Imminent threats

MY TAKE: Why companies should care about 2.2 billion stolen credentials circulating in easy reach

By Byron V. Acohido

Some chilling hard evidence has surfaced illustrating where stolen personal information ultimately ends up, once it has flowed through the nether reaches of the cyber underground.

Wired magazine reported this week on findings by independent security researchers who have been tracking the wide open availability of a massive cache of some 2.2 billion stolen usernames, passwords and other personal data.

Ever wonder where the tens of millions of consumer records stolen from Marriott, Yahoo, Equifax, Dropbox, Linked In, Target, Home Depot, Sony, Anthem, Premera Blue Cross, Uber and literally thousands of other organizations that have sustained major network breaches ends up?

This data gets collected and circulated in data bases that the thieves initially attempt to sell for big profits on the dark web, as reported by Motherboard. The work of these researchers shows how, at the end of the day, much of the stolen personal data eventually spills over into the open Internet, where it is free for the taking by anyone with a modicum of computer skills.

Credential stuffing

The clear and present risk to the average consumer or small business owner is that his or her stolen account credentials will surface in one or more credential stuffing campaigns. This is where criminals deploy botnets to automate the injection of surreptitiously obtained usernames and password pairs until they gain fraudulent access to a targeted account. And once they do, they swiftly try to gain access to accounts on other popular services.

Reddit earlier this month acknowledged that credential stuffers locked down a “large group of accounts.” The social news aggregation site informed the victims that would need to reset their passwords to regain access, and, notably, advised them to choose strong, unique passwords. …more

MY TAKE: ‘Bashe’ attack theorizes a $200 billion ransomware raid using NSA-class cyber weapons

By Byron V. Acohido

A report co-sponsored by Lloyd’s of London paints a chilling scenario for how a worldwide cyberattack could trigger economic losses of some $200 billion for companies and government agencies ill-equipped to deflect a very plausible ransomware attack designed to sweep across the globe.

The Cyber Risk Management (CyRiM) project lays out in detail how a theoretical ransomware attack – dubbed the “Bashe” campaign – could improve upon the real life WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware worms that plagued thousands of organizations in 2017.

The exercise was commissioned by Lloyd’s of London, the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies and the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, among others. In their construct, the fictional cyber ring behind Bashe leverages lessons learned from missteps made in WannaCry and NotPetya, with the aim of making Bashe “the most infectious malware of all time.”

It should not be forgotten that WannaCry and NotPetya made use of some of the 69 cyber weapons stolen from the NSA and released publicly by a group known as Shadow Brokers. These weapons were designed by NSA software engineers to take advantage of heretofore undisclosed security vulnerabilities in Windows, Linux, IBM and other core operating systems and applications widely used in commerce and government.

EternalBlue pedigree

Keep in mind, globe-spanning ransomware worms are just one of endless ways the NSA weapons, often referred to as “EternalBlue,” could be leveraged. While the Lloyd’s study focuses on the ransomware scenario, it’s reasonable to believe threat actors of every stripe are developing other ways to utilize EternalBlue-class cyber weaponry.

This creates a responsibility for every organization to consider this report and assess what damage control might entail, says Darin Pendergraft, vice president of product marketing at STEALTHbits Technologies, a Hawthorne, NJ-based supplier of systems to protect sensitive company data. …more

Q&A: Here’s why robust ‘privileged access management’ has never been more vital

By Byron V. Acohido

Malicious intruders have long recognized that getting their hands on privileged credentials equates to possessing the keys to the kingdom. This is because privileged accounts are widely deployed all across modern business networks — on-premises, in the cloud, across DevOps environments and on endpoints.

However, lacking robust protection, privileged accounts, which are intended to give administrators the access they need to manage critical systems, can instead be manipulated to enable attackers to move laterally across an organization’s network.

In recognition of the significant security risks privileged accounts can pose, industry research firm Gartner recently released the first-ever Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Management.1-

Last Watchdog asked Adam Bosnian, executive vice president at CyberArk – the company that pioneered the market – to put into context how much can be gained by prioritizing privilege in today’s dynamic, fast-evolving digital business landscape. Here are excerpts edited for clarity and length:

LW: Why is privileged access management so important?

Bosnian: Privileged access has become the fulcrum of the success or failure of advanced attacks. Nearly 100 percent of all advanced attacks involve the compromise of privileged credentials.

This is a mounting challenge for organizations because privileged accounts exist and ship in every single piece of technology, including servers, desktops, applications, databases, network devices and more. …more

Q&A: Why emerging IoT platforms require the same leading-edge security as industrial controls

By Byron V. Acohido

The heyday of traditional corporate IT networks has come and gone.

In 2019, and moving ahead, look for legacy IT business networks to increasingly intersect with a new class of networks dedicated to controlling the operations of a IoT-enabled services of all types, including smart buildings, IoT-enabled healthcare services and driverless cars.

This coming wave of IoT networks, architected to carry out narrowly-focused tasks, will share much in common with the legacy operational technology, or OT, systems long deployed to run physical plants — such as Industrial Control Systems (ICS,) Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA ,) Data Control System (DCS,) and Programmable Logic Controller (PLC.)

The global cybersecurity community is keenly aware of these developments and earnest discussions are underway about how to deal with the attendant security exposures. This includes a rising debate about the efficacy of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, or CVSS. Initially introduced in 2005, CVSS is a framework for rating the severity of security vulnerabilities in software.

Last Watchdog recently sat down with a couple of senior executives at Radiflow, a Tel Aviv-based supplier of cybersecurity solutions for ICS and SCADA networks, to get their perspective about how NIST and ICS-CERT, the two main organizations for disclosing and rating vulnerabilities, are sometimes not aligned. Radiflow currently is conducting this survey to collect feedback from IT and OT professionals about the ramifications of this conflict.

