Blog – Page 31

Researchers Find Major Vulnerabilities In Banking Apps

May 3, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Do you do your banking online? If so, there’s bad news in the form of a report recently released by the security firm “Positive Technologies.”

The company tested a variety of websites using a proprietary tool they developed in-house, which scans websites for security flaws. While flaws were found across a wide range of industries, literally every banking site Positive Technologies tested was found to have serious security flaws.

The particulars varied from one bank to the next, but the security flaws included:

XML external entity errors

Arbitrary file reading and modification flaws

Expired or nonexistent SSL certificates

Poor or nonexistent encryption

Some banking websites were so flawed that a hacker could execute a ‘man in the middle’ attack and execute malicious code to infect the user’s machine. They could potentially make off with all their money and with more than enough information to steal their identity.

Some 80 percent of sites tested were found to be vulnerable to XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks.

Regardless of the specific vulnerability, the big, terrifying takeaway from the Positive Technologies report is simply this: Of the financial sites they tested, 100 percent of them were found to have vulnerabilities.

These are the people who are tasked with safeguarding your money, and they’re obviously not doing enough to keep their websites secure.

Firewalls and basic detection protocols are simply not enough. The hackers of the world have matured and gotten better at what they do, and security professionals simply haven’t been improving as quickly. This is the reason we’re seeing such a massive spike in high profile data breaches. The reason is that each year is a new, record-breaking year, beating out the one before, often by a wide margin.

Until that changes, everyone is at risk. Given how important the internet has become to international commerce and modern life, that’s simply unacceptable.

Major Server Ring Distributing Malware Taken Down

May 2, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Score one for the good guys. A researcher from BrilliantIT was recently able to figure out how infected computers would connect to EITest’s command and control server, and using that information, was able to bring down their entire network.

If you haven’t heard of EITest before, the true significance of that statement might not be registering.

EITest first appeared in 2011. In its original incarnation, it was little more than an annoyance. It was a collection of compromised servers used to direct web traffic to poisoned websites, where the owners could infect unsuspecting users with their homegrown malware.

In 2013, EITest’s owners got savvy, relentlessly grew their network to more than 52,000 compromised machines and started renting their network out to hackers around the world to drive traffic to their poisoned websites. This unleashed a torrent of wildly destructive malware. Ever since, it’s been a thorn in the side of IT professionals everywhere.

Using the crack discovered by BrilliantIT, researchers were able to redirect all traffic to a sinkhole, effectively shutting the network down altogether.

Since then, it appears that the hackers have made one halfhearted attempt to regain control of their network, and then apparently gave up on the idea.

While this is undeniably good news, EITest isn’t the only traffic distribution network on the Dark Web, and even if the hackers have given up on the idea of recovering access to their old network, there’s nothing stopping them from building a whole new one. That’s not to undercut the significance of the victory here, but rather, merely to point out that it’s a temporary win and reprieve, at best. They’ll be back. They always come back.

Good news is rare on the security front, and when it is found, we should all take a moment to celebrate. Kudos to the team at BrilliantIT!

Hacked Routers Being Used To Spread Malware

April 30, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Beware of compromised routers spreading malware. This is according to both Kaspersky Labs and a recently released government report.

Using hacked routers to spread malware is nothing new. Security insiders have known about it for years. However, since 2008, the number of instances where routers are being used to push malicious code has been steadily increasing. Researchers are observing marked increases in their use by APTs (Advanced Persistent Threat) around the world.

APTs are nothing new either, although their ranks have been growing in recent years. Many are state-sponsored hacking groups with virtually unlimited resources. Some are simply tight-knit groups of hackers banding together under a single banner.

Many people view hackers as lone wolves and that there are millions of lone wolves hacking networks across the globe. Increasingly though, these are becoming minor actors on the world stage. The real threat is now well-organized groups of hackers who can execute highly coordinated globe-spanning attacks and create botnets comprised of tens, or even hundreds of thousands, of compromised computers.

