The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency has released a new tool designed to help IT and security professionals detect indicators of compromise associated with the SolarWinds and Active Directory/Microsoft 365 Compromise.
The tool, CISA Hunt and Incident Response Program (CHIRP), scans for signs of compromise from an advanced persistent threat actor within an on-premises environment.
According to CISA, the tool can detect indicators of compromise associated with the hack of the SolarWinds Orion products and activity within Microsoft 365/Azure environments. According to SolarWinds, about 18,000 organizations were using the affected versions of its Orion product, but only a fraction of those were selected by the allegedly Russian hacking group for further activity. Those targets were largely either close to the U.S. government or government agencies themselves.
The tool is similar to Sparrow, another CISA tool that scans for signs of advanced persistent threat compromise within a Microsoft 365 or Azure environment, according to the agency.
According to CISA, CHIRP is a command-line executable with a dynamic plugin and indicator system to search for signs of compromise. It can search through event logs and registry keys and run YARA rules to scan for signs of APT tactics, techniques and procedures. The tool also has a YAML file that contains a list of IOCs associated with the malware and activity of the SolarWinds hackers.
CISA says the tool looks for:
- The presence of malware identified by security researchers as TEARDROP and RAINDROP;
- Credential dumping certificate pulls;
- Certain persistence mechanisms identified as associated with this campaign;
- System, network, and M365 enumeration; and
- Known observable indicators of lateral movement.
CHIRP is freely available on the CISA GitHub Repository, and the agency will continue to release plugins and IOC packages for new threats.
“Network defenders should review and confirm any post-compromise threat activity detected by the tool. CISA has provided confidence scores for each IOC and YARA rule included with CHIRP’s release,” the agency said in a statement. “For confirmed positive hits, CISA recommends collecting a forensic image of the relevant system(s) and conducting a forensic analysis on the system(s).”
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