[Updated 7/11/2019 – Azure AD now supports FIDO2 tokens for MFA, which also protect against EvilGinx2]

This is my second blog post in this series. In the first blog post (here) Aidan Holland (@thehappydinoa) demonstrated how EvilGinx2 can bypass Microsoft’s 2FA that is built into Office 365 (SMS Text or Mobile Authenticator), sometimes called “Always-On MFA.”

Kuba Gretzky (@mrgretzky) stated that it can defeat any form of 2FA!

“Be aware that: Every sign-in page, requiring the user to provide their password, with any form of 2FA implemented, can be phished using this technique!” https://breakdev.org/evilginx-2-next-generation-of-phishing-2fa-tokens

That’s a bold claim! Matt Soseman from Microsoft says, “always combine MFA with Conditional Access.” Matt is one of Microsoft’s top Cybersecurity experts, as he spoke on behalf of Microsoft at the RSA Security Conference in March 2019 (PDF HERE).

In this blog post, we are going to put both claims to the test. How does Microsoft’s Conditional Access compare against Evilginx2? We tested 13 of Microsoft’s defense capabilities and found 7 ways to defeat EvilGinx2. We also provide 4 recommendations for Microsoft to further improve security, and 5 recommendations for customers.

First, let’s define terms.

• 2FA, or ‘two-factor authentication’ is most commonly something you know like a password, and then some other factor like an SMS text code or a token-based Authenticator mobile app.
• MFA, or ‘multi-factor authentication’ can be multiple factors, not just two. For example, Microsoft’s conditional access allows you to go beyond user-authentication to perform machine authentication. You can check to see whether a computer is joined to the on-premises Active Directory domain, or whether it has a certificate issued from Active Directory Certificate Services (using Microsoft Cloud App Security Conditional Access App Control), or is originating from a range of IP addresses (aka IP-fencing). You can also check for the risk level of a user identity (using Azure Identity Protection) or the risk level of a machine (with Microsoft Defender ATP).

In our testing, we found that while EvilGinx2 is successful in bypassing the user-authentication forms of 2FA (yes, even the Microsoft Authenticator App!), and Azure Identity Protection.

EvilGinx2 was unsuccessful in bypassing the full MFA capabilities that Microsoft offers in Azure Conditional Access. This is available for customers who own the Azure AD Premium P1 license, which is also bundled in Enterprise Mobility Suite E3, and/or M365 E3.

Anyone who owns Azure AD Conditional Access can protect themselves from EvilGinx2 MFA bypass. Anyone who does not own Conditional Access can partially defend themselves against EvilGinx. The client access rule only protects Exchange Online, not SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Dynamics, or any of the other Office 365 or Azure services.

How does EvilGinx2 Work?

In order to understand how Azure Conditional Access can block EvilGinx2, its important to understand how EvilGinx2 works. First, the attacker must purchase a domain name, like “office-mfa.com” and convince an end-user to click on that link. The attacker’s machine passes all traffic on to the actual Microsoft Office 365 sign-on page. Since all traffic is passed directly through, the end-user sees the *actual* Office 365 sign-in page. This means the attacker does not have to waste valuable time trying to make the page look identical. The authentication token is captured after the user performs user-based authentication (SMS or Authenticator App). The attacker can then import the cookie into their own browser to access Office 365. In our testing, the link was not blocked by MSFT EOP, Office ATP, Microsoft Defender ATP, or Windows Defender SmartScreen. However, we did find at least three methods that blocked EvilGinx2.

Figure 1 image credit – breakdev.org

The attacker’s EvilGinx2 server terminates the SSL session and it then re-transmits a new SSL session against login.microsoftonline.com. This avoids all SSL errors in the browser, since there is a valid ssl handshake to the attacker’s machine. This is an advantage for the hacker, but it turns out to be the Achilles heel because Azure Conditional Access can perform additional checks that will all block EvilGinx such as: IP address, Domain Join Membership, Compliance (via Intune UEM), or Certificate (via CASB).

