Monthly Archives: October 2018

NTT Security adds botnet infrastructure detection to Managed Security Services

NTT Security has developed a new network analytics technology to detect and defend NTT Group’s Managed Security Services (MSS) customers from attacks launched on botnet infrastructures. The new network flow data analysis uses machine learning and scalable streaming analytics – developed in partnership with NTT Group companies – and pulls data from NTT’s global network infrastructure, which provides visibility into the world’s internet traffic. The enhancement will enable NTT Security to find attacks on customers’ … More ? The post NTT Security adds botnet infrastructure detection to Managed Security Services appeared first on Help Net Security .

Nastiest malware of 2018: Top attack payloads wreaking havoc

Webroot highlights the top cyberattacks of 2018 in its latest nastiest malware list, which showcases the malware and attack payloads that have been most detrimental to organisations and consumers alike. Three nastiest: Botnets and banking trojans Emotet is this year’s nastiest botnet that delivers banking Trojans. It aspires to increase the number of zombies in its spam botnet, with a concentration on credential gathering. Threat actors have recently developed a universal plug and play (UPnP) … More ? The post Nastiest malware of 2018: Top attack payloads wreaking havoc appeared first on Help Net Security .

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Nastiest malware of 2018: Top attack payloads wreaking havoc

Week in review: Top cyber attack sources, serverless botnets, CFO as best cybersecurity friend

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news and articles: Repairnator bot finds software bugs, successfully submits patches Can a bot create valid, high-quality fixes for software bugs more rapidly than a human can, and get them accepted by human developers and permanently merged in the code base? How to make the CFO your best cybersecurity friend Good cybersecurity is extremely expensive, and bad cybersecurity is, well… even more expensive. It’s very … More ? The post Week in review: Top cyber attack sources, serverless botnets, CFO as best cybersecurity friend appeared first on Help Net Security .

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Week in review: Top cyber attack sources, serverless botnets, CFO as best cybersecurity friend

Over third of large Dutch firms hit by cyberattack in 2016 – CBS

Large companies are hit by cyberattacks at an above average rate, according to the Cybersecurity Monitor of Dutch statistics bureau CBS for 2018. Among companies of 250+ employees, 39 percent were hit at least once by a cyberattack in 2016, such as a hack or DDoS attack. By contrast, around 9 percent of small companies (2-10 employees) were confronted with such an ICT incident. Of the larger companies, 23 percent suffered from failure of business processes due to the outside cyberattacks. This compares to 6 percent for the smaller companies. Of all ICT incidents, failures were most common, for all sizes, though again, the larger companies were more affected (55%) than the smaller ones (21%). The incidents led to costs for both groups of companies. Chance of incident bigger at large company CBS noted that ICT incidents can arise from both from an outside attack and from an internal cause, such as incorrectly installed software or hardware or from the unintentional disclosure of data by an employee. The fact that larger companies suffer more from ICT incidents can be related to the fact that more people work with computers; this increases the chance of incidents. In addition, larger companies often have a more complex ICT infrastructure, which can cause more problems. The number of ICT incidents also varies per industry. For example, small businesses in the ICT sector (12%) and industry (10%) often suffer from ICT incidents due to external attacks. Small companies in the hospitality sector (6%) and health and welfare care (5%) were less often confronted with cyberattacks. Internal cause more common at smaller companies Compared to larger companies, ICT incidents at small companies more often have an internal cause: 2 out 3, compared to 2 out of 5 for larger companies. ICT incidents at small companies in health and welfare care most often had an internal cause (84%). In the ICT sector, this share was 60 percent. About 7 percent of companies with an ICT incident report them to one or more authorities, including police, the Dutch Data Protection Authority AP, a security team or their bank. The largest companies report ICT incidents much more often (41%) than the smallest companies (6%). Large companies report these ICT incidents most frequently to the AP, complying with law. After that, most reports are made to the police. The smallest companies report incidents most often to their bank. Smaller: less safe Small businesses are less often confronted with ICT incidents and, in comparison with large companies, take fewer security measures. Around 60 percent of small companies take three or more measures. This goes to 98 percent for larger companies. Source: https://www.telecompaper.com/news/over-third-39-of-large-dutch-firms-hit-by-cyberattack-in-2016-cbs–1265851

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Over third of large Dutch firms hit by cyberattack in 2016 – CBS