In addition to identifying and calling attention to a little-known attack vector, the recent announcement underscores an important weakness in current cybersecurity thinking. Most people are still laboring under the faulty assumption that they’re facing individual hackers operating out of a dark room in someone’s basement.

While those types of threats are no doubt present, it’s false to assume that’s where the biggest danger lies. If you get hacked, it’s just as likely (perhaps even more likely) that you’re actually facing a well-organized group who may have more resources at their disposal than your entire IT department. While you’re preparing to fight a skirmish, the barbarians are coming to your gates with an army. Most people are simply planning to fight the wrong type of battle, and that could prove to be a devastating mistake.

Panera Bread Customer Accounts Exposed To Threats

April 25, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Panera Bread company is the latest to find itself in hot water. Recently, security researcher Dylan Houlihan discovered that the company had failed to encrypt (or otherwise protect) a file containing usernames, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers and loyalty account numbers for a staggering thirty-seven million of its customers.

The file was found stored as plain text, and accessible to anyone who bothered to go looking for it. The good news is that no one appears to have absconded with the data, so odds are that even if you’re a Panera customer, you’re not at risk. The bad news is that Panera’s handling of the incident to this point has been dreadful, to say the least.

First, the company was slow to even acknowledge that there was a problem, and when they did, they attempted to downplay the number of users the oversight impacted. Second (the truly disturbing part of the ongoing story), even when the company did acknowledge the scope and scale of the incident, they left the plain text file on the website. It was completely unsecured until the security professional (Houlihan) contacted them a second time.

To date, their most detailed response has been that the investigation into the matter is ongoing.

There’s a harsh lesson here for any business owner. This is a textbook example of how not to respond to an incident like this. There are so many different things Panera could have done to make this a non-issue. The first of which would have been to immediately take the file down or secure it. Next, to immediately notify all the customers on the list (just in case the file had been downloaded by hackers). Lastly, issue a detailed action plan that assured customers that the company was taking steps to make sure something like this would happen in the future. Sadly, exactly none of that has happened.

No Spectre Fix For Certain Intel Processors

April 24, 2018 by Joseph Martin

The bad news just doesn’t seem to stop where Intel and the Speectre vulnerability are concerned. The latest bit of news comes directly from Intel, as the company admits that it’s just not possible to address the Spectre vulnerability in some of its older hardware. This means that nine families of chips and more than 230 models of computers (mostly manufactured between 2007 and 2011) will remain vulnerable to Spectre forever.

The company has stopped Spectre mitigation development on the following families of chips:

Bloomfield

Clarksfield

Gulftown

Harpertown Xeon

Jasper Forest

Penryn

SoFIA 3GR

Wolfdale

Yorkfield

A company spokesman had this to say about the recent announcement:

“We’ve now completed the release of microcode updates for Intel microprocessor products launched in the last 9+ years that required protection against the side-channel vulnerabilities discovered by Google. However, as indicated in our latest microcode revision guidance, we will not be providing updated microcode for a select number of older platforms for several reasons, including limited ecosystem support and customer feedback.”

It’s unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. If you have any older Intel equipment still in service at your company, have your IT group check the processor family. If it’s one of the above, it’s well worth marking those systems high priorities for upgrades, and limiting their use until you can.

Spectre is a devastating flaw, and it’s just not worth the risk to leave exposed systems connected to your network and in service. This is especially true now that it’s official that no help is coming for certain older systems.

Even worse, AMD chips, which are not impacted by Spectre and Meltdown, have since been found to have their own critical security flaws. While not as bad or as pervasive as the two Intel is facing, they will nonetheless require the company to issue its own microcode updates, which they are currently scrambling to do.

The long and the short of it is that there really are no safe harbors anymore.

Microsoft Helping With Ransomware In Office 365

April 23, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Microsoft recently made small but significant changes to its Office 365 subscription service and to OneDrive, which are often used in tandem. The goal is to make it easier for users whose files have been encrypted by ransomware (or otherwise corrupted) to recover them.

