Security Alert

Malware Reports Continue To Rise

September 26, 2018 by Joseph Martin

We’ve known for some time now that the next big crisis the internet will have to come to grips with is the dramatic rise of the Internet of Things (IOT).

The problem isn’t with the devices themselves, which are enormously helpful and rapidly growing in their popularity. Rather, it lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of IoT manufacturers have been notoriously lax when it comes to building even basic security protocols into the goods they make and sell.

The lack of security and the complete absence of any type of security has made the Internet of Things the new “low hanging fruit” of the internet, and hackers have been happy to take advantage of the incredibly easy access.

Kaspersky Lab has recently given us hard numbers to provide a sense of the scope and scale of the problem.

Last year, the company detected a total of 32,615 malware infections on IoT devices. In just the first six months of this year, the company has spotted 121,588 infections on IoT devices, representing a staggering 273 percent increase.

Far and away, the most commonly compromised devices were routers. Behind them were a whole raft of other IoT devices including smart TVs, refrigerators, DVRs, printers, washing machines and more.

Things have gotten so bad that earlier this year, the FBI issued a public service announcement in a bid to warn users of the dangers of unsecured devices.

These can be slaved by hackers to create enormous botnets like the one that brought down the internet on the entire eastern seaboard earlier this year. However, if they are connected to your home or office network, they provide a perfect launchpad for attacks against other network connected devices.

Sadly, manufacturers to this point have shown little interest in beefing up the security of the devices they sell, so the problem is likely to get much worse before it starts getting better.

Joseph Martin

President & CEO
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Your Business Email Is Highly Targeted For Attacks

September 25, 2018 by Joseph Martin

There’s a new report out, authored by ProofPoint, and its findings for business are grim.

It’s no secret that businesses of all shapes and sizes are coming under increasing fire from hackers around the world.

Now we have hard data that shows us exactly how big of an increase we’re seeing.

Here are some of the key findings in the report:

Email fraud attacks targeting businesses have increased 25 percent in the last quarter alone

They have increased by a staggering 85 percent from this time last year

Phishing links sent via social media platforms have increased by 30 percent

60 percent of those phishing links specifically targeted individual contributors and lower-level corporate management

23 percent of attacks targeted employees working in operations and production

Incidents of customer support fraud increased by 39 percent, compared to the previous quarter. This increased a whopping 400 percent compared with this time last year

Nick Frost (a co-founder of the Cyber Risk Management Group) had this to say about the disturbing report:

“Key to this is engineering emails and spoofing email addresses to a level of sophistication that fails to alert the recipient that there is anything suspicious about the email. Techniques such as web crawling and web scraping are able to collect and collate key information about an individual that can be used in crafting an email, accompanied by a link (as part of a phishing attack) to an unsuspecting user.

Whilst there are many legitimate web crawlers and many are enabled for business reasons, there may be organizations and individuals that wish for their information not to be collected and shared either for legitimate or adversarial purposes. There are tools that organizations can adopt that prevent or even delay web crawlers.”

Training is the first line of defense here. If you’re not doing it already, you should be holding regular phishing simulations so your employees become adept at spotting them.

Joseph Martin

New Google Chrome Feature Created For Better Password Security

September 24, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Google is taking yet another important step to help save us from ourselves. The company is releasing a complete redesign of their Chrome browser, which is exciting. There’s one feature in particular, however, that bears taking a special look at.

Perhaps the most significant change to the browser is the addition of a new password manager, which will offer to generate a random password when you sign into a website for the first time. The randomly generated password will be securely tucked away inside your Google Account and synced across both desktop and mobile versions of Chrome.

Password security is something humans aren’t very good at. Despite the risks and the repeated dire warnings, many people still have the tendency to use the same passwords that are only marginally different, across multiple websites they have accounts on.

The problem is that if one of the websites you have an account on is breached, it puts most (if not all) of your other web accounts at risk. It’s an extremely bad habit from a security standpoint, and unfortunately, it is one that has proved to be notoriously difficult to break.