Radiflow expects to release its survey findings in late January. This is not just another arcane tussle among nerdy IT professionals. New vulnerabilities and exposures are part and parcel of accelerating the deployment of vast distributed systems, fed by billions of IoT sensors. And they must be fully addressed if digital commerce is to reach its full potential. Here are excerpts of my discussion about this with Radiflow’s CEO Ilan Barda and CTO Yehonatan Kfir, edited for clarity and length:

LW: As we move forward with digital transformation and the Internet of Things, is it becoming more urgent to think about how we protect OT systems?

Barda: Yes. The risks are growing for two reasons. One is the fact that there are more and more of these kinds of OT networks, …more

GUEST ESSAY: Supply chain vulnerabilities play out in latest Pentagon personnel records breach

By Michael Magrath

It is disheartening, but not at all surprising, that hackers continue to pull off successful breaches of well-defended U.S. government strategic systems.

On Friday, Oct. 12, the Pentagon disclosed that intruders breached Defense Department travel records and compromised the personal information and credit card data of U.S. military and civilian personnel.

The Associated Press, quoting a U.S. official familiar with the matter, reported that the breach could have happened months ago, but was only recently discovered. At this juncture, as many as 30,000 federal employees are known to have been victimized, but that number may grow as the investigation continues.

The Pentagon has since issued a statement conceding that a department cyber team informed leaders about the breach on Oct. 4. Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Joseph Buccino now says that DoD continues to gather information on the size and scope of the hack, and is attempting to identify the culprits.

It does appear that this is another example of attacks successfully penetrating a weak supply chain link, underscoring the importance of addressing third-party risks.

Third-party risk

Buccino disclosed that authorities are examining a “breach of a single commercial vendor that provided service to a very small percentage of the total population” of Defense Department personnel. …more

MY TAKE: The no. 1 reason ransomware attacks persist: companies overlook ‘unstructured data’

By Byron V. Acohido

All too many companies lack a full appreciation of how vital it has become to proactively manage and keep secure “unstructured data.”

One reason for the enduring waves of ransomware is that unstructured data is easy for hackers to locate and simple for them to encrypt.

Ironically, many victimized companies are paying hefty ransoms to decrypt unstructured data that may not be all that sensitive or mission critical.

I talked with Jonathan Sander, Chief Technology Officer with STEALTHbits Technologies, about this at Black Hat USA 2018.

The New Jersey-based software company is focused on protecting an organization’s sensitive data and the credentials attackers use to steal that data. For a drill down on our conversation about unstructured data exposures please listen to the accompanying podcast. A few takeaways:

Outside a database

Structured data can be human- or machine-generated, and is easily searchable information usually stored in a database, including names, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, ZIP codes.

Unstructured data (also human- or machine-generated) is basically everything else. Typical unstructured data includes a long list of files—emails, Word docs, social media, text files, job applications, text messages, digital photos, audio and visual files, spreadsheets, presentations, digital surveillance, traffic and weather data, and more. In a typical day, individuals and businesses create and share a tidal wave of this information.

The main difference between the two is organization and analysis. Most of the unstructured data generated in the course of conducting digital commerce doesn’t get stored in a database or any other formal management system.

For structured data, users can run simple analysis tools, i.e., content searches, to find what they need. But with no orderly internal framework, unstructured data defies data mining tools. Most human communication is via unstructured data; it’s messy and doesn’t fit into analytical algorithms.

Ransomware target

There is a mountain of unstructured data compared to a molehill of its structured counterpart. Gartner analysts estimate that over 80 percent of enterprise data is unstructured …more

MY TAKE: Here’s how anyone with $20 can hire an IoT botnet to blast out a week-long DDoS attack

By Byron V. Acohido

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks continue to erupt all across the Internet showing not the faintest hint of leveling off, much less declining, any time soon.

To the contrary, DDoS attacks appear to be scaling up and getting more sophisticated in lock step with digital transformation; DDoS attacks today are larger, more varied and come at the targeted website from so many more vectors than ever before.

This is borne out by Akamai Technologies’ Summer 2018 Internet Security/Web Attack Report.

Akamai, which optimizes the delivery of content for large enterprises, measured a 16 percent increase in the number of DDoS attacks recorded since last year.

GitHub’s logo

That increase included far and away the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, when the popular code-sharing website GitHub got inundated by an astounding 1.35 terabytes per second of nuisance traffic. The attackers responsible for the GitHub attack very cleverly leveraged something called memcached database servers.

They accessed these otherwise obscure servers — which make up part of the Internet’s open infrastructure — and used them to massively amplify traffic directed at GitHub — to deafening levels.

Of course, we’ve not seen the last of these types of innovative, brute-force attacks. But that’s not all. DDoS attacks are evolving to become more diverse. A nascent cottage industry is starting to gel around DDoS botnets-for-hire, comprised of millions of compromised IoT devices. …more

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The Last Watchdog

Imminent threats

MY TAKE: Why companies should care about 2.2 billion stolen credentials circulating in easy reach

By Byron V. Acohido

MY TAKE: ‘Bashe’ attack theorizes a $200 billion ransomware raid using NSA-class cyber weapons

By Byron V. Acohido

Q&A: Here’s why robust ‘privileged access management’ has never been more vital

By Byron V. Acohido

Q&A: Why emerging IoT platforms require the same leading-edge security as industrial controls

By Byron V. Acohido

GUEST ESSAY: Supply chain vulnerabilities play out in latest Pentagon personnel records breach

By Michael Magrath

MY TAKE: The no. 1 reason ransomware attacks persist: companies overlook ‘unstructured data’

By Byron V. Acohido

MY TAKE: Here’s how anyone with $20 can hire an IoT botnet to blast out a week-long DDoS attack

By Byron V. Acohido