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Why hackers love patching

Donald Korinchak, MBA, PMP, CISSP, CASP, ITILv3
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Why hackers love patching

When a company issues a patch to fix security issues the bad guys start salivating.  They know that in many cases they now have the opportunity to take advantages of vulnerabilities that the previously did not know about.

Hackers can easily reverse engineer patches.

When a patch is released a hacker will first review the published issues that the newly released patch intends to fix.  Many times the hacker can read the publisher’s write up and get a good handle of the severity of the vulnerabilities that are being patched.  If the patch details lead one to believe that the fix is urgent due to a high risk vulnerability there is motivation for the bad guy to reverse engineer the patch with the goal of identifying the exact issue.

Next, the hacker will create an exploit for the identified vulnerability.

The bad guy now knows the exact details of what the patch fixed.  The hacker will now have the ability to determine the steps needed to exploit the vulnerability.  Hackers often just find an unpatched system and start working.  Others will spin up virtual machines and test in their own lab environment to perfect the process before taking it to the wild.

Hackers now can identify unpatched systems and begin their attack.

Everyone, including the bad guys know that patch management is lacking in many organizations.  The hackers take advantage of this to exploit as many systems as they can.  As time goes by companies eventually get caught up on their patches and close the loophole.  But by this time it may be too late.  The organizations who don’t patch in a timely basis may already have experience a serious breach or worse.

In summary, many hackers watch for patches to be released.  They then do their magic by figuring out what the patch fixed and take advantage of the many companies who are not on top of their game when it comes to security and patch management.

The moral of the story?

When a patch is pushed out make sure that you test, understand, and implement the patch quickly.

Every day we hear about new security breaches. Why don’t people take more precautions?

Fred Templeton, CISA, CASP, SEC+
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Every day we hear about new security breaches. Why don’t people take more precautions?

There are high profile Cyber Security breaches almost Daily

Cybersecurity breaches seem to be a Continuous part of modern life, With a new high-profile leak or hack occurring almost daily. Regardless of this, however,  individuals still aren’t taking adequate measures to safeguard their data.

In a poll of over 1,000 individuals living in the United Kingdom, nearly a quarter — 23 percent — admitted to regularly using either their name or date of birth as their password in online accounts.  This makes them easy targets for hackers.  People still 0nly use one or two passwords for all of their online accounts, meaning that if you were to be breached all of your accounts would likely be in trouble.

Despite corporate training policies, employees aren’t practices sufficient cybersecurity.  This puts companies at serious risk.

The WannaCry Effect

WannaCry ransomware struck earlier this year.  This attack was all over the news and everyone heard about it.  But did this help to change people’s habits when it comes to cyber security?  No Way.  Polls show that very few people implemented extra security best practices.

“A surprising amount of people still seem oblivious to the threat Posed for their private and, in reality, company information by using their name or date of arrival due to their passwords,” said Bradley Maule-ffinch, manager of plan for Cyber Security Europe.

“Nowadays this is far from being just a personal matter. We have seen A spate of prolific attacks and breaches this season alone and companies must make sure that employees are knowledgeable about the principles like password security.  Using their own personal devices to connect to company networks which Is an ever-growing hazard landscape. This could prove a costly Vulnerability for businesses in the wake of GDPR.”

Since it is human nature to make things easy – like logons and remembering passwords – it is human nature that hackers exploit.

So what is the solution?

Companies must train their employees, but they cannot trust that their employees will follow the training.  Companies must implement strong controls that force their employees to foll0w security best practices.  These controls – like requiring strong passwords and frequent password updates – are easy to implement.

 

 

Your W2 Form is For Sale on the Dark Web

Fred Templeton, CISA, CASP, SEC+
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Your W2 Form is For Sale on the Dark Web

Tax Season is a Hacker’s Dream

The “dark web” is where hackers turn to sell the valuable personal data that they have stolen from their unsuspecting victims.  They sell your personal information like social security numbers, bank account details, hacked passwords, credit card account information, and even your W2 tax forms.

How do they get your W2 Form?

In the past W2 forms that have been sold on the dark web have been traced to compromises from payroll providers.  Phishing emails have lead to compromises at these types of companies.  But the leaks are also suspected to be from employees who have access to this data.

Data brokers on the dark web actively advertise a bounty for such information.  The temptation is high when the low paid employee finds out that he or she could make a few extra thousand dollars with very low risk of getting caught.  A quick copy of work data to a thumb drive is all it takes to do the breach.

So what happens to the victims?

You will not know that anything is afoul until you file your taxes.  After filing you will be notified by the IRS that your social security number was already used to file a tax return.  In many cases the fraudster has already received a tax refund based on the fraudulent return. They take the money and run.

This leaves you with a bit of a mess to clean up.

