Security – Page 12

IRS Labeled Email Could Contain Ransomware

March 5, 2018 by Joseph Martin

There’s a new strain of the “Rapid Ransomware” making the rounds, and because of how it’s being transmitted, it’s destined to have a higher than average rate of infection. The new strain was first discovered by Derek Knight. It is disturbing because it claims to come from the IRS, and will feature subject lines like “IRS Urgent Message-164.”

The body of the email then goes on to say that the recipient owes some amount of money in real estate taxes, and “helpfully” includes instructions for how to settle in the attached file. Inside the zipped file, the user will find a word document. You’ll need to click on “Enable Editing” to see the file, and unfortunately, the moment you do, you’re doomed. “Rapid” will scan the target computer for data files and encrypt them, appending each with the “.rapid” extension.

As soon as the malware finishes encrypting your files, it will automatically open “Recovery.txt” which will display details on how much you’ll have to pay the hackers to get your files back. Unlike most other ransomware strains, this one will configure itself to start every time you login to the computer, so if you pay the ransom to get access to your files again, but fail to completely remove the malware, you’ll be facing the same problem the very next time you use the machine.

Observant users will take note of the fact that the email address is not a .gov and likely not be taken in. Unfortunately, many people will look no further than the subject line and immediately begin following the instructions contained in the email, which is obviously the reaction that the hackers are hoping for.

As ever, protecting yourself from threats like these comes down to two things: Education and vigilance.

Joseph Martin

President & CEO
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40 Percent Of All Login Attempts Are From Bots

March 5, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Here’s a statistic that is as disturbing as it is frustrating. According to the latest “State of the Internet/Security” report for the fourth quarter of 2017, as published by Akamai, bot-traffic accounts for a staggering 43 percent of all login attempts. As bad as that figure is on its face, it’s far worse for companies in the hospitality industry, where the figure is an almost unbelievable 82 percent.

The reason? Hackers are increasingly using bots to perform “credential stuffing” attacks.

Although human traffic still dominates the web, bot traffic is rapidly catching up. According to Akamai’s estimates, not counting streaming video, bot traffic accounts for 30 percent of the total, and that figure increases every year. In fact, even though bot traffic is still a minority in absolute terms, some industries already see more bot traffic than human traffic.

TicketMaster is a great example of this. The web’s premier site for purchasing concert tickets online is almost unusable by humans these days, because virtually all of their traffic is bot-driven, with bots often being used to buy every available ticket the moment they become available, so they can be resold later at a hefty premium.

Akamai’s Martin McKeay had this to say about the report: “Increased automation and data mining have caused a massive flood of bot traffic to impact websites and internet services. Although most of that traffic is useful for internet businesses, cyber-criminals are looking to manipulate the powerful volume of bots for nefarious gains. Enterprises need to watch who is accessing their sites to differentiate actual humans from both legitimate and malicious bots. Not all web traffic and not all bots are created equal.”

These are wise words, and it bears some consideration. How much of the traffic coming to your business website on any given day is human?

Joseph Martin

2018 Olympics Hit By Malware

February 27, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Hackers are picky about their victims. They’ll target just about any group or organization, including the 2018 Olympics.

Cisco’s Talos Group recently identified a new strain of malware they’ve dubbed “Olympic Destroyer” which is wreaking havoc in Pyeong Chang’s computer networks and causing downtime to internal WiFi and television systems. This has impacted the games’ opening ceremonies, and stands an excellent chance of further disrupting the rest of the festivities.

Because the threat was only recently discovered, the Talos team’s initial assessment and report was spotty and short on details, but the group recently amended their initial findings. The results aren’t pretty, and the malware is seen as being both more dangerous and more advanced than originally thought.

The big three findings in the team’s amended report are as follows:

It’s Polymorphic – As the malware spreads, it collects new credentials from each machine it infects, adding these to its binary on the fly. Members of the Talos team had this to say about the behavior: “I have not seen a malware sample modify itself to include harvested creds before and I’ve been doing this stuff longer than I should admit. Polymorphic malware isn’t a new idea by itself, but I’ve never seen any examples of malware modifying itself to include harvested credentials.”

