"National Guard's Cybersecurity Vulnerability Exposed by Salt Typhoon Incident - Implications for U.S. Cybersecurity"
Headline: Chinese State-Sponsored Threat Actor Salt Typhoon Raises Alarms with Long-term Infiltration of Army National Guard Networks
The recent breach in Army National Guard networks has raised alarming concerns about the resilience of U.S. military and civilian infrastructure. The culprit behind this infiltration is Salt Typhoon, a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor known for its "living off the land" tactics and evasive nature.
Salt Typhoon's actions indicate their ability to understand the network posture and layout of a target environment. They target entities' assets within a target's environment that are more likely to be unmanaged or unmonitored, often running old software or old firmware. In this case, the breach was maintained for close to nine months, between March and December 2024.
The stolen network diagrams could potentially shorten recon activities for future campaigns from weeks to minutes. Salt Typhoon exfiltrated administrator credentials from the compromised network, allowing them to create new credentials that will be treated as fully trusted users in the future.
To protect against cyber attacks like those conducted by Salt Typhoon, organizations should implement a combination of advanced cybersecurity practices focused on detection, prevention, and infrastructure modernization.
Key recommended measures include:
- Stay current with threat intelligence: Continuously monitor and subscribe to updated intelligence feeds that reveal evolving tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of actors like Salt Typhoon. This helps anticipate changes and proactively adjust defenses.
- Enhance monitoring and detection capabilities: Invest in state-of-the-art tools capable of detecting subtle anomalies and suspicious behaviors, including proactive threat hunting. Salt Typhoon is skilled at evading typical security measures by blending activity within normal network traffic and tampering with logs.
- Modernize infrastructure using advanced security architectures: Deploy micro-segmentation and zero-trust security models to limit lateral movement inside networks. Replace or retire legacy systems and deprecated protocols that harbor vulnerabilities exploited by Salt Typhoon, such as unpatched VPNs and firewalls.
- Address living-off-the-land tactics: Since Salt Typhoon extensively uses legitimate system tools and scripts, implement strict application control and behavior analytics to detect misuse of native utilities.
- Continuous patching and vulnerability management: Rapidly identify and remediate known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) which Salt Typhoon leverages for initial access.
- Preemptive defense strategies: Consider advanced protective measures, such as stealth networking technologies that minimize exposed attack surfaces, making infrastructures effectively invisible to attackers.
Collectively, these measures form a robust defensive posture to detect, prevent, and respond to sophisticated nation-state threats like Salt Typhoon.
It is crucial for organizations to prioritize being up-to-date with patching their devices, especially after learning from the telecom attack mentioned earlier. Unmanaged devices, such as HVAC controllers, door controllers, cameras, and printers, are often trustworthy from a network traffic standpoint and are attractive targets for actors like Salt Typhoon.
The stolen information includes details about how the state might be collaborating with other states, making this breach a significant concern for national defense. This breach is being viewed as a wake-up call for national defense, emphasizing the need for continued vigilance and investment in advanced cybersecurity practices.
- The federal workforce must reimagine its approach to cybersecurity, given the long-term infiltration of Army National Guard networks by the Chinese state-sponsored threat actor Salt Typhoon.
- In light of the stolen information from the Army National Guard breach, it is essential to modernize the technology within the federal workforce's infrastructure to counteract living-off-the-land tactics used by threat actors like Salt Typhoon.