First you will need to file your tax return with IRS Form 14039.  This form is an Identity Theft Affidavit.  The form simply tells the IRS that you are claiming that the previously filed tax return was fraudulent.

You can take heart that you are not the only one that this is happening to.  The number of fraudulent tax returns are skyrocketing due to the availability of W2 and other personal information on the dark web. The IRS is dealing with thousands and thousands of fraud cases every year.

Just be patient and the system works.  If you are owed a refund you certainly should not expect it quickly.  After 4 weeks you can check the status of your return online.  The expectation is that your refund will show up within a couple of months.

How can I avoid this type of fraud?

The best way to avoid this type of tax fraud is to file your taxes early.  You want to beat the bad guys to the punch.  Prepare your taxes as soon as you have the needed information and get your tax return submitted early in the cycle.

In today’s age of stolen W2 information you have to be proactive.  The fraudsters know that it is a race against time.  When tax time comes they are prepped and ready to start cashing in.  By filing quickly you will be able to get the jump on them and neutralize the the threat.

 

 

 

The Future of Cyber Security

Oliviah Nelson
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The Future of Cyber Security

The rate at which cybercrime is rising is alarming. Almost every week, a high profile cybercrime is reported. Every business is in its own unique stage of digital transformation, however, it doesn’t matter the far your business has gone, security should be the topmost priority as it has always been and will always be the first consideration.

Information Technology Dependence

Information technology and Cybersecurity are tightly connected to each other; this means that future cybersecurity is tightly tied to the advancement of the cyberspace and future information technology. In this generation, almost all the critical systems are interconnected and driven by computers and this predicts the future where the connection will be even tighter.

The complexity and connectivity of these systems will have a direct effect on their level of vulnerability. The cybercrime or attack activities are increasingly getting into more complex methods and there is a greater need for cybersecurity systems to be more sophisticated to combat the attacks. This implies that future security to be smarter and more sophisticated, systems that can update themselves very fast.

Large data and complexity in systems

The future cybersecurity systems should be able to handle large amounts of data, deal with a larger population and take decisions in real time. It’s so challenging and it might affect the future cybersecurity, unlike in the physical world where we can easily identify our enemies and know the exact weapons that they use, it’s very unfortunate that in cyberspace anyone can become our enemy and attack us any time. 

Most likely, financially driven groups of attackers will be seeking ways to monetize cyber-attacks and hacktivists will also continue to use cyber at an advanced level to pass their message and even terrorists may also shift to cyber-crime. It will be impossible for human analysts to deal with all these thus there will be greater need more artificial intelligence for proper and accurate decision making. The next generation will have to be refined to develop and drive new systems.

Possibly, new professions and domain expertise will have to be formed and we shall have to work extra hard to protect our systems in a more advanced manner.

The Internet of Things

Cyber threats are growing daily both in complexity and in volumes as more organizations are adopting technologies and internet if things. The security professionals are equipped with versed knowledge to protect our mobile devices and servers but how about our home automation gadgets like refrigerators, cars and thermostats and others or even medical equipment?

There are a lot of cyber threats posing significant challenges to the IT experts across all the sectors. This means there is an urgent need to increase technologies that will be able to deal with big data analytics, cognitive computing, and the Internet of Things at an advanced level to influence our connected world in a better way.  Initiatives should devote in solutions. Users of the new and advancing technologies should practice good password hygiene and refrain from opening unsolicited or suspicious emails and untrusted attachments and links.

Cybersecurity and mitigation

There is a greater need to identify and track risks to plan ahead of mitigating or preventing potential risks. This involves drawing a sketch of how a project or business will react when subjected to any cyber threat or risk and the action that can be taken to reduce the risk or threats. There is a need to identify the most valuable assets in a company or organization and their vulnerabilities. Due to lack of professionals who can deal with security issues, there will be a need to embrace more use of artificial intelligence.

Cloud infrastructure is increasingly becoming a more lucrative target for hackers or cybercriminals and it is subjected to more threats the more it develops. Many organizations are really struggling with managing and monitoring so many user identities and this means there is a need to develop identity governance and intelligence system. Developing this system will however require more time to fully eliminate the use of a password and embrace advanced authentications like the use of biometrics for identification.

5 Interesting Cyber Crime Stories

Abdul Saboor Malik
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5 Interesting Cyber Crime Stories

Living in this Internet Era, cybercrime has become a reality. Most of us might not have been a victim of this novel and digital world crime, but many have experienced it, ranging from individual to enterprises. These incidents stories reach us after the forensic investigators try to reverse the crime scene and get the artifacts so that the world is aware of rising crimes.

This blog aims to provide five interesting cybercrime stories to help you get aware and be safe while you live in the cyber world.

