Identification of IoT Assets from Known IPv6 Addresses

The preceding section gives a brief account of difficulties in the blind-scan of IPv6 addresses. To work around these problems, we based our recon on some available IPv6 addresses, in a bid to discover IoT assets operating in IPv6 environments. Sources of these addresses include Hitlist27, which maintains about 3 million IPv6 addresses, and NSFOCUS Threat Intelligence (NTI), which provides a collection of about 1.7 billion IPv6 addresses extracted from domain name intelligence. Note that the IPv6 addresses available for our recon are but a very small portion of the total number. Besides, IoT assets found active in IPv6 environments were rather small in number.

This section presents the exposure of IPv6 assets on the Internet and methods for recon of these assets. IPv6 Evolution With the IoT and 5G gaining ground, the demand of network applications for IP addresses is undergoing an explosive growth. However, the IPv4 address space has been depleted and IPv4 addresses have been unevenly allocated. […]

Overview

2020 H1 witnessed nine Internet of Things (IoT) security events that deserved close attention:

• Ripple20 0-day vulnerabilities were discovered and affected hundreds of millions of networked devices in various industries across the globe.
• A high-risk 0-day vulnerability was detected in dozens of Netgear router products.
• A group of Industrial Control System (ICS) honeypots attracted four 0-day attacks.
• A critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability affected millions of network devices based on OpenWrt.
• Hackers exploited 0-day vulnerabilities in DrayTek devices to launch attacks on enterprise networks.
• Hackers hijacked a smart building access system and could launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on devices accessible via networks.
• Millions of devices using LoRaWAN were vulnerable to hacker attacks, and nodes, gateways, and servers in the LoRaWAN network were prone to critical vulnerabilities. Therefore, their security protection capabilities remained to be improved.
• Hackers divulged Telnet credentials of over 500,000 devices.
• Researchers discovered LiquorBot, which was a new botnet with the cryptomining function.

Introduction

As we indicated in the 2018 Annual IoT Security Report, network addresses on the Internet constantly change. Use of historical data to delineate exposure of assets will result in a deviation from reality, presenting a value higher than the actual number. Therefore, to accurately reflect the reality of a given area, we should specify a short period as the statistical cycle when calculating the number. This chapter starts with an analysis of the actual exposure of IoT assets in 2019.

With the booming of IoT applications and depletion of IPv4 addresses, IPv6 addresses will be gradually adopted, which is an irreversible trend. This means that IoT assets on IPv6 networks will become major targets of attackers. In this sense, it will be of great significance to cybersecurity to accurately survey IPv6 assets and services. For this reason, we also describe the methods for discovering IoT assets in IPv6 environments and analyze their exposure in this chapter.

LockerGoga Ransomware Alleged to Repeatedly Attack Plants

On January 24, 2019, France-based Altran Technologies was allegedly hit by LockerGoga ransomware. On March 19, Norsk Hydro, one of the largest aluminum companies worldwide, was hit by an extensive cyberattack, having machines around the globe infected with malware and some unable to operate. As a result, some plants had to switch from automatic to manual procedures, significantly compromising the productivity. This attack on the Norwegian aluminum company employed a tactic similar to that of LockerGoga. On March 12, 2019, two US chemical manufacturers Hexion and Momentive respectively suffered a LockerGoga ransomware attack9. In as short as two months, four plants in Europe and the USA became targets of ransomware attacks. Such devastating ransomware caused great damages to enterprises. According to a report on July 23, 201910, the attack could cost Norsk Hydro a whopping amount of $63.50 million to $75 million. But no exact figure was given because the computing system used for calculating profits was also compromised by the ransomware.