MY TAKE: A primer on how ransomware arose to the become an enduring scourge

By Byron V. Acohido

“All we know is MONEY! Hurry up! Tik Tak, Tik Tak, Tik Tak!”

This is an excerpt from a chilling ransom note Baltimore IT officials received from hackers who managed to lock up most of the city’s servers in May. The attackers demanded $76,000, paid in Bitcoin, for a decryption key. Baltimore refused to pay – choosing, instead, to absorb an estimated $18 million in recovery costs.

Some 15 months earlier, in March 2018, Atlanta was hit by a similar assault, and likewise refused to pay a $51,000 ransom, eating $17 million in damage.

Stunning as these two high-profile attacks were, they do not begin to convey the full scope of what a pervasive and destructive phenomenon ransomware has become – to individuals, to companies of all sizes and, lately, to poorly defended local agencies.

Probing and plundering

Ransomware is highly resilient and flexible. Its core attraction for criminals is that it is about as direct a channel to illicitly-garnered cash as any conman could dream up – few middlemen required.

From a high level, ransomware is essentially an open platform that operates on market principles, around which a thriving ecosystem of suppliers and specialists has taken shape. This has opened the door for newbie purveyors, with modest technical skill, to enter the field, giving these novices easy and cheap access to powerful turnkey tools and services. Meanwhile, the advanced hacking collectives invest in innovation and press forward. The net result is a continuation of proven styles of ransomware attacks, as well as constant probing for vulnerable pockets and plundering along fresh pathways.

According to the FBI, the absolute number of daily ransomware attacks actually dipped slightly last year. However, that’s more a function of hackers targeting individuals less, and companies and governments more. And as highlighted by the assaults on Baltimore and Atlanta, municipalities are among the hottest targets of the moment. A survey of local media reports by Recorded Future tallied 38 ransomware attacks against cities in 2017, rising to 53 attacks in 2018. In the first four months of 2019 alone, some 22 attacks have been disclosed.

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ROUNDTABLE: Huge Capital One breach shows too little is being done to preserve data privacy

By Byron V. Acohido

Company officials at Capital One Financial Corp ought to have a crystal clear idea of what to expect next — after admitting to have allowed a gargantuan data breach.

Capital One’s mea culpa coincided with the FBI’s early morning raid of a Seattle residence to arrest Paige Thompson. Authorities charged the 33-year-old former Amazon software engineer with masterminding the hack.

Thompson is accused of pilfering sensitive data for 100 million US and 6 million Canadian bank patrons. That includes social security and social insurance numbers, bank account numbers, phone numbers, birth dates, email addresses and self-reported income; in short, just about everything on an identity thief’s wish list.

Just a few days before Capital One’s disclosure, Equifax rather quietly agreed to pay up to $700 million to settle consumer claims and federal and state investigations into its 2017 data breach that compromised sensitive information of more than 145 million American consumers. Also very recently, the Federal Trade Commission slammed Facebook with a record $5 billion fine for losing control over massive troves of personal data and mishandling its communications with users.

Sure enough, it didn’t take long (less than 24 hours) for Keven Zosiak, a Stamford, Connecticut resident and Capital One credit card holder, to file a lawsuit against Capital One for its failure to protect sensitive customer data. Many more lawsuits, as well as federal probes and Congressional hearings, are sure to follow.

Oh, and let’s not forget how Equifax summarily canned five top execs, including Equifax CEO Richard Smith, in the aftermath of its big breach. Not even doing this YouTube video apology was enough to save Smith his job. It’s going to be interesting to see who Capital One’s board of directors designates to throw under the bus on this one.

Larger lessons

Arguably the most fascinating twist to the Capital One caper is the FBI’s rather quick arrest of Paige Thompson. Arrests in network breaches are rare, indeed. For instance, we know a lot of details about the Equifax breach, thanks to a GAO investigation and report. But no suspects have ever been publicly named.

What’s more, the usual suspects in high-profile breaches – i.e. professional Russian, Eastern European, Chinese and North Korean hacking collectives – appear to be out of the loop with respect to this particular caper. The Capital One breach, it seems to me, vividly highlights the depth and breadth of the Internet underground. Anyone with technical aptitude, diligence and a lack of scruples, such as an out-of-work IT staffer, can engage in criminal activity at a fairly high level. …more

NEW TECH: A couple of tools that deserve wide use — to preserve the integrity of U.S. elections

By Byron V. Acohido

As the presidential debate season ramps up, the specter of nation-state sponsored hackers wreaking havoc, once more, with U.S. elections, looms all too large.