Story 1

A retired GP in the UK is under trial accused of murdering his pension advisor. The National Crime Agency (NCA) prosecutors have also found him accused of malicious calls and SMS communications. Moreover, the prosecutors moved to the dark web and found some digital evidence associated with the murder. On the dark web, a website named Crime Bay by Chechen Mob listed order for killing Mr. Bolden, the pension advisor. The agency said that GP used a particular browser to access the site and created an account there and choose the hitting options of ‘Kill the bastard’. The payment for hitman was in Bitcoin, which was worth $ 5000. These showed the evidence for his apparent involvement in digital crime

Story 2

Ashley Madison is a famous data breach. Its investigations were carried out by the Australian and Canadian privacy commissioner. The hack resulted in the online publishing of data of millions of users of the site. This includes many government officials as well. The breach consists of personal information that includes email accounts and credit card numbers. The investigations after the breach raised the questions on the data handling of users’ data and not following standard information security practices. The hacker’s group named Impact Team threatened to release the data and demanded to disband the site

Story 3

Wanna cry is one of the deadliest and famous ransomware attacks that infected millions of systems spanning users, private and government systems. A robust malware is exploiting the windows SMB vulnerability that was initially discovered by the NSA. This programmed widely spread across various healthcare and other networks. Once reached a system, it encrypts all the hard disk and renders the system useless unless the ransom of $300 is paid though Microsoft launched a patch earlier that was never applied at such a large scale anywhere [3].

Story 4

In March 2018, a widespread hack in the US was carried out by a group of Iranian hackers that lead to penetration of 144 US universities, 176 universities in 21 other countries, 47 private companies and others. Using the spear-phishing, the attackers were able to trick university professors letting the attackers compromise their accounts and gaining data. Hackers stole 31 TB of data and $3 billion Intellectual property loss

Story 5

A hacking campaign from Russia launched a new malware affecting 500,000 routers. The malware named VPNFilter created a botnet from the affected devices and could cause tamper with the web activity and data going through the routers. This malware can be used in spam campaigns and targeted attacks. The LEA has been working on to quarantine routers and analyze the malware impacts.

Countering Cybersecurity Attacks

Oliviah Nelson
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Countering Cybersecurity Attacks

It is a cry of every person, organization and even countries that a long lasting solution for cybersecurity is found.  Every day, reports of growing number of cases concerning breach in cybersecurity are reported and the risk increases daily due to growing number of interconnected devices being added to the internet.  Your information and data is not one hundred percent secure in your computer because you are exposed to the outside world. You never know who is trying to access your information.

What is cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity is processes and practices that work together to ensure integrity, authentication, confidentiality and availability of information.  It is defending against people who want to illegally access devices, information and data.  It is protecting your information, data and devices from illegal access. It also encompasses recovering from failures of the system and illegal access from attacks by hackers. Cybersecurity has layers of protection from computers, programs, data and network. For cybersecurity to be a success in an organization, there should be collaboration between people, processes and technology involved to assist in defending any cyber-attack.

Training

You need to get to know everything about cybersecurity for you to be able to counter any threat that comes on your way. Knowledge about cybersecurity is needed for you to win this war. There will always be a cyber-attack even when strong controls are implemented, because attackers are always looking for a weak places and links; it is possible to prevent these attacks by doing basic security precautions activities.

Users of the system need to be trained on current cybersecurity precaution measures like use of strong passwords. In addition users should also be advised not to open any attachment that comes from unknown people and they should treat it as a spam. Backing up of data after a period of time is necessity. In a big organization there should be people tasked to brief the employees of trending risks, news about cybersecurity and also necessary controls to counter those current threats.

Compliance and regulatory policies

Europe union’s General Data Protection Regulatory(GDPR) body is tasked to make sure that all organizations meet the privacy and security mandates that GDPR and all other bodies have set so that to counter cyber-crimes.

These bodies have lowered risk that Internet of things has exposed everyone to. They make sure that they have lowered risk of exposing organization and other institutions by coming up with rules and regulations that must be met to counter cybersecurity challenges.

In case of any successful breach of cyber-attack, an organization should have a well-respected framework to assist and guide on how to go about it. It should be understandable on how to identify, detect and respond to attacks. It should also guide on how to protect systems and respond to any threat that comes. A great framework is able to guide on how to recover from successful attacks.

Hiring cyber security professionals

You organization will be more secured from cyber threats if you get a professional cyber security expert. He will assist you in making sure your systems and devices are protected from challenges concerning cybersecurity. It gives you advantage over the others because, you will be well updated with any risks or concerns and necessary measures and control will be guided by a professional.  You may think it is not worth it, but it is worth everything you have because when a malware strikes you may lose everything.

Security tools

You need to get security tools that will be able to detect and counter any cyber threat that may come. Protection should start from Endpoint devices like computer, printers, routers and other devices. There is great anti-virus software that shield computers from internet attacks. You also need to have firewalls, emails solutions, malware protection and practice DNS filtering.

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