New Tool To Detect Microsoft 365 Compromises

The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a new tool to help with the detection of potential compromise within Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 environments. The release of the tool comes after Microsoft disclosed how cyber criminals are using stolen credentials and access tokens to target Azure customers.

Called Aviary, the new tool is a dashboard that makes it easy to visualise and analyse output from Sparrow, the compromise detection tool that was first released in December 2020. Using a Splunk-based dashboard, the newly released Aviary is meant to facilitate the analysis of output data from Sparrow.

Built by CISA to help with the detection of malicious activity like the SolarWinds attack, Sparrow can be used by network defenders to hunt for potential malicious activity within Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD), Microsoft 365 (M365), and Office 365 (O365) environments. “Frequently, CISA has observed the APT actor gaining Initial Access to victims’ enterprise networks via compromised SolarWinds Orion products like Solorigate and Sunburst.

“However, CISA is investigating instances in which the threat actor may have obtained initial access by Password Guessing, Password Spraying, and/or exploiting inappropriately secured administrative or service credentials instead of using the compromised SolarWinds Orion products, says the CISA in its Alert.

Sparrow was designed to help identify both accounts and applications that might have been compromised within an organisation’s Azure/M365 environment.

With Sparrow, defenders can look out for domain authentication or federation modifications, find new and modified credentials in logs, detect privilege escalation, detect OAuth consent and users’ consent to applications, identify anomalous SAML token sign-ins, and check the Graph API application permissions for service principals and apps in the environment, among others.

The tool is now available on GitHub, with additional information on how to install Aviary, after running Sparrow, included in CISA’s January announcement for the detection tool, which has been updated with instructions on using Aviary.

In addition to these tools, CISA released the Python-based CHIRP IOC detection tool in March, which can be used to identify signs of malicious activity linked to the SolarWinds cyber-attack on Windows operating systems within an on-premises environment. The tool examines Windows events logs and the Windows registry for evidence of intrusions, and can be used to query Windows artifacts and apply YARA rules to detect malware, backdoors, and implanted malicious code.

CERT CISA:       GitHub:     TechRadar:       Security Week:        HIPPA Journal:       Image: Unsplash

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