The FBI Is Investigating More Cyberattacks in a California Congressional Race

The hacks — first reported by Rolling Stone — targeted a Democratic candidate in one of the country’s most competitive primary races WASHINGTON — The FBI has opened an investigation into cyberattacks that targeted a Democratic candidate in a highly competitive congressional primary in southern California. As Rolling Stone first reported in September, Democrat Bryan Caforio was the victim of what cybersecurity experts believe were distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks. The hacks crashed his campaign website on four separate occasions over a five-week span, including several hours before the biggest debate of the primary race and a week before the election itself, according to emails and other forensic data reviewed by Rolling Stone. They were the first reported instances of DDoS attacks on a congressional candidate in 2018. Caforio was running in the 25th congressional district represented by Republican Rep. Steve Knight, a vulnerable incumbent and a top target of the Democratic Party. Caforio ultimately finished third in the June primary, failing to move on to the general election by several thousand votes. “I’m glad the FBI has now launched an investigation into the hack,” Caforio tells Rolling Stone in a statement. “These attacks put our democracy at risk, and they’ll keep happening until we take them seriously and start to punish those responsible.” It was unclear from the campaign’s data who launched the attacks. But in early October, a few weeks after Rolling Stone’s report, Caforio says an FBI special agent based in southern California contacted one of his former campaign staffers about the DDoS attacks. The FBI has since spoken with several people who worked on the campaign, requested forensic data in connection with the attacks and tasked several specialists with investigating what happened, according to a source close to the campaign. According to the source, the FBI has expressed interest in several details of the DDoS attacks. The bureau asked about data showing that servers run by Amazon Web Services, the tech arm of the online retail giant, appear to have been used to carry out the attacks. The FBI employees also seemed to focus on the last of the four attacks on Caforio’s website, the one that came a week before the primary election. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment for this story. A DDoS attack occurs when a flood of online traffic coming from multiple sources intentionally overwhelms a website and cripples it. The cybersecurity company Cloudflare compares DDoS to “a traffic jam clogging up a highway, preventing regular traffic from arriving at its desired destination.” Such attacks are becoming more common in American elections and civic life, according to experts who monitor and study cyberattacks. “DDoS attacks are being used to silence political speech and voters’ access to the information they need,” George Conard, a product manager at Jigsaw, a Google spin-off organization, wrote in May. “Political parties, campaigns and organizations are a growing target.” Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, told Rolling Stone last month that his company had noticed an increase in such attacks after 2016 and the successful Russian operations on U.S. soil. “Our thesis is that, prior to 2016, U.S.-style democracy was seen as the shining city on the hill. The same things you could do to undermine a developing democracy wouldn’t work here,” Prince says. “But after 2016, the bloom’s off the rose.” The FBI has since created a foreign influence task force to combat future efforts to interfere and disrupt U.S. elections. Southern California, in particular, has seen multiple cyberattacks on Democratic congressional candidates during the 2018 midterms. Rolling Stone reported that Hans Keirstead, a Democratic candidate who had challenged Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), widely seen as the most pro-Russia and pro-Putin member of Congress, had been the victim of multiple hacking efforts, including a successful spear-phishing attempt on his private email account that resembled the 2016 hack of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. Hackers also reportedly broke into the campaign computer of Dave Min, another Democratic challenger in a different southern California district, prompting the FBI to open an investigation. On Friday, the nation’s four top law enforcement and national security agencies — the FBI, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — released a joint statement saying there were “ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran” that include interference in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Cybersecurity experts and political consultants say there are many reports of hacking attempts on 2018 campaigns that have not been publicized. But the proximity of the attacks is significant because Democrats have a greater chance of taking back the House of Representatives if they can flip multiple seats in Southern California. Source: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/california-congressional-race-hack-745519/

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The FBI Is Investigating More Cyberattacks in a California Congressional Race

Serverless botnets could soon become reality

We have been accustomed to think about botnets as a network of compromised machines – personal devices, IoT devices, servers – waiting for their masters’ orders to begin their attack, but Protego researchers say that many compromised machines are definitely not a requirement: botnets can quite as easily be comprised of serverless functions. They created one on the Google Cloud Functions platform as a proof of concept and have calculated that the losses experienced by … More ? The post Serverless botnets could soon become reality appeared first on Help Net Security .

