “on contract,” pursuing a business model, and must also be guided by values such as efficiency or probability of success. Just as cloud computing has become an integral part of most companies’ IT, it now also serves cyber criminals to automate, organize and accelerate attacks. With great success: Ransomware has grown to become the biggest threat, and with Ransomware as a Service, attacks can be booked quite easily.

More and more security professionals are just now developing an understanding of the attackers’ business models: their logic is hardly any different from that of other companies. They invest the same resources in developing exploits and tools and want to achieve the highest possible return on investment (ROI). That is why they often pay close attention to the reusability of their tools.

Faced with limited resources, cyber criminals develop exploits for widely used technologies that offer high profit potential for multiple targets.

The Perspective of Cyber Criminals

The attackers have organized themselves, orders are placed on the darknet, and payment is made via Bitcoin. They are profit-maximized, efficiency-oriented and professionally structured: However, the new, economy-oriented logic can and must also be a key to better defense mechanisms. Especially when security managers see themselves buried under an avalanche of security warnings, it is helpful to understand how cyber criminals “tick”.

In order to secure their own systems, defense must now rethink and think outside the box. Understanding the logic of cyber criminals helps decipher key signals and close gaps. David Wolpoff, CTO of Randori, has formulated six key questions in a blog post on Threatpost that describe the mindset of modern cyber criminals well:

  1. What useful information about a target can be identified from the outside?
  2. How valuable is the target to the attackers?
  3. Is the target known to be easy to hack?
  4. What is the potential of the target and environment?
  5. How long will it take to develop an exploit?
  6. Is there a repeatable ROI for an exploit?

The more knowledge cyber criminals can gather about a technology or a person in a company, the better they can plan the next attack phase. In the first step, they thus ask how detailed the target can be described from the outside. For example, depending on the configuration, a web server may not reveal a server identifier or server names and detailed version numbers. If the exact version of a used service and its configuration is visible, precise exploits and attacks can be executed. This maximizes the chances of success while minimizing the probability of detection and the effort required.

No Longer Random

The increasingly important economic interest ensures that cyber criminals have to consider factors such as effort, time, money and risk more strongly. Accordingly, it is not worthwhile to attack or spy on systems indiscriminately. These days, attackers first clarify the potential value before acting and focus on promising targets such as VPNs and firewalls, credential stores, authentication systems or remote support solutions at the network edge. These could turn out to be master keys and unlock the way into the network or to credentials.

Again and again, reports of critical and incendiary vulnerabilities emerge that apparently no one had exploited for attacks. It sounds unbelievable, but often no one has done the work to program an exploit for a vulnerability. Modern cyber criminals increasingly follow the principle of return on investment and make use of existing proof of concepts (POC).

Complexity Is Unwanted

This sometimes yields surprising findings: modern cyber criminals avoid well-documented vulnerabilities. Extensive research and analysis of a particular vulnerability is more an indicator of unwanted complexity and effort, which one wants to keep to a minimum. RaaS hackers search for available tools or buy exploits already created for a particular object. Attackers want to move unnoticed in the systems they compromise. So they pick targets with few defenses where malware and pivoting tools work, such as desktop phones and VPN apps and other unprotected hardware. Many apps there are built with or for Linux, have a full scope of use, and have trusted pre-installed tools. This promises to keep them usable after an exploit and makes them all the more attractive to cyber criminals.

Surprising Cost-Benefit Calculation

Once the target has been set, attackers need to assess time, cost, and reusability. Vulnerability research also goes beyond simply uncovering unpatched devices. Cyber criminals must assess whether the cost of researching and developing the resulting tools is commensurate with the gain after an attack. Well-documented software or open-source tools that are easy to obtain and test mean a relatively easy target.

Also surprising: overall, the severity of a vulnerability does not play the central role for cyber criminals, according to Wolpoff. Planning an attack is far more complex and requires economic thinking. Recognizing that the other side must also make compromises helps defend cloud environments in a meaningful way. Protecting everything, everywhere, all the time from all attackers is illusory. Thinking more like them, however, makes prioritization easier.

In the third part of this series of articles, it’s all about whether the Ransomware-as-a-Service model would be possible without Bitcoin and darknet, and whether the two technologies actually deliver what the attackers promise in that context.