Here is a screen shot showing Azure Conditional Access blocking EvilGinx2 because the attacker’s IP address does not match the policy.

Here is a screen shot showing that Azure Conditional Access blocks EvilGinx2 because the attacker’s proxy machine is not a domain-joined device

Here is a screen shot showing that Azure Conditional Access blocks EvilGinx2 because the attacker’s proxy machine is not meeting Intune compliance policy.

Here is a screen shot showing Microsoft Cloud App Security Conditional Access App Control successfully blocked the attacker from getting into Exchange Online because the attacker could not present a valid certificate.

Here is a screen shot showing new-clientaccessrule blocking EvilGinx2 from accessing the mailbox in Office 365

Another method that blocks EvilGinx is U2F (Universal 2nd Factor Authentication). The author of EvilGinx2 states (here) that U2F “leaves no room for error and is totally unphishable using Evilginx method…” and that “make your life easier and get a U2F device! This will greatly improve your accounts’ security.” [Update: On July 10th, Microsoft formally announced that Azure AD now supports FIDO2 in public preview (read announcement here).]

So here is a summary of all known/possible defenses in Microsoft’s security arsenal and how they measure up against EvilGinx2.

Recommendations for Office 365 Customers

1. If you are an Office 365 E3 subscriber, upgrade to Enterprise Mobility Suite and configure Azure AD Conditional Access for either (machine-authentication (domain-join checking, certificate checking) or IP address fencing) or (compliant device checking with Intune for Mobile Devices or Intune UEM for Windows 10). If you need assistance, find a qualified Microsoft Partner (here) and scroll down to the bottom.
   
2. Consider implementing client access rules to protect Exchange Online. For an excellent overview of how client access rules work, watch this MSFT Ignite Video (here), fast-forward to 7:35 and watch until 15:55. Here is an example client access rule targeting a test account.
   new-ClientAccessRule -name “Allow InternalIP Only” -Action DenyAccess -ExceptAnyOfClientIPAddressesOrRanges [enter your public IP addresses here] -UsernameMatchesAnyOfPatterns *TestUserName
   
3. Plan a U2F deployment, for example with Yubico. [This is now supported with Azure AD as of 7/10/2019].

   “With the YubiKey, user login is bound to the origin, meaning that only the real site can authenticate with the key. The authentication will fail on the fake site even if the user was fooled into thinking it was real. This greatly mitigates against the increasing volume and sophistication of phishing attacks and stops account takeovers.” Reference https://www.yubico.com/solutions/fido-u2f/
   

4. Perform regular Security Awareness training to help users recognize suspicious URLs.
   Note: Microsoft’s Office 365 ATP has an exclusive feature called ‘Native Link Rendering’
   to show users the original hyperlink when they hover over it. No other advanced hyperlink scanning solution has this capability (I asked all the top vendors this question including ProofPoint, Mimecast, FireEye, Symantec and others). Native Link Rendering requires the Office 365 C2R (click-to-run) version, and not the volume-licensed MSI installer version of Office. Monthly Channel 1808 release (September 2018) or Semi-Annual Channel 1901 (which has not rolled out yet except to the Semi-Annual Targeted channel). See release notes (here).
5. Harden the Office 365 tenant. A good place to start is my blog post ’20 Things to do before and after a phishing event in Office 365′. And we also offer a monthly service to continuously audit and harden Office 365, for more on that service click here.
   If you are investigating an incident and you believe a user’s token has been captured, you can invalidate a token with this AAD PowerShell cmdlet
   $date =get-date; Set-Msoluser -UserPrincipalName (UPN) -StsRefreshTokensValidFrom $date
   

Feedback for Microsoft:

• Microsoft should consider improving Office ATP Safe Links and/or SmartScreen to take into consideration the age of a newly registered domain name. Some of Microsoft’s competitors can check the age of a domain name when determining hyperlink reputation.
• Microsoft should consider developing features similar to new-clientaccessrule for the other services in Office 365 like SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, Dynamics
• Azure Identity Protection could be improved to check every attempt, similar to new-clientaccesrule. We assume the fact that we had imported a captured token is why we did not get triggered by the User Risk policy or Sign-in risk policies (which were both set to ‘low and above’ with the block control).
• Don’t give away which factor of authentication was the reason why the attacker could not sign-in. For example, in our testing the attacker is able to learn whether it was a domain join check or a compliance check that they failed. This is precisely what the PCI DSS takes issue with in their MFA guidance (here)

  

  Therefore we recommend that Microsoft change from Multi-Step to true Multi-Factor authentication. Today, any world-wide user can attempt to guess a username and password, only to then be blocked by a subsequent policy. This arms the attacker with too much information on which challenge failed.

  

-Joe Stocker, CEO

Patriot Consulting Technology Group, LLC

Our Mission “to empower our clients to manage cyber security risk by securely deploying Microsoft Cloud technology”

According to the latest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report, spear phishing remains the preferred attack method used by hackers. Microsoft detected a 250% increase in phishing messages between January and December 2018.

Figure 1 Page 21 of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Volume 24

Many organizations have deployed 2FA as a layer of defense to guard against phishing, so that if the user gives away the username and password, the attacker shouldn’t be able to logon to the user account. The purpose of this blog post is to raise awareness that Office 365 in particular is now vulnerable to “network session hijacking proxy theft” which allows an attacker to sign in regardless of the MFA solution (MSFT, Duo, RSA, SMS, etc). The authentication token is captured after the victim is tricked to going to a credential stealing website where they perform MFA through a proxy server. The token is then re-played by the attacker who can sign in as the user.

To see a demonstration of this, watch this Youtube video,

Kuba Gretzky – Phishing Through Modern 2FA Defences With Evilginx – YouTube

The cookie import was done using EditThisCookie

Prior to this video, I haven’t been able to find any evidence of blog posts or videos demonstrating a successful bypass against Office 365’s 2FA capabilities. It’s worth noting that Office 365 is not unique – the same man-in-the-middle attack works against Google, LinkedIN, and other platforms as first demonstrated by Kevin Mitnick (KnowBe4) in May 2018 (original blog post (here). Since then other phishlets have been developed for Amazon, Github, Protonmail, Citrix, OKTA, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, reddit, and consumer Outlook.com, and now Office 365.

The reason why this is important is because much of the security industry emphasizes MFA without raising awareness of this man-in-the-middle threat. For example, in my opinion one of the best presentations at the 2018 RSA conference was given by Booz | Allen | Hamilton which gave overwhelming evidence that 2FA would have stopped or reduced the impact of every one of the 159,700 total cyber incidents reported by the Online Threat Alliance in 2017. (Page 6, reference here). Now, the caveat has to be added that MFA would have stopped cyber incidents as long as victims were not tricked to going to proxy websites.

We have taken for granted that the very best anti-spam/anti-phish security solutions will not block 100% of the threats, and it is now time we accept the reality that MFA will not always prevent unauthorized authentication (much like how the SMS version of 2FA is no longer recommended or sufficient).

Roger Grimes of KnowBe4 gave a wildly popular presentation at the 2019 RSA Security Conference (requiring overflow seating) which listed 12 methods to bypass MFA (PDF download here). Some of these techniques require the attacker to invest a lot of time and sometimes money and risk (sim swapping) or be adept at social engineering (phone number porting). However, this all changed when Kuba Gretzky (@mrgretzky) released EvilGinx in 2017. Kuba showed how attackers can reduce their risk, cost, and effort through “network session hijacking proxy theft.” Grimes mentioned this technique among the 12 MFA bypass methods in his RSA presentation, and included a video showing how Kuba’s updated EvilGinx2, successfully bypasses the 2FA of Gmail and LinkedIN. At that time, there was no Office 365 phishlet available, but it was later added by @JamesCullum. 