It Spreads Via The EternalRomance Exploit – This bit of information comes to us from the Windows Defender team. The mechanism by which Olympic Destroyer spreads is industrial grade, utilizing an exploit from the NSA leaked by the Shadow Brokers last year.

Finally, It Wipes Data – This is perhaps the most significant of the three updates to the Talos report. The malware has a data wiping mechanism built into it that it utilizes at every opportunity in an attempt to delete files on network shares. Since it only seems to target shared files, it’s not deleting items key to OS functionality. Even so, these shared files are important, and this is what’s causing operational disruptions.

More details will no doubt become available as the various teams researching Olympic Destroyer get a better understanding of what they’re looking at. The bottom line is, it’s a pretty advanced threat and will likely inspire copycats in the months ahead.

Joseph Martin

Smart TV’s May Be Tracking You And Vulnerable To Hacks

February 27, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Do you own a smart TV? More than half of all television sales in the US last year were smart TVs, so chances are decent that you own one. If you do, be aware that it may be collecting far more data about you than you think.

Recall that last year, Samsung, (one of the top smart TV manufacturers) found itself in hot water when it was revealed that the TV could listen in on conversations, record them (for better voice recognition) and save them on a Samsung server.

Those issues still persist to varying degrees, but a recent Consumer Reports study underscores something most people in the tech business have known all along. Smart devices really aren’t all that smart, at least when it comes to security.

The Consumer Reports study concluded that most smart TVs and associated technologies like the Roku have only the most rudimentary of security features and can easily be hacked, giving the hackers total control of your TV. This includes the ability to turn it off, on, change the channel, and monitor your viewing habits. Given that, these TVs can also be voice-controlled. Once a hacker is in control of your set, he could monitor any conversations that take place near it without your knowledge.

In addition, the most recent smart TVs come with a feature called Content Recognition. For example, if you watch the latest episode of the Walking Dead (whether on AMC or Amazon Prime or some other streaming service), the next time you pull up a web page on your PC or smart phone, you’ll start seeing advertising related to the Walking Dead.

This, of course, gives any would-be hacker a much deeper view into your viewing habits and history.

The upside is that most of these features can be deactivated if you have the patience to sift through the television’s menu system. Of course, if you do that, then it’s no longer a smart TV, and thus, not worth the extra money you spent on it.

As ever, the bottom line is this: These kinds of risks aren’t going to go away on their own. Until and unless smart device makers start taking security more seriously, we’re going to keep hearing about potential or actual abuses.

Joseph Martin

Google Will Get Tougher On Websites Not Using HTTPS

February 27, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Google is poised to make an important change to its Chrome browser beginning in July 2018.

Here’s the summary from Emily Schechter, the Google Chrome Security Product Manager:

“For the past several years, we’ve moved toward a more secure web by strongly advocating that sites adopt HTTPS encryption, and within the last year, we’ve also helped users understand that HTTP sites are not secure by gradually marking a larger subset of HTTP pages as ‘not secure.’ Beginning in July 2018 with the release of Chrome 68, Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as ‘not secure.'”

All the major browsers already have plug-ins that alert users anytime they’re visiting a non-secure (HTTP) website, but Google’s planned move will likely prompt them to incorporate the notification into their core product as well.

According to Google’s statistics, 81 of the top 100 sites (as ranked by traffic volume) already use HTTPS. In addition to that, Google reports that 68 percent of Chrome users are finding HTTPS when using Android and Windows, and 78 percent of the time when using Mac OS X, iOS, and Chrome OS. Those figures are markedly higher than they were in 2010, when an estimated 40 percent of websites were using the secure socket layer.

If your company’s website hasn’t already made the switch, the time to do so is now. The writing is clearly on the wall, and it’s not hard to imagine that after Google begins “shaming” non-secure sites with the notification, they’ll also start implementing penalties that will hurt their position on search results pages. Even if they don’t, the persistent non-secure warnings will be enough to keep many users away, so it doesn’t matter how well optimized or SEO-friendly your site is, an increasing percentage of users may simply opt out if it’s not secure.