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Serverless botnets could soon become reality

The Haunting Horror Story Of Cybercrime

As the old saying goes, “darkness falls across the land, the midnight hour is close at hand.” Halloween is upon the scene and frightening things are unforeseen. Imagine watching a chilling movie depicting a zombie apocalypse or a deadly virus spreading fast across a metropolis, infecting everything in its wake. Sounds like a monstrous scenario? Sounds analogous to a cyber-attack? You could be onto something. Strap yourself in. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. According to recent F5 Labs threat analysis, the top application breaches haunting companies right now with rapidly mutating sophistication include payment card theft via web injection (70%), website hacking (26%), and app database hacking (4%). Frighteningly, further analysis shows that 13% of all web application breaches in 2017 and Q1 2018 were access related. This bloodcurdling discovery can be dissected as follows: credentials stolen via compromised email (34.29%), access control misconfiguration (22.86%); credential stuffing from stolen passwords (8.57%), brute force attacks to crack passwords (5.71%), and social engineering theft (2.76). The eerie evidence also shows that applications and identities are the initial targets in 86% of breaches. Businesses worldwide now face a sense of creeping dread and imminent disruption. Nowadays, they are more prone than ever to terrors such as malware hijacking browsers to sniff or intercept application authentication credentials. Then there are the strains of malware that target financial logins to menace both browser and mobile clients. There’s no way around it. Getting your cybersecurity posture right is the only way to stay safe. Get it wrong, however, and you’ll get the fright of your life in the shape of EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enforcement. There is definitively nowhere to hide this Halloween if you’re breached or fall short of tightening compliance expectations. Yet, if scary movies have taught us anything about horror stories, it is to never to scream and run away. As this ghoulish season can overshadow any organisation, it’s imperative that preventative measures are in place to protect vital assets. Yes, the findings from F5 Labs may paint a bleak picture but there are plenty of preventative measures you can take to improve your security posture and safeguard your employees’ applications and sensitive data: Understand your threat environment and prioritise defences against grave risk concerns. Know which applications are important and minimise your attack surface. Remember, an app’s surface is broadening all the time, encompassing multiple tiers and the ever-increasing use of application programming interfaces (APIs) to share data with third parties. Use data to drive your risk strategy and identify what attackers would typically target. Beware that any part of an application service visible on the Internet will be probed by fiendish hackers for possible exploitation. Configure your network systems properly or suffer the consequences of applications leaking internal and infrastructure information, including server names, private network addresses, email addresses, and even usernames. This is all valuable ammunition for a horrible hacker to carry out an attack. Be aware of common threats including DDoS attacks, ransomware, malware, phishing, and botnets. Ensure your IT response strategies are built to adapt and update in line with new vulnerabilities and threats will invariably improve survival rates. Implement a strong set of easily manageable and powerful security solutions such as an advanced web application firewall (AWAF). This type of technology is extremely scalable and can protect against the latest wave of attacks using behavioural analytics, proactive bot defence, and application-layer encryption of sensitive data like personal credentials. Ensure the company enforces a proactive culture of security and educates employees on policy, device management, as well as safe internet and cloud usage. When travelling on business, ensure staff never conduct financial transactions requiring a debit or credit card when using public or free Wi-Fi services. Never assume mobiles and laptop devices are safe, even at the local coffee bar. Change your passwords regularly (i.e. every month). This is especially important after travel. Devices may have been compromised during transit. Always perform regular data backups on approved devices and/or secure cloud platforms to ensure sensitive information is not lost or stolen and can be quickly recovered in the event of an attack. Remember, careless employees who feel they are unaccountable for the loss of work devices can damage business reputations. The grim reality Remember this is the time of year when “creatures crawl in search of blood to terrorize the neighbourhood”. Whether you’re expecting a trick or treat this Halloween, neglecting cybersecurity is certain to have ghastly consequences. The business world is littered with victims of cybercrime, so don’t get consigned to the grievous graveyard of cyber fraud. Know what makes your apps vulnerable and how they can be attacked. Makes sure you put the right solutions in place to lower your risk. Now is the time to stop being haunted by cybercriminals draining the lifeblood out of your business. Source: https://www.informationsecuritybuzz.com/articles/the-haunting-horror-story-of-cybercrime/

Six Lessons From Boston Children’s ‘Hacktivist’ Attack

CIO Daniel Nigrin, M.D., says hospitals must prepare for DDoS and ransomware Most health system CIOs have heard about the 2014 attack on Boston Children’s Hospital by a member or members of the activist hacker group Anonymous. The hospital was forced to deal with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack as well as a spear phishing campaign. Yesterday, as part of the Harvard Medical School Clinical Informatics Lecture Series, the hospital’s senior vice president and CIO Daniel Nigrin, M.D., discussed six lessons learned from the attack. Although the cyber-attack took place four years ago, there have been some recent developments. The attack was undertaken to protest the treatment of a teenager, Justina Pelletier, in a dispute over her diagnosis and custody between her parents and the hospital. In August 2018 Martin Gottesfeld, 32, was convicted of one count of conspiracy to damage protected computers and one count of damaging protected computers. U.S. District Court Judge Nathaniel Gorton scheduled sentencing for Nov. 14, 2018. Gottesfeld was charged in February 2016. According the U.S. Department of Justice, Gottesfeld launched a massive DDOS attack against the computer network of the Boston Children’s Hospital. He customized malicious software that he installed on 40,000 network routers that he was then able to control from his home computer. After spending more than a week preparing his methods, on April 19, 2014, he unleashed a DDOS attack that directed so much hostile traffic at the Children’s Hospital computer network that he temporarily knocked Boston Children’s Hospital off the Internet. In his Oct. 17 talk, Nigrin said cyber criminals still see healthcare as a soft target compared to other industries. “The bottom line is that in healthcare, we have not paid attention to cybersecurity,” he said. “In the years since this attack, we have seen ransomware attacks that have brought hospital systems to their knees. We have to pay more attention and invest more in terms of dollars and technical people, but it really does extend to entire organizations — educating people about what a phishing attack is, what a social engineering attack is. These need to be made a priority.” He offered six lessons learned from Boston Children’s experience: 1. DDoS countermeasures are critical. No longer can healthcare organizations assume that a DDoS attacks are things that only occur against corporate entities, he said. “Prior to this event, I had never thought about the need to protect our organization against a DDoS attack,” he said. “I will submit that the vast majority of my CIO colleagues were in the same boat. And that was wrong. I think now we have gotten this understanding.” 2. Know what depends on the internet. Having a really detailed understanding of what systems and processes in your organization depend on internet access is critical, Nigrin stressed. You also mush have good mitigation strategies in place to know what to do if you lose internet access — whether it is because you have a network outage due to a technical issue or a malicious issue. “As healthcare has become more automated and dependent on technology, these things are crippling events. You have got to know how you are going to deal with it ahead of time. Figuring it out on the fly is not going to work.” 3. Recognize the importance of email. Email may be seen as old-school, Nigrin noted, but it is still the primary method to communicate, so you have to think about how you can communicate and get the word out in scenarios where you don’t have email or lose voice communication. “In our case, we were super-lucky because we had just deployed a secure texting platform, so we could do HIPAA-compliant texting, and when our email was down, that was how we communicated, and it was very effective,” he explained. 4. Push through security initiatives – no excuses anymore. Because he is a doctor himself, Nigrin feels OK picking on doctors about security. Historically they have always pushed back on security measures such as dual-factor authentication. He paraphrases them saying “Come on, Dan, that is an extra 10 seconds; I have to carry a secure ID, or you have to send me a text message on my phone. It is a pain. I don’t want to do it. I am the highest-paid employee in your organization and that is time better spend on something else.” But Nigrin argues that we can’t afford to think like that anymore. He used the Anonymous attack as an opportunity to push through four or five security initiatives within the next two to three months when he had everyone’s attention. “The platform was burning, and the board of trustees was willing to expend the money to pay for it all. They all of a sudden recognized the risk.” 5. Securing audio- and teleconference meetings. Nigrin said this topic wouldn’t have occurred to Boston Children’s until they were warned by the FBI. “The FBI told us about an attack that affected them when they were dealing with Anonymous. When Anonymous was attacking the FBI, the FBI convened internal conference calls on how to deal with it. Anonymous had already breached their messaging platform and intercepted the calendar invites that invited everyone to dial in. Anonymous basically was called into the meeting. Within 30 minutes of one of those meetings, the entire audio transcript of the conference call was posted to YouTube. “So we took heed of that and made sure that when we had conference calls, we sent out PINs over our secure texting platform,” he said. 6. Separating signal from noise. During the attack, Boston Children’s set up a command center and told employees: if you see something, say something. “We didn’t know what attack was coming next. We were flying blind,” Nigrin said. “We started to get lots of calls into our command center with reports of things that seemed somewhat suspicious,” he remembers. People got calls on their cell phone with a recorded message saying your bank account has been compromised. Press 1 to talk to someone to deal with it. “Today we would recognize this as some type of phishing scam and hang up,” he said, “but at the time it was sort of new. People started calling us and we didn’t know if this was Anonymous trying to get into the bank accounts of our senior clinicians. Was it part of the attack? It was tough for us to detect signal from noise.” In the Q&A after his presentation, listeners were curious about how much the incident cost the hospital. Nigrin said there two big costs incurred: One was the technology it had to deploy in an emergent way to do DDOS protection and penetration testing. The other was revenue lost from philanthropic donations. Together they were close to $1 million. Another person asked if the hospital had cyber insurance. Nigrin said they did, but when they read the fine print it said they were covered only if they were breached and technically they were never breached, so the insurance company was reluctant to pay. Although they eventually got compensated for a good share of it, the hospital also made sure to update its policy. Still another attendee asked Nigrin if ransomware attacks were still targeting hospitals. He said they definitely were. “Think about community hospitals just squeaking by on their budgets,” he said. “They don’t have millions to spend, yet their data is valuable on the black market. Attackers recognize we are dead in the water as entities if we don’t have these systems. We have important data and will do anything to get our systems back up and running.” Nigrin said even large health systems can be vulnerable because some technology they deploy is run by third-party vendors who haven’t upgraded their systems. An example, he said, might be technology to record videos in the operating room setting. Some vendors, he said, are not accustomed to thinking about security. They are unable to update their software so it works on more modern operating systems. That leaves CIOs with a tough choice. “We can shut off the functionality or take the risk of continuing to use outdated and unpatched operating systems. Those vendors now have woken up and realize they have to pay more attention.” Source: https://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/cybersecurity/six-lessons-boston-children-s-hacktivist-attack

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Six Lessons From Boston Children’s ‘Hacktivist’ Attack

VestaCP users warned about possible server compromise

Unknown attackers have compromised the official distribution of the VestaCP hosting control panel solution to harvest server IPs and admin credentials. That information was exploited to install malware with DDoS capabilities (Linux/ChachaDDoS) on victims’ web servers. About the software A web hosting control panel is a web-based interface provided by a web hosting service that allows users to manage their servers and hosted services. There are many web hosting control panels out there. Some are … More ? The post VestaCP users warned about possible server compromise appeared first on Help Net Security .

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VestaCP users warned about possible server compromise

Ireland vulnerable to cybersecurity attack, says industry leader

The Government has been urged to appoint a cybersecurity “tsar” to ensure the State is adequately prepared to deal with potential attacks. The call by one of the State’s leading IT security experts comes amid growing concern Ireland could be caught off-guard by a cybersecurity attack, due to a lack of joined-up thinking on the issue and a failure to take threats seriously. Currently the response to cyber threats lies across a number of bodies, with the Department of Communications, An Garda Síochána, the Defence Forces and the Department of Defence among those involved. Brian Honan, an independent security consultant who has also served as a special adviser to Europol’s Cybercrime Centre (EC3), said a tsar with the authority and autonomy to ensure an effective cybersecurity strategy should be appointed as a matter of urgency. “We need a coherent and centralised approach to protecting our nation rather than having responsibilities for various aspects of cybersecurity spread throughout different departments and agencies,” he said. Mr Honan warned that cybersecurity was becoming more of an issue globally with data breaches, DDoS and ransomware attacks, financial scams and state-sponsored hacking incidents all on the rise. As well as domestic considerations, the State is also responsible for the security of services provided across the EU by multinational companies who have their European headquarters located here. Mr Honan said that, given this, a cybersecurity attack could not only cause widespread disruption for businesses and public agencies, but would also lead to serious reputational damage. “It is too critical for us as a nation, both from an economic and national security point of view, for [cybersecurity] to be left to individual government departments or businesses to look after,” said Mr Honan. Funding review Mr Honan’s comments come just weeks after a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General revealed that a dedicated cybersecurity unit established to protect government and industry networks has no strategic plan and requires a review of its funding. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), based in UCD, was established in 2011 with a view to “securing critical national infrastructure”. However, the C&AG report into its operations found an oversight body set up to monitor its performance had not met since 2015. Fianna Fáil has also recently urged the Government to take a more proactive approach to cybersecurity. Its defence spokesman, Jack Chambers, recently called for responsibility for the NCSC to be reassigned away from the Department of Communications. “The Department of Defence should take ownership and control of this so it can develop a proper whole-of-government response to the area of cybersecurity as it becomes a serious national threat. It would compromise foreign direct investment if our national infrastructure were to be seriously undermined and there were to be an attack,” Mr Chambers. Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/ireland-vulnerable-to-cybersecurity-attack-says-industry-leader-1.3666946

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Ireland vulnerable to cybersecurity attack, says industry leader