The most significant of the changes is a new button that Office 365 users will see a new “File Restore” function in both applications. If you’ve saved your Office 365 files to OneDrive, you’ll be able to restore files in a thirty-day window. In the event that your files are accidentally deleted or corrupted, getting them back is as simple as pressing the button and selecting the files to be restored.

That’s a huge win for Office 365 and OneDrive users, but there’s more.

The additional changes include:

A mobile alert sent to the phone number you select, which will inform you if your files may have been encrypted or otherwise tampered with

Support for end-to-end email encryption in their mail service (Outlook), including the web version of the mail app

Office now scans all links embedded in PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents to check if they point to malicious content on the web

All file attachments and links embedded in emails are now scanned for known phishing threats and viruses

Outlook.com now gives users the ability to prevent email recipients from forwarding your emails

The ability to password protect OneDrive shared links

That last one is also significant, and is a feature that OneDrive’s user base has been clamoring on about for quite some time. OneDrive has made it incredibly easy to share files via a link-based system, but unfortunately, never offered users a way to secure those links. That, thankfully, has now changed.

Individually, all these changes are quite good, but taken together, they represent a significant step in the right direction. Kudos to Microsoft for taking the threat of ransomware so seriously, and adding specific features to help protect their users.

Hackers Zone In On Microsoft Products To Attack

April 17, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Congratulations to Adobe Flash Player for not being the software most targeted by hackers. Security vendor “Recorded Future” has just published their annual list of the software hackers most commonly focus on when targeting computers and handheld devices for attack.

For the last several years, Adobe’s Flash Player has topped the list, but this year they have been dethroned. Microsoft now has the embarrassing honor. There are multiple Microsoft programs on this year’s list, with some of them having exploits that date back more than a decade.

It’s a shameful honor to say the least, and even worse, in this year’s report, Microsoft captured seven of the top ten places.

The most often abused security flaw this year was CVE 2017-0199. Found in a variety of Microsoft Office products, the flaw allows a hacker to embed and execute VBS (Visual Basic Scripts) that contain Powershell commands into an Office document. Recorded Future has found exploit kits for sale on the Dark Web that automate the process going for between $400 and $800.

Hot on the heels of the #1 entry is CVE 2016-0189, which is one of a whole raft of Internet Explorer vulnerabilities that allow hackers to take unfettered control of a victim’s PC, laptop, or smartphone. It is one of the reasons Microsoft has moved away from IE in preference for Microsoft Edge.

Despite this dismaying news, Recorded Future notes that attacks via exploit kit are down significantly, with a staggering 62 percent drop in new variants.

The report’s author, Scott Donnelly, had this to say:

“The observed drop in exploit kit activity overlaps with the rapid decline of Flash Player usage. Users have shifted to more secure browsers and attackers have shifted as well. Spikes in cryptocurrency mining malware and more targeted victim attacks have filled the void.”

Despite the shifting landscape, the central lesson is clear. Hackers tend to take advantage of known exploits. Companies that keep their software properly patched dramatically reduce their chances of being targeted.

Most “Wannacry” Hacks Were On Windows 7 Machines

April 17, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Last year’s Wannacry attack was bad, but in many ways, it was a self-inflicted wound. According Webroot’s recently published “Annual Threat Report,” almost all of the machines that succumbed to the Wannacry attack were running Windows 7. That attack is estimated to have caused in excess of $4 billion in total losses.

The central problem is that businesses have been much slower than individuals to make the shift from Windows 7 to the much more secure Windows 10. For example, in January 2017, only one Enterprise computer in five was running Windows 10, a figure which climbed to 32 percent by year’s end.

