Background: The Distinctive Panorama of the Black Hat NOC
Working the Black Hat Safety and Community Operations Heart (NOC) presents a novel set of challenges and expectations. Not like a typical company atmosphere the place any hacking exercise is instantly deemed malicious, the Black Hat convention is a nexus for cybersecurity analysis, coaching, and moral hacking. Consequently, we anticipate and even count on a major quantity of exercise that, in different contexts, could be thought-about extremely suspicious or outright hostile. This consists of varied types of scanning, exploitation makes an attempt, and different adversarial simulations, usually performed as a part of official trainings or unbiased analysis.
Including to this complexity is the Carry Your Personal Gadget (BYOD) nature of the convention community. Attendees join a big selection of private units, making conventional endpoint telemetry (like EDR options) a major problem for complete monitoring. As such, our major focus was on sturdy network-based telemetry for detection and menace looking.
Investigation Workflow: A Multi-Instrument Method to Fast Response
Section 1: Assault Triage With Cisco XDR
The Cisco XDR analytics incident offered the preliminary alert and connection flows, giving us instant visibility into this tried intrusion exercise from an exterior malicious supply to our convention registration server and mapping it to MITRE ATT&CK.
The XDR incident indicated that there was an entry try of the registration server equivalent to an intrusion referring to “SAP NetWeaver Visible Composer metauploader entry try”. The exercise was mapped to MITRE ATT&CK strategies, TA0001: Preliminary entry, T1189: Drive-by Compromise and T1190: Exploit of Public-Dealing with Utility.
Cyber Menace Intelligence
Trying deeper into the alert from Cisco Firepower Administration Heart (FMC) in XDR, we will see that the tried intrusion was an entry occasion over port 443. The alert is classed as excessive precedence. The exterior supply IP was categorized with a malicious disposition by Cisco XDR International Menace Intelligence and suspicious by Cisco Talos.
Section 2: Site visitors and Alert Evaluation With Cisco Firepower Administration Console (FMC)
We utilized Cisco FMC to dive deeper into the related alert and packet data from the site visitors.
The next particulars had been significantly notable:
- The intrusion alert was categorized as excessive precedence and categorized as Tried Administrator Privilege Achieve.
- The site visitors was TCP and HTTPS to port 443.
- The request sort was an GET request to URI path /developmentserver/metauploader
- The person agent consists of zgrab/0.x
Researching extra about this person agent, Zgrabindicated it’s used for scanning and penetration testing. ZGrab is a part of the broader ZMAP suite of instruments. This offered additional validation that this was a malicious intrusion try in opposition to our registration server.
Section 3: Vulnerability Evaluation
We did additional analysis into the alert from FMC and located that it correlated with vulnerability CVE-2025-31324.
This vulnerability is thought to be exploited within the wild, as confirmed by CISA and is classed as Important with a CVSS rating of 9.8 by the Nationwide Vulnerability Database (NVD). It is usually notable that the vulnerability was revealed very not too long ago on April 4th, 2025.
Potential exploitation of the vulnerability permits an unauthenticated agent to add arbitrary malicious code to the goal system.
Section 4: Threat Evaluation and Mitigation
As a closing step we reached out to the Black Hat engineering workforce to inquire if the registration server was weak to CVE-2025-31324.
Particularly, we inquired:
- Does the registration server leverage SAP NetWeaver?
- Does the next useful resource path exist on the endpoint?
We confirmed that each of those standards weren’t met, and therefore the Black Hat registration server was not weak to CVE-2025-31324.
Decision
The investigation for this Cisco XDR incident was closed, because the registration server was not discovered to be weak to the tried exploitation. For the reason that registration web site is a vital asset and is public dealing with, we count on to see scanning exercise and malicious entry makes an attempt in opposition to it. We continued to stay vigilant for the rest of the convention.
Key Takeaways
- Fast, Multi-Instrument Investigation Enhances Response
Utilizing Cisco XDR and Cisco FMC enabled swift detection, detailed evaluation, and actionable insights making certain a well-coordinated and efficient response to suspicious exercise. - Asset Consciousness and Stakeholder Engagement Are Important
Understanding your atmosphere and confirming technical particulars with engineering groups prevents false alarms and pointless remediation. Participating stakeholders early ensures correct threat evaluation and environment friendly decision. - Steady Vigilance for Important Public Property
Even after ruling out instant threats or vulnerabilities, ongoing monitoring and investigation are important to safeguard public-facing, high-value methods in opposition to persistent scanning and exploitation makes an attempt.
About Black Hat
Black Hat is the cybersecurity trade’s most established and in-depth safety occasion sequence. Based in 1997, these annual, multi-day occasions present attendees with the newest in cybersecurity analysis, improvement, and tendencies. Pushed by the wants of the neighborhood, Black Hat occasions showcase content material immediately from the neighborhood via Briefings shows, Trainings programs, Summits, and extra. Because the occasion sequence the place all profession ranges and educational disciplines convene to collaborate, community, and focus on the cybersecurity matters that matter most to them, attendees can discover Black Hat occasions in the US, Canada, Europe, Center East and Africa, and Asia. For extra data, please go to the Black Hat web site.
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