Google’s solution to the problem is interesting,T but it should be noted that it is far from all-inclusive. Bear in mind that Chrome only manages passwords inside the browser, so if you log into services like Netflix on your smart TV, those login details won’t be captured in, or stored by your Google Account.

Google isn’t the only company doing what it can to save us from our worst password impulses. Apple is making changes too. With the release of iOS 12, Apple will give its OS the ability to autofill passwords across browsers and apps from third-party password managers.

Joseph Martin

SmartHome Users Aren’t Keeping Up With Security Updates

September 24, 2018 by Joseph Martin

The Internet on devices continues to be a major problem when it comes to security. Unfortunately, a big part of the reason why comes down to end users. Recently, Bitdefender released a new report entitled “The IoT Threat Landscape And Top Smart Home Vulnerabilities in 2018,” and it paints a grim picture indeed.

The average home now contains twenty smart devices, and most of them contain security vulnerabilities. 95 percent of those vulnerabilities reside in the firmware.

While the majority of smart device users (60 percent ) claim to be “worried” or “very worried” about identity theft, most are utterly failing to adequately protect their IoT devices. In fact, sixty percent indicated that they had never performed a firmware update on their router, and 55 percent reported that they had never updated their smart TVs.

It gets worse. 40 percent of users surveyed indicated that they use the same password for each of their devices, and half of all smart TV owners said they had literally never updated their password.

Thirty percent of users claim that they’re worried about the prospect of a hacker accessing a smart camera to spy on them, but paradoxically, fully 70 percent have at least one camera connected to a vulnerable router.

To provide a sense of scope and scale, the company reported that its BOX product blocked nearly half a million threats (461,718) in just a 30-day period, with 76 percent of those being malicious websites.

Analyst Bogdan Botezatu stressed that while weak passwords are a big part of the problem, it’s not only users who are to blame.

He added:

“Smart device manufacturers share responsibility for the current state of IoT security because most of them are overlooking the security aspect. In their rush to launch the product ahead of the competition, they are leaving attack avenues wide open to attackers interested in user sensitive data.”

If you have one or more smart devices in your home, and you probably do, it’s time to get serious about securing them.

Joseph Martin

Another Chrome Extension Is Stealing Passwords

September 19, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Do you use the Chrome browser extension for the MEGA file storage service? If you do, please read this article carefully. The official extension for that service has been compromised. It has been replaced with a malware version that has the capability to steal user login data for a number of popular websites, including Github, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and more.

The extension was compromised on September 4th, when an unknown attacker breached MEGA’s Chrome Web Store account and uploaded the poisoned version of the extension. Any user who installs it is at risk of having their other login credentials stolen.

It gets worse. If you allow auto-updates, then the poisoned version of the extension would have automatically “updated” on your PC or smartphone when the malware was uploaded. Note that when the extension attempted to update, it would have asked users for elevated permissions. Those elevated permissions would allow the extension access to personal information, which is the mechanism by which the credentials are stolen.

The poisoned file was in place for a total of four hours before it was found, eradicated and replaced by a clean version (version 3.39.5).

According to MEGA:

“You are only affected if you had the MEGA Chrome extension installed at the time of the incident, auto update enabled, and you accepted the additional permission, or if you freshly installed version 3.39.4.”

If you think there’s even a chance you were impacted by this event, your best bet would be an across-the-board change of all your passwords, as there’s no way to be sure which ones may have been compromised.

Two things to note here: The Firefox extension was not impacted. This applies only to chrome users who have the MEGA extension installed. Also, you should check your extension version number immediately to be sure you’re not running version 3.39.4. If you are, uninstall it immediately and grab the clean version referenced above.

Joseph Martin

Name Of Utility Company That Leaked Information Just Released

September 18, 2018 by Joseph Martin

In 2016, an unnamed US energy company left some 30,000 records (containing information about its security assets) exposed for more than two months (a total of 70 days), in violation of energy sector cyber security regulations. When the incident was initially reported, the name of the company was withheld.

That company has now agreed to a $2.7 million-dollar settlement, and its name has now been made public, along with some additional details about the incident.