In January at a Microsoft event, I asked Microsoft if Office 365 defended or detected network session hijacking proxy theft, specifically EvilGinx2. They stated that Office 365 would prevent this technique. [See part two of this blog series to see how]

Enter Aidan Holland (@thehappydinoa), who recently verified that EvilGinx2 can successfully bypass Office 365’s 2FA. Aidan also solved a vexing problem for Troy Hunt, who was trying to get a list of the Fortune 500 for his security research. Read about his solution to solve that problem here.

It’s worth noting that the phishing link generated by EvilGinx2 is not blocked by MSFT EOP, Office ATP, Microsoft Defender ATP, or Windows Defender SmartScreen.

In the next blog post (here), I will discuss ways to protect against EvilGinx2.

In this three-part blog series, I will be writing about interesting trends amongst the Fortune 500 using public DNS reconnaissance posted in open source github repositories. This first post is focused on the email security providers used by the Fortune 500. The other posts will analyze adoption trends in DMARC and IdP Federation.

One of the favorite people I follow on twitter is Daniel Streefkerk (@dstreefkerk) from Sydney, Australia. Daniel tweeted on February 11^th about a script he published to github (here) that performs DNS reconnaissance He posted a graph (here) of which email security providers were used by the top 250 Australian Companies.

Then a few days later he posted (here) how he updated the script to check for federation information (ex: Does the domain federate with OKTA, ADFS, Ping, OneLogin, etc?) and other interesting things like whether Office 365 was detected, the tenant name discovered (typically it is publicly listed in the DKIM DNS record).

I was curious how his findings in Australia compared to companies in the United States, but I couldn’t think of a simple way of finding the fortune 500 email domain names. Turns out, I was not alone. One of Daniel’s fellow Auzzies, Troy Hunt, a Microsoft Regional Director (a title similar to an MVP) recently asked a similar question (here) on March 31^st:

Everyone seemed to have ideas but Troy seemed frustrated at one point that there wasn’t a simple list available somewhere. That’s when Aidan Holland (@thehappydinoa) came to the rescue and wrote an elegant 152-line python script (here) to gather about 455 of the 500 from a JSON query against hifld data. He then took that data and queried virus total, threat crowd, crt.sh, and finally validated it was a valid DNS domain for email by querying the MX record in DNS. All in 152 lines of Python. Impressive.

His JSON query the initial data set came from ARCGIS.COM with this code:

FORTUNE_500_JSON
=
“https://opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/a4d813c396934fc09d0b801a0c491852_0.geojson”

Aidan published the resulting list of 455 domain names (here). Then using PowerShell, we can pipe that into Daniel’s DNS recon script, to produce a report showing the email filtering systems used by the Fortune 500.

Get-Content fortune_455_emails.txt | .\Invoke-EmailRecon.ps1 | Export-Csv 455.csv

Raw Table Results:

The results indicate that most are using ProofPoint, Exchange Online Protection, or they are self-hosting their own service of some type.

Comparing the results to Australia, we can see that the US Market is consolidated to a few big players, whereas Australia is reasonably diversified. The significance of this is that malware should theoretically spread slower in Australia, because malware authors would have to work significantly harder to find vulnerabilities across multiple email security solutions if they wanted to infect the majority of the top 250 companies in Australia, whereas in the USA the malware authors just need to find a flaw in ProofPoint and Exchange Online Protection to infect 50% of America’s Fortune 500.

What surprised me was to see ProofPoint has a 6% penetration into the Australian market, compared to 28% in the United States (no surprise since ProofPoint HQ is in the USA).

These results could also be helpful for smaller or mid-size businesses who sometimes look at the decisions made by members of the Fortune 500 as a standard, ex: “good enough for them, good enough for me.”

Universities, think tanks, and research firms like Gartner and Forrester can now take periodic snapshots of this data to determine trends of email security vendors (or IdP federation vendors). Companies could use this data to find out which markets to expand into. And unfortunately Malware authors have most likely already figured out that targeting flaws in ProofPoint and Exchange Online will net them 50% of the Fortune 500.

In the next blog post, I will examine DMARC and IdP adoption trends.