It’s easy to get discouraged by developments such as Sen. McConnell recently blocking a bi-partisan bill to fund better election security, as well as the disclosure that his wife, Transportation Security Elaine Chao, has accepted money from voting machine lobbyists.

That’s why I was so encouraged to learn about two new tools that empower individual candidates – and local election officials – to take proactive steps to make election tampering much more difficult to successfully pull off. In the current geo-political environment, every forthright step can make a huge difference.

First, there’s a tool called the Rapid Cyber Risk Scorecard. NormShield, the Vienna, VA-based, cybersecurity firm that supplies this service, recently ran scores for all of the 26 declared presidential candidates — and found the average cyber risk score to be B+.

What this tells me is that the presidential candidates, at least, actually appear to be heeding lessons learned from the hacking John Podesta’s email account – and all of the havoc Russia was able to foment in our 2016 elections. NormShield found that all of the 2020 presidential hopefuls, thus far, are making sure their campaigns are current on software patching, as well as Domain Name System (DNS) security; and several are doing much more.

My takeaway: other candidates can use this scorecard, which runs assessments of 10 cyber risk categories, as a starting point to harden their campaigns.

Another such service that can do a ton of good was announced last week by Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), in partnership with Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the Center for Internet Security. It’s a free cybersecurity toolkit for elections that gives local election authorities actionable guidance on how to mitigate the most common risks to trustworthy elections.

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NEW TECH: Baffin Bay Networks takes a ‘cloud-first’ approach to securing web applications

By Byron V. Acohido

Hear about the smart toaster that got attacked three times within an hour after its IP address first appeared on the Internet?

That experiment conducted by a reporter for The Atlantic crystalizes the seemingly intractable security challenge businesses face today.

Caught in the pull of digital transformation, companies are routing ever more core operations and services through the Internet, or, more precisely, through IP addresses, of one kind or another. This trend has greatly expanded the attack surface for malicious botnets to automatically probe and infiltrate company networks, at scale. And in a double-whammy, the efficacy of legacy cybersecurity defenses — which were deployed, at great expense, mainly to protect on-premises data centers – by many measures is rapidly eroding.

I had the chance to discuss this with Joakim Sundberg, founder and CEO of a cybersecurity startup, Baffin Bay Networks, based in Stockholm, Sweden. We met at Black Hat USA 2019, where Baffin Bay touted its cloud-first, full-stack suite of threat protection services. For a full drill down on our conversation, give a listen to the accompanying podcast. Here are my key takeaways:

Formula for poor practices

Launched in 2017, Baffin Bay has attracted VC funding of $6.4 million and grown to 42 employees, winning customers in leading media firms, financial services companies and government agencies in the Nordics.

“We’ve been in production about 19 months and we have a 100 percent retention rate,” Sundberg told me. “We’re protecting about 220 different brands, everything from companies with two people and an app, to big European banks.”

There’s room for Baffin Bay’s cloud-first approach to security because in today’s cyber threat landscape, low hanging fruit – like the smart toaster — does not go unnoticed by threat actors for very long. The business equivalent of the toaster probe might well be two categories of automated attacks: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and SQL injection (SQLi) hacks. Both DDoS and SQLi have been around for quite some time, are well understood and, by now, should be well defended. …more

MY TAKE: How advanced automation of threat intel sharing has quickened incident response

By Byron V. Acohido

Threat intelligence sharing is such a simple concept that holds so much promise for stopping threat actors in their tracks. So why hasn’t it made more of an impact stopping network breaches?

Having covered the cybersecurity industry for the past 15 years, it’s clear to me that there are two primary reasons. One is the intensely competitive nature of organizations, and the other has to do with the escalating digitalization of commerce.

I had an illuminating discussion about this with Jonathan Couch, senior vice president of strategy at ThreatQuotient. We spoke at Black Hat USA 2019. ThreatQuotient is a Reston, Virg.-based security vendor in the thick of helping companies make more of their threat feeds.

The company launched in 2013, the brainchild of Ryan Trost and Wayne Chiang, a couple of buddies working as security analysts in a U.S. military complex, who got frustrated by their inability to extract actionable intel from a deluge of threat feeds. For a full drill down of my conversation with Couch, give a listen to the accompanying podcast. Here are key takeaways:

Ripe for badness

Let’s face it, for-profit enterprises, and even public agencies, are geared to keep their rivals in the rearview mirror. Sharing proprietary information, even from one in-house department to the next, is simply not in their DNA. At the same time, digital transformation has redoubled the complexity of company networks, catapulting us from Big Data to Very Big Data.