Initially, the company admitted that they unintentionally exposed the database in question, but that it contained fake data. As the investigation into the matter continued, it became apparent that the data was not only real, but that it included hashed passwords for administrators that hackers could have easily reverse-engineered. PG&E subsequently reversed their fake data assertion.

The exposed data was found by independent security researcher Chris Vickery, who indicated at the time that the database contained details for some 47,000 computers, virtual machines, servers and other devices.

In addition to that a number of non-encrypted email passwords were found, along with 120 encrypted passwords. In Vickery’s words, “This would be a treasure trove for any hostile nation-state hacking group.”

According to the official NERC notice regarding the incident:

“The data was exposed publicly on the internet for 70 days. The usernames of the database were also exposed, which included cryptographic information of those usernames and passwords. Exposure of the username and cryptographic information could aid malicious attackers in using this information to decode passwords.”

Once PG&E was made aware of the problem, it took a server offline, which removed the exposed data. They also brought in third-party forensic experts to investigate, and as a result of that investigation, revised a number of their security policies.

Overall, the company’s handling of the matter was spotty at best, but in light of the record-setting fine, the hope is that we won’t see a similar instance of carelessness in the future.

Joseph Martin

Air Canada Customers May Have Had Their Data Exposed

September 17, 2018 by Joseph Martin

If you fly Air Canada and use their mobile app, it may be time to change your password. The company recently announced that between August 22nd and August 24th of this year, they detected “unusual log-in behavior,” and that a small fraction (some 20,000) of their 1.7 mobile app users may have had their data compromised as a result.

The company stressed that no credit card information was compromised, but that doesn’t make the breach much less damaging.

The exposed data included:

Customer name

Physical address

Email address

Phone number

Any information an individual customer added to his or her profile

Worst of all is the fact that passport numbers were also exposed. Using that information, a hacker could easily gain access to the countries that a person has been to, when the passport expires, country of residence, the flight numbers of any flights they’ve taken, their gender, birthday and more.

As is usually the case when events like this occur, Air Canada has apologized to their customers and has reached out to all of their potentially impacted users.

Even if you didn’t get a notification from Air Canada, it would be prudent to change your password as soon as possible.

The company has not released any details about exactly how the breach occurred, and the matter is still under investigation.

Note that in terms of scope and scale, this is a fairly small breach. The 20,000 users represents about 1 percent of the total user base. Even so, the data stolen has the potential to be quite damaging. Even after you change your password, since email addresses were compromised during the breach, be on the alert for phishing emails, as the group responsible may attempt to leverage the information they have to get even more.

Joseph Martin

Tech Support Scammers Are Advertising Online

September 17, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Tech Support scams are nothing new, but they are getting increasingly sophisticated. Worse, tech giants like Google are finding it notoriously difficult to detect them.

A report recently released by the venerable data security firm, Symantec, indicates that tech support scammers are increasingly integrating call optimization into their schemes, which allows them to insert phone numbers into web pages dynamically. Among other things, this allows the scammers to display the phone number of someone who speaks the language of the victim, which makes the whole act more convincing and much more likely to succeed.

In recent years, tech support scams have begun promoting their “services” via ads, where they claim to be legitimate, authorized service centers for companies like Apple, Microsoft, or Dell. The brand recognition and professional presentation combine to put their victims at ease.

They’re so slick and professional, and their “employees” so good at mimicking the employees of legitimate service centers that it can be virtually impossible to tell the real companies from the fake ones.

David Graff, Google’s Director of Global Product Policy had this to say about the matter:

“For many years, we’ve consulted and worked with law enforcement and government agencies to address abuse in this area. As the fraudulent activity takes place off our platform, it’s increasingly difficult to separate the bad actors from the legitimate providers.”

Google is taking steps to try and combat the rising threat. Recently, they’ve made a change to their policy as it relates to tech support companies, only accepting ads from verified third-party support vendors.

