Cyber risk and advisory programs that identify security gaps and build strategies to address them.
MDR that provides improved detection, 24/7 threat hunting, end-to-end coverage and most of all, complete Response.
Our team delivers the fastest response time in the industry. Threat suppression within just 4 hours of being engaged.
Visibility and response across your entire Microsoft security ecosystem.
XDR with Machine Learning that eliminates noise, enables real-time detection and response, and automatically blocks threats.
Be protected by the best from Day 1.
24/7 Threat Investigation and Response.
Expert threat hunting, original research, and proactive threat intelligence.
TRU is foundational to our MDR service. No add-ons or additional costs required.
Stop ransomware attacks before they disrupt your business.
Detect and respond to zero-day exploits.
Protect against third-party and supply chain risk.
Adopt a risk-based approach to cybersecurity.
Protect your most sensitive data.
Meet cybersecurity regulatory compliance mandates.
Eliminate misconfigurations and policy violations.
Prevent business disruption by outsourcing MDR.
Defend brute force attacks, active intrusions and unauthorized scans.
Safeguard endpoints 24/7 by isolating and mediating threats to prevent lateral spread.
Enhance investigation and threat detection across multi-cloud or hybrid environments.
Remediate critical misconfigurations, security vulnerabilities and policy violations across cloud and containerized environments.
Detect malicious insider and identity-based behavior leveraging machine learning models.
Our Threat Response Unit (TRU) publishes security advisories, blogs, reports, industry publications and webinars based on its original research and the insights driven through proactive threat hunts.
eSentire is The Authority in Managed Detection and Response Services, protecting the critical data and applications of 2000+ organizations in 80+ countries from known and unknown cyber threats. Founded in 2001, the company's mission is to hunt, investigate and stop cyber threats before they become business disrupting events.
We provide sophisticated cybersecurity solutions for Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), Managed Service Providers (MSPs), and Value-Added Resellers (VARs). Find out why you should partner with eSentire, the Authority in Managed Detection and Response, today.
We believe a multi-signal approach is paramount to protecting your complete attack surface. See why eSentire MDR means multi-signal telemetry and complete response.
See how our 24/7 SOC Cyber Analysts and Elite Threat Hunters stop even the most advanced cyberattacks before they disrupt your business.
Choose the right mix of Managed Detection and Response, Exposure Management, and Incident Response services to strengthen your cyber resilience.
Try our interactive tools including the MITRE ATT&CK Tool, the SOC Pricing Calculator, the Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment, and our MDR ROI Calculator.
Read the latest security advisories, blogs, reports, industry publications and webinars published by eSentire's Threat Response Unit (TRU).
See why 2000+ organizations count on eSentire to build resilience and prevent business disruption.
eSentire has been closely monitoring the Petya/NotPetya malware outbreak this week. Our threat lab has learned more about the behaviors and propagation methods used by this variant. While latest research suggests that this attack may be the result of a geo-political agenda (targeting Ukraine), indications suggest that activity and spread is winding down.
Read on for a summary of the latest from the eSentire Threat Intelligence lab:
There are at least three mechanisms by which the malware is known to spread from one machine to another. The first involves the ETERNALBLUE and ETERNALROMANCE SMB exploits from the Shadow Brokers dump of alleged NSA hacking tools. When the Wannacry worm was released into the wild in May 2017, the ETERNALBLUE exploit allowed it to spread like wildfire due to many organizations not having applied the MS17-010 patch that Microsoft had released a couple of months earlier. It was probably less effective this time around, as many organizations would have deployed the patches by now. Nevertheless, it remains a potent infection vector on networks containing out-of-date (unpatched) Windows hosts.
The other two mechanisms are more interesting. They are examples of well-known techniques that penetration testers and hackers use to move from computer to computer inside a network that they have successfully compromised. The first involves the administration tool PsExec, which is often used for remote deployment of software on enterprise networks. The second leverages a built-in Windows tool called WMIC (Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line) that can also be used to remotely manage computers on enterprise networks.
Both of these mechanisms require valid administrative credentials in order to work. The Petya malware comes bundled with a credential-stealing tool (based on the well-known Mimikatz) that it uses to extract cached user credentials from the memory of the infected machine, and passes them on to PsExec/WMIC for use in infecting other computers on the network.
In addition to spreading itself from system to system, the Petya malware includes two kinds of encryption functionality. The standard file encryption part scans all fixed drives on the computer for files with “interesting” extensions, and encrypts them with the AES encryption algorithm. It then creates a ransom note file called README.TXT that contains an encrypted version of the AES key. If there are multiple drives, the files on each drive will be encrypted with a different AES key, and will have a separate ransom note file.
The low-level part of the encryption targets two critical data structures on the hard disk, namely the Master Boot Record (MBR) and the Master File Table (MFT). Petya first overwrites the Master Boot Record with its own version that prevents the system from booting its regular operating system and displays a ransom note screen instead. It saves a copy of the original MBR, and creates a scheduled task to restart the system after it has had a chance to complete its network propagation phase. In addition to overwriting the MBR, it also encrypts the Master File Table, which is the main file system data structure that Windows relies on to locate files on disk. Unfortunately, the encryption key is then thrown away by the malware, rendering the MFT unrecoverable. The “installation ID” displayed on the ransom note screen is randomly generated and cannot be used to recover the MFT encryption key. This fact has led some researchers to conclude that Petya/NotPetya was not intended to be for-profit ransomware, and the motivations behind it may have been political.
Petya/NotPetya is a worm (malware that autonomously spreads by copying itself from victim to victim), which means the most likely cause of infection is exposure to a previously infected machine on the same network. However, in order to kick start the spreading process, an initial set of computers must first be infected in a different way. Malware researchers sometimes call this the “initial infection vector”.
Early reports pointed to malicious Microsoft Word documents using the well-known CVE-2017-0199 vulnerability to download and install Petya on victim computers. While this is certainly a possibility, we have not seen any confirmed instances of this infection vector. The purported samples we examined in our lab turned out to be spreading a different strain of malware known as Lokibot.
A more unusual infection vector has now emerged as the prime suspect. According to multiple sources, the Ukrainian tax accounting software maker MeDoc had its software update mechanism co-opted in order to spread the Petya malware to unsuspecting users. MeDoc is one of only two tax software packages approved by the Ukrainian government, so anyone doing business with Ukraine is likely to use it. This could explain how the malware was able to infect some organizations outside of the Ukraine. After initial denials, MeDoc has now confirmed that a breach of its systems has been detected and is currently being investigated.