Consider that 90% of the data that exists in the world was created in two years — 2017 and 2018 — and that our digital universe is on track to swell from 3.2 zettabytes to 40 zettabytes, as the Internet of Things and 5G networks take hold. …more

SHARED INTEL: Mobile apps are riddled with security flaws, many of which go unremediated

By Byron V. Acohido

The convergence of DevOps and SecOps is steadily gaining traction in the global marketplace. Some fresh evidence of this encouraging trend comes to us by way of shared intelligence from WhiteHat Security.

Organizations that are all-in leveraging microservices to speed-up application development, on the DevOps side of the house, have begun acknowledging the importance of incorporating SecOps along the way. The most forward-thinking among them are increasingly checking for vulnerabilities in new apps – and finding them, big time.

That’s one of the key revelations in the 2019 WhiteHat Application Security Statistics Report, which I’d place in the category of reports that bear close scrutiny because it is based on the actual in-the-field experiences of WhiteHat’s global customer base. Also, WhiteHat has been generating this report annually since 2006.

Based on 17 million application security scans carried out in 2018, WhiteHat found a 20% increase in vulnerabilities found in the applications that organizations tested for security flaws.

What’s more, based on WhiteHat’s partner, NowSecure’s insight, some 70% of mobile apps were found to leak sensitive data.

The fact that more companies are participating in the hunt for security flaws in new apps is a good thing. However, WhiteHat also found many app vulnerabilities are, today, going unaddressed. Remediation rates actually fell in 2018, as compared to 2017. At the moment, the effort required to secure existing and new apps appears to be overwhelming already short-staffed security teams.

The Dawn of DevSecOps

This field report tells us that, yes, SecOps is gaining traction, with more and more security teams beginning to contribute to the delivery of secure apps. However, many security teams lack the skills, and/or have not yet won corporate backing to bring in the engineering support needed to mitigate the vulnerabilities.

These applications flaws were always there, mind you – WhiteHat found that more than one-third of all application security risks are inherited rather than written – but now they are being flushed out as DevOps and SecOps merge into DevSecOps.

The more progressive security teams are, indeed, tackling remediation. For those teams, the benefits associated with paying a bit of attention to security, up front, have sunk in. Not only can they take pride in contributing to a better experience for end users, they’re also reducing the headaches that go along with having to patch vulnerabilities that turn up, post production. …more

MY TAKE: Six-figure GDPR privacy fines reinforce business case for advanced SIEM, UEBA tools

By Byron V. Acohido

Europe came down hard this summer on British Airways and Marriott for failing to safeguard their customers’ personal data.

The EU slammed the UK airline with a $230 million fine, and then hammered the US hotel chain with a $125 million penalty – the first major fines under the EU’s toughened General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect May 25, 2018.

It’s no wonder security analysts toiling in security operations centers (SOCs) are depressed. There’s a widening security skills shortage, the complexity of company networks is going through the roof, cyber attacks continue to intensify and now regulators are breathing down their necks.

More than half of the 554 IT and security pros recently polled by the Ponemon Institute consider their SOCs to be ineffectual and some 66% indicated they are considering quitting their jobs.

I had an evocative discussion about this with Sam Humphries, senior product marketing manager for Exabeam. We spoke at Black Hat USA 2019. Exabeam, which sponsored the Ponemon study, is a San Mateo, Calif.-based supplier of advanced security management systems.

Fortunately, there is a cottage industry of cybersecurity vendors, Exabeam among them, engaged in proactively advancing ways for SOC analysts to extract more timely and actionable threat intelligence from their security information and event management (SIEM) and user and entity behavior (UEBA) systems. For a full drill down on our meeting, give a listen to the accompanying podcast. A few key takeaways:

Sticks & carrots

Poor security practices at British Airways resulted in hackers pilfering credit card information, names, addresses, travel booking details and logins for some 500,000 airline customers. Marriott, meanwhile, failed to notice a breach that persisted for four years, exposing some 339 million customer records, of which about 30 million belonged to European residents.

Under GDPR, Europe has the authority to fine organizations up to 4 percent of their annual global revenue if they violate any European citizen’s privacy rights, for example, by failing to secure their personal data. What’s more, organizations that run afoul of the GDPR’s new data loss reporting requirements could face additional fines up to 2 percent of annual global revenue. …more

NEW TECH: ICS zero-day flaws uncovered by Nozomi Networks’ analysis of anomalous behaviors

By Byron V. Acohido

Andrea Carcano’s journey to co-founding a security company in the vanguard of defending critical infrastructure began at a tender age.

Carcano hacked a computer screen at age 14, and that got him intrigued by software controls. He went on to earn a masters degree in cybersecurity, during which time he won a scholarship from the European Commission to craft a proof of concept attack against an industrial control system (ICS.)