Even with this added layer of protection, however, the tech support scam is thriving. Scammers have already begun taking steps to get around the new restrictions by cold-calling their victims. For the most part, this has proved to be a successful tactic for them. However, in at least one instance, where the scammers called the New Zealand Police, it ended quite badly for the criminals.

Joseph Martin

Hacker Requests For Wire Transfers Are Topping Email Scams

September 13, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks are a major threat, costing business nearly three billion dollars a year.

This form of attack primarily targets the C-Suite in order to impersonate them.

In the world of BEC attacks, those that employ requests for wire transfers are almost devastatingly effective.

Asaf Cidon, the Vice President of Content Security at Barracuda Networks, explains why:

“Criminals use business email compromise attacks to obtain access to a business email account and imitate the owner’s identity, in order to defraud the company and its employees, customers, or partners. In most cases, scammers focus efforts on employees with access to company finances or payroll data and other personally identifiable information.”

The attack unfolds when the hacker, pretending to be a company CEO or other high-ranking official requests immediate payment, usually via wire transfer.

Again, per Asaf Cidon:

“The sense of urgency, a request for action, or a financial implication used in BEC schemes tricks targets into falling for the trap. For example, an accountant may receive a fraudulent email request for a wire transfer from the company CEO, which includes a spoofed version of the CEO’s email address and even the CEO’s own email signature.”

According to a 2016 report published by Trend Micro, a successful BEC attack nets the hacker an average of $140,000. Given how easy they are to pull off (and how low-tech), don’t expect this type of attack to show any signs of decline in the foreseeable future.

What makes BEC attacks even more troublesome is the fact that law enforcement officials believe that few attacks of this type are ever reported, and that the losses to business could be up to four times the figure we cited earlier.

Worst of all, these types of attacks appear to be increasing in their frequency. Unfortunately, C-Suite employees are notoriously resistant to basic security training, meaning that there are no easy solutions to this large and growing problem.

Joseph Martin

New Versions Of Ransomware Continue To Wreak Havoc

September 12, 2018 by Joseph Martin

2017 was “The Year of Ransomware.” It saw an incredible number of ransomware attacks and infections, paired with a tremendous number of innovations.

Although 2018 hasn’t seen quite the same level of ransomware activity, it’s still a major threat with one company coming under attack about every ten minutes.

Although there haven’t been as many innovations so far this year, that doesn’t mean they’re not occurring, and some of the new ransomware strains are particularly nasty.

Of interest, this year has seen a rise in ‘Cryptojacking’, which is a variant of a classic ransomware attack where the malware mass encrypts files on the victim’s machine while simultaneously installing cryptocurrency mining software.

This should come as no surprise given the rise in popularity of cryptocurrency, but it does add a disturbing new wrinkle to ransomware attacks. Even after you get your files back, lurking in the background there is a rogue process that’s slowing your system and ultimately putting money into the bank accounts of the hackers.

Most recently, an Obama-themed cryptojacker has been making the rounds.

The ransomware itself is nothing out of the ordinary. It predictably locks your files, demands payment, and installs a Monero miner in the background.

Obama is not the first world leader to unwittingly become the face of ransomware. In 2016, Candidate Trump was featured in a malware strain that proved to be a work in progress. It would infect machines, but didn’t actually encrypt files. It’s unclear if a working version was ever deployed in the wild.

The Obama strain contains code fragments that indicate Chinese origin. There’s circumstantial evidence that leads some security researchers to believe it may be the work of a Chinese hacker known only as “Rocke,” but so far, there’s no definitive proof.

As things stand now, there’s no good defense against this most recent threat, save for continued vigilance.

Joseph Martin

Malware Reports Continue To Rise

Your Business Email Is Highly Targeted For Attacks

New Google Chrome Feature Created For Better Password Security

SmartHome Users Aren’t Keeping Up With Security Updates

Another Chrome Extension Is Stealing Passwords

Name Of Utility Company That Leaked Information Just Released

Air Canada Customers May Have Had Their Data Exposed

Tech Support Scammers Are Advertising Online

Hacker Requests For Wire Transfers Are Topping Email Scams

New Versions Of Ransomware Continue To Wreak Havoc

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