IIS Web Servers Based Attacks Increased by 1.7 Million in Last Quarter of 2018

In the second quarter of 2018 IIS, Drupal, and Oracle WebLogic are highly targeted by attackers. IIS based attacks alone increased from two thousand to 1.7 million, since Q1
2018.

According to eSentire, the attacks based on following web technologies increased in Q2 2018. IIS (30 percent), WebLogic (24 percent) and Apache (less than one percent).

“Biotechnology, Accounting, Real Estate, Marketing, and Construction were the top verticals that experienced the highest amount of traffic due to outdated vulnerabilities.”

IIS Based Attacks

Most of the IIS attacks are combined Oracle Fusion Middleware vulnerability CVE-2017-10271 and the code execution vulnerability with (CVE-2017-7269) IIS version 6.0.

The attackers don’t target a particular industry reads the eSentire report. With Biotechnology the IIS 6.0 and WebLogic exploit were dominant, Real Estate, marketing firm targeted with D-Link exploit and Finally, Construction experienced Drupalgeddon2 attacks.

eSentire also had a collection of operating systems among the attacking infrastructure involved – over 400 of the attacking IPs had Shodan records indicating they were Windows machines (including XP, 7, 8, 2008, and 2012). Additionally, nearly 350 FTP servers and more than 100 mail servers were reported.

According to Shodan report, more than 3.5 million IIS web servers exposed. In the second quarter of 2018, many hacking groups attack IPs with a unique set of exploits and some IPs with multiple exploits.

Other Events

The four-year-old banking trojan Emotet emerges again and the attackers distribute the malware through pdf and doc files.

The Emotet is one of the rapidly spreading banking trojans that could cost around $1 Million to recovered the affected networks and the malware authors are continuously improving the malware to maintain the persistence.

Forty-nine percent of Emotet samples included “invoice,” “payment” or “account”
in their filename. The filenames of unspecified documents often consisted only of random strings of numbers and letters. Emotet and Hancitor were observed in large portions with the second quarter.

Hancitor also called as Chanitor is typically sent as a macro-enabled empowered Office document in phishing messages with “critical” messages, for example, phone messages, faxes or invoices.

Observations of malicious PowerShell in Q2 2018 showed a slight decrease in unique PowerShell commands (48 in Q1 vs. 44 in Q2) and a corresponding two percent decrease in obfuscation techniques.

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