Cybersecurity today.
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Living off the land attacks on Microsoft, attackers use fake Calendly invites
to hijack Google and Meta ad accounts.
Oracle breach claims yet another victim and researchers trace AI jailbreaks to
hidden patterns in sentence structure.
This is Cybersecurity Today.
I'm your host, Jim.
Love
living off the land attacks is a phrase that was first coined about a dozen
years ago by Christopher Campbell and Matt Grabber at Derby Con three.
It describes a technique where attackers can hide using existing software and
utilities I was reading about this and how it had been used in the Ukraine war
where intruders were relying entirely on Microsoft utilities to stay hidden.
And then I looked around and I found more and more examples of where
intruders were relying entirely on trusted Microsoft utilities.
But now in North America, The stories are the same.
Attackers start with a foothold and they pivot Using PowerShell WMI task scheduler
all legitimate windows components.
PowerShell might quietly download a script, WMI might
execute commands remotely.
A scheduled task or a registry run key might be altered to keep the attackers
hidden inside And nothing they do involves a suspicious binary and
nothing looks foreign to the system.
These are the same tools administrators use every day, and
they're also tools Windows relies on, so you can't simply block them.
And of course.
That's why these attacks evade so many defenses.
Endpoint Detection and Response systems are excellent at spotting malware,
lateral movement, or even odd binaries.
But when an attacker sticks to Microsoft signed utilities,
there's often nothing to flag.
Investigators in the Ukraine example that I was using said the
intrusion blended into regular administrative traffic for weeks.
What was dangerous looked almost identical to routine system work.
. And the real risk isn't just the intrusion, it's the quiet persistence
that follows living off the land.
Techniques, let attackers stay inside networks for long stretches
of time, often without writing a single malicious file to disc.
And I guess that's why defenders are being pushed to rethink
how these tools are monitored.
When the threat hides inside some normal system activity, the only way
to spot it going offside is when you have an idea of what normal really
is and a way to spot the difference.
And that means logging, that captures what these utilities are doing, but that
logging's going more to a behavioral analysis that can surface these anomalies.
Of course, zero trust and least privilege models can limit how much
damage a built-in tool can do if it's misused, but it's not one control.
We're looking at an orchestrated defense and living off the land
attacks are showing why that shift is becoming perhaps even more important.
And you know how it is when you see something and it makes you think,
and then you keep seeing examples of the same thing over and over again.
While I was working on that last story, David, our Monday host sent
me a story, and this time they were spoofing a different trusted utility.
A new campaign is sending fake meeting invitations that look like
the real thing complete with branding, but from well-known companies.
But instead of opening a scheduling page, the link may open a phishing
site designed to steal either Google ad or Meta business login credentials.
And it's a clever twist on this living off the land approach.
Calendly is a tool that is used by a lot of people, And of course people click
meeting links without thinking about it, and the attackers aren't dropping
malware or trying to compromise devices.
they're going after The people who control Google AdWords or Meta
advertising budgets and the phishing pages are tuned specifically for them.
Once an attacker gets access to an ad manager account, they can spend
thousands of dollars in minutes running fraudulent campaigns or crypto scams,
all billed to the victim, and all coming from what might be a trusted source.
What makes this campaign stand out is the precision.
The phishing isn't being blasted out to random users.
It's aimed at people who manage business pages and have payment methods attached.
The entire attack relies on trust, a familiar scheduling tool, a
familiar business brand, and a login page that looks exactly like
Meta or Google's own interface.
It is another reminder of how this living off the land idea is
shifting beyond system utilities.
Attackers are now using the everyday cloud tools we depend
on as their delivery mechanism.
And when the threat arrives through something as ordinary as a meeting
invite, the line between safe and suspicious becomes a lot thinner.
And again, as if to show how much damage can be done.
Once somebody breaches your defenses and gets within your system, the
University of Pennsylvania is reporting another data breach.
This one appears to trace back to the Oracle E-Business Suite hack
disclosed earlier this year, Penn says attackers stole documents from its
Oracle EBS servers in August, months before Oracle issued patches for
multiple vulnerabilities in October.
And even though those patches were applied, the university now
believes that new breach may have stemmed from access the attackers
gained during that earlier incident.
And Penn is a major target.
It's an Ivy League institution with more than 29,000 students,
almost 6,000 faculty, and an operating budget of $4.7 billion.
It also holds a $24.8 billion endowment as of mid 2025.
And this isn't the first time it's been hit.
Back in October, Penn disclosed a separate compromise involving its
development and alumni systems, and in that case, a hacker claimed to have
stolen personal information on roughly 1.2 million students, alumni, and donors.
What makes the new incident stand out is the timing.
The attackers first accessed the Oracle EBS servers in August.
Oracle then released patches in October, but Penn's latest investigation
shows the intruders may have used the foothold from August to carry
out newly reported date of theft.
it suggests that even when an organization patches quickly, the
damage from an earlier compromise can continue to unfold months later.
It's a reminder that once attackers get inside a system, especially one tied to
business operations, the breach doesn't end when the vulnerability is fixed.
The challenge becomes understanding how far the original intrusion
went and whether access that was gained early on could still be used.
Quietly in the background And finally, a different story.
But something that keeps coming up.
One of the ways we could spot patterns in behavior and maybe work to defeat
living off the land is in using AI, but AI has its own set of issues and problems.
One of them being how easily it be jailbroken and turn what
should be a trusted tool into a liability and an attack vector.
, We hear about a breach almost every couple of days.
Open AI reported one last week.
That was a major one.
So, most jailbreaks make sense in a human way.
Someone reframes a harmful request, so it sounds harmless.
Essentially socially engineering the model.
The famous example is you can't ask it to build a bomb, but you can ask for
help writing a scene in a community play where your character builds one.
The trick works on the framing, not the intent.
We've used this as little as last week to break one of the major models.
It's a problem and it's one they need to solve, but there's another
problem that's surfaced and researchers have begun studying.
A stranger kind of jailbreak, the one built from strings of nonsense words or
words appended to the end of sentences.
These prompts don't look like trick questions or role-playing setups.
Many of them read like gibberish, yet they sometimes cause an AI system
to ignore its own safety rules.
And now a new study by researchers from MIT Northeastern University and
Meta may explain why in their paper with the mellifluous flowing title of
syntactic domain, spurious correlations in language models, which I'll translate
for you into syntax hacking how sentence structure enables LLM Jailbreaks.
They show that many nonsense jailbreaks work, not because of the
words, but because of the syntactic patterns hiding underneath them.
Some combinations of meaningless terms accidentally form structures
that these large language models interpret as commands.
In other words, they're using the correct grammar.
But nonsense words syntax resembles that system level instruction learned during
the training, the patterns that can slip past the safety layers added later.
so just to recap, they're using a grammatic structure that's
accurate, but with nonsense words.
Although the system might recognize that grammatical structure, the words just
slip past, The researchers argue that this happens because models are more sensitive
to shape and structure than pure meaning.
That doesn't mean they don't understand meaning they do,
But they have this inherent flaw that calls them to look at the shape
and structure of sentences as well.
They generalize from these patterns in sentence construction, and those
patterns can override the safeguards when they resemble the cues.
The model associates with higher level instructions.
It also explains why gibberish jailbreaks are inconsistent and difficult to patch.
They don't rely on a specific loophole.
They rely on quirks in how the model processes language.
and while both of these vulnerabilities breaking the frame and breaking
the syntax have been known for some time, understanding why they work can
bring us one step closer to higher levels of protection and defense.
and that's our show for today.
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Thanks for listening.