EternalBlue and You: Detecting & Trending SMB Vulnerabilities and Exploitation Activity

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Presented at flocon 2018 by

Kevin Breeden

The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol had a big year in 2017. While a fairly ubiquitous networking protocol with a long history of vulnerabilities and best-practice guidance, it came to the forefront of headlines when the Shadow Brokers group released ExternalBlue, an exploit that takes advantage of a vulnerability in Microsoft’s SMBv1 server implementation. EternalBlue gained notoriety during the record-breaking WannaCry ransomware attack and later its use in the Petya/NotPetya ransomware attacks. Are we vulnerable to such attacks? Are we being targeted and do we have any current infections? What can we do to ensure our infrastructure is protected from these threats? These are all questions that immediately come to mind for IT managers and network defenders. The NCCIC/US-CERT Technical Analysis Branch leveraged the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS), better known as EINSTEIN, to answer these questions for U.S. Federal Government entities.This presentation will begin with an overview of EternalBlue and the prominent campaigns in which it was used. Next we will present the analysis methodology that we employed, leveraging netflow to profile SMB traffic and identify potentially vulnerable SMB servers. We will also discuss content-based network traffic analysis and how we detected and trended this threat activity. Finally, we will discuss ways to protect yourself from future SMB exploits and lessons-learned.