Contrast that with the number of Enterprise computers running Windows 7. In January 2017, a staggering 62 percent of Enterprise computers were still running Windows 7. That figure declined as the year went on, but only marginally, dropping to 54 percent by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Windows 8 was running on 5 percent of Enterprise computers in January 2017, and had dropped to 4 percent by the end of the year. Windows Vista and XP both represented a tiny fraction (less than 1 percent) of Enterprise OS’s.

Contrast that to the Windows 10 migration figures for individuals. In January 2017, 65 percent of home users had made to switch to Windows 10. By the end of the year, that figure had grown to an impressive 72 percent.

A Webroot spokesperson had this to say about the report:

“While Windows 10 won’t solve all security woes, it’s a step in the right direction. Combined with advanced endpoint protection that uses behavioral analysis and machine learning, adopting Windows 10 can greatly reduce enterprises’ vulnerability to cyber-attacks.”

All that to say, if you haven’t moved away from outdated operating systems at your company, this is yet another compelling reason to do so immediately. No matter what legacy systems you may be running that rely on old OS’s, it’s just not worth the risk.

Apple Releases Major iPhone and iOS Device Update 11.3

April 13, 2018 by Joseph Martin

There’s a lot to talk about in Apple’s latest update to iOS. Version 11.3 boasts some significant changes and is well worth getting. We’ll go over the highlights below.

Battery management is the biggest and most significant change. Last year, the company found itself in hot water when they began quietly throttling older phones and slowing down their performance because older phones have batteries that begin to degrade. In the absence of throttling, it’s entirely possible that a user’s phone will simply shut down when it attempts to run a process that requires more power than the aging battery can provide.

Despite the company’s good intentions, their decision to throttle older phones met with serious backlash from their normally adoring customer base, and the company has changed their approach in 11.3. Now, throttling is optional and under user control if you have an iPhone 6, 6S/6S Plus, 7, or 7 Plus SE. However, all users, regardless of model now have access to a new battery health screen so they can keep tabs on the condition of their battery and make good decisions about if and when to replace.

Another significant change is the addition of a new Health Records section, which allows users to get easy access to their medical records if their doctor also utilizes the app.

On the business side, the 11.3 update comes with Business Chat, which allows select businesses to communicate with customers directly in the iMessage app, rather than via social media or email. While there aren’t a lot of companies taking advantage of this feature yet, you can bet that in coming weeks, you’ll see a slew of big names signing up to take advantage of the service.

There is a raft of other, smaller features in 11.3, but even if there weren’t, the “Big Three” mentioned here would make the update well worth getting. Kudos to Apple!

Amazon Removing Music Storage Service At End Of April

April 11, 2018 by Joseph Martin

If you use Amazon’s Cloud MP3 Locker to store your music online, now is the time to start looking for a new home for it. Last year, the company announced that they were ending the service, but didn’t provide a firm date. April 30, 2018 will be the last day you’ll be able to access your music if you don’t take action.

Back in December, the company stopped allowing users to upload new tracks to their music storage system, which users were formerly allowed to store up to 250 songs for free.

In the company’s most recent announcement about the coming changes, they made two important clarifications. First, there is a back-end way you can keep access to your existing music files, but it requires action on your part. You’ll need to log in, go to your Music Settings and click the “Keep My Songs” button. Failing to take this step will result in your music being deleted.

Second, the company stresses that these changes do not apply to music purchased through Amazon Prime, or Amazon’s digital music streaming service. Those files will still be available, with no action needed on your part.

While it’s a sad development, it’s not surprising in the least. Increasingly, companies that provide cloud-based storage are streamlining or scaling their services back. Amazon isn’t the first, and they certainly won’t be the last. Last year, both DropBox and Microsoft Onedrive (two prominent players in the cloud storage ecosystem) announced scalebacks to the amount of storage offered in their free accounts.

While it’s true that storage has become increasingly low cost, it’s also true that the growth in popularity of cloud storage has exploded. Companies offering the service have had to scale back, lest they become completely overwhelmed.

In any case, there’s still time to move or preserve your files, but you’ll want to take action sooner rather than later.