Joseph Martin

Changes To Google Images Will Make Image Theft Difficult

February 27, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Image theft is one of the biggest problems on the internet. If you’re a photographer, you’ve almost certainly lost money because people find your work online and make a copy of it rather than paying for the right to use it.

Unfortunately, Google has made that incredibly easy to do, but that’s changing. Until recently, if you did a Google image search, you’d get a list of images that matched your search phrase, and one of the buttons displayed was a “View Image” button that would take you to the image file itself, as opposed to viewing the image in the context of whatever web page it was displayed on.

This, of course, made stealing the image a trivial task. Content providers have been complaining loudly, and Google listened. Effective February 15, the “View Image” button is no longer listed. Of course, it’s still possible to steal the image in question, but users will have to jump through at least a couple more hoops to do so.

A second, smaller and somewhat less impactful change is the fact that Google has also removed the “Search By Image” button that formerly appeared when you navigated straight to an image file. Savvy users will still be able to drag the image itself to the search bar and accomplish the same thing, but relatively few people are aware of this, which will cut down on its use significantly. The thinking here is that netizins were making use of this feature to find copies of images that didn’t have a watermark visible.

While these two changes give photographers reason to cheer, it definitely negatively impacts the user experience, as there are a number of perfectly legitimate uses for copyrighted image material. The bottom line is that if you’re accustomed to the old way of searching for and acquiring images, you’ll have a bit of an adjustment period ahead.

Joseph Martin

Almost Half Of Top Ranking Websites Are Vulnerable

February 20, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Menlo Security just released their third annual “State of the Web” report and it’s not pretty. The headline finding is that 42% of the top 100,000 sites as ranked by Alexa are more dangerous than you think.

The report defines a risky site as one that meets one of three criteria:

The site, or one of its associated background sites (from which news articles or video is pulled), is running software with a known security vulnerability

The site has been used to launch attacks or distribute malware

The site has suffered a security breach in the past twelve months

This first point is key, and often overlooked by security professionals. Any time your website is pulling content from another source, it creates an opening that a hacker could potentially exploit. Worse, most security professionals lack the tools to properly monitor those connections.

As bad as that sounds, there’s an even worse detail lurking in the pages of the report, and that concerns emails.

Hackers are increasingly moving away from setting up their own domains. Instead, they’re preferring to create a subdomain of a compromised, legitimate domain, which makes it harder to spot. Amir Ben-Efraim, the CEO of Menlo Security, had this to say about the issue:

“It is far easier to set up a subdomain on a legitimate hosting service than use other alternatives – such as trying to hack a popular, well-defended site or to set up a brand-new domain and use it until it is blocked by web security firms. Legitimate domains are often whitelisted by companies and other organizations out of a false sense of security, giving cover to phishing sites.

Also, hosting services typically allow customers to set up multiple subdomains. For example, researchers found 15 phishing sites hosted on the world’s 10 most popular domains.”

The bottom line is: The web and even the most popular sites on it, aren’t nearly as safe as you think.

Joseph Martin

Microsoft is Adding Much Needed Feature To Windows Defender

February 16, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Microsoft is getting tough on so-called “registry cleaners”, and it’s about time. The company recently announced a planned change to Windows Defender (the anti-malware program that comes standard with every Windows installation). The change will see to the deletion of an increasing number of these registry cleaners. It’s a great move, and the company deserves credit for it, but there’s a catch. This type of software has been around for decades. So the move, as welcome as it is, comes very late in the game.

It’s overwhelmingly likely that you’ve seen these programs in action. They’re usually free downloads (though there are a few web based services too) that scan your system to find problems with your registry that the software claims are causing performance issues and slowing your machine down.

There are two major problems with this: First, the software tends to be light on details, refusing to provide much information about exactly why the “problems” that have been identified are impacting system performance. Worse, the software often incorrectly identifies critical system files and registry entries as being problematic. So of course, when they are deleted, they actually create many more problems than they solve.

Second, in order to actually fix the problems that have been identified, you’ve got to buy the premium version of the package. The result is that you’re losing money, and the software often breaks your system. Not a pretty picture.