“I said at the time, ‘OK, this is cool, someone is paying me to develop malware,” Carcano told me. “So I decided to keep going. I saw a huge gap, and I got really passionate about this topic. I started on my PhD, and at the very beginning focused on the offensive side. But I quickly moved to the defensive side and spent all of my academic career focused on how to protect critical infrastructure.”

PhD in hand, Carcano spent three years in the field helping a large oil-and-gas company tighten ICS security for operations in different corners of the world. In 2013, he co-founded Nozomi Networks aiming to deliver a more holistic and efficient way to defend industrial controls of all types.

I had the chance to visit with Carcano at Black Hat USA 2019. For a full drill down, give a listen to the accompanying podcast. Here’s what I came away with:

Ready-made attack tools

Vulnerability research and outright attacks on industrial controls has shifted dramatically over the past 10 to 15 years ago. When Carcano first began working in the field, only a handful of the top nation-states were actively involved in sponsoring this type of activity, and they tried to do it as quietly as possible.

Today, for a variety of reasons having to do with geo-political affairs and the evolving cyber underground, things are much different. The state-sponsored hacking groups are still in business. But they are part of a thriving cottage industry that has arisen around finding, selling and testing fresh ICS vulnerabilities. And not just of power plants and utilities, but also in the firmware and software that run manufacturing plants of all types and sizes, Carcano told me. …more

GUEST ESSAY: The ethical considerations of personal privacy viewed as a human right

By Dean Chester

It ought to be clear to everyone that personal privacy should be a human right and not a commodity to be bought and sold.

Alas, we can’t take it for granted: data breaches put us under fire constantly, revealing everything about us from logs and passwords to medical data.

The recent Suprema data breach, for example, exposed such sensitive data as fingerprints, facial recognition, and clearance level information of as many as 28 million employees worldwide. This number is so high that it’s difficult to even imagine the consequences of it.

Luckily for us, there are ways to protect our private info, at least to some extent. But there seems to be an underlying problem in these possibilities.

The question of ethics

Yes, what we should ask is how ethical it is to even charge for upholding one’s privacy? It is true that there are cheap VPN services and even free ones. Isn’t it great to be able to hide your traffic by encrypting it for free?

But as it always is the case with free services, those that aren’t paid make you their product by limiting your speed and traffic, showing you ads, and – what a surprise – selling your private data to third parties.

Inexpensive services may not seek to profit off of you, but the question of ethics still stands. Is a right you have to pay for a right or is it a privilege?

It may be argued that it costs money to keep a virtual private network going, and it’s a good argument. This article, however, is not meant to be a jab at honest VPN providers. Obviously, what they do is logical and they can’t be blamed for it. There’s a market for the services they provide and they try to keep the fees low.

It is the situation creating this market that is unhealthy. And as long as it doesn’t change, we can’t take our privacy online as a fundamental right.

Free privacy… or is it?

Another popular solution to the lack of privacy on the Web today is Tor. At first glance, it seems to be a perfect one: it’s free and maintained by the sheer dedication of thousands of volunteers all around the globe. Sure, it may be slow, but that only adds certain grassroots charm to the whole affair.

The second glance brings disillusionment. Tor may be free to use but it’s not free to keep going and the funds have to come from somewhere. And they do – from the American government, as they always have. …more

Older Articles »

The Last Watchdog

NEW TECH: LogicHub introduces ‘virtualized’ security analysts to help elevate SOAR

By Byron V. Acohido

MY TAKE: A primer on how ransomware arose to the become an enduring scourge

By Byron V. Acohido

ROUNDTABLE: Huge Capital One breach shows too little is being done to preserve data privacy

By Byron V. Acohido

NEW TECH: A couple of tools that deserve wide use — to preserve the integrity of U.S. elections

By Byron V. Acohido

NEW TECH: Baffin Bay Networks takes a ‘cloud-first’ approach to securing web applications

By Byron V. Acohido

MY TAKE: How advanced automation of threat intel sharing has quickened incident response

By Byron V. Acohido

SHARED INTEL: Mobile apps are riddled with security flaws, many of which go unremediated

By Byron V. Acohido

MY TAKE: Six-figure GDPR privacy fines reinforce business case for advanced SIEM, UEBA tools

By Byron V. Acohido

NEW TECH: ICS zero-day flaws uncovered by Nozomi Networks’ analysis of anomalous behaviors

By Byron V. Acohido

GUEST ESSAY: The ethical considerations of personal privacy viewed as a human right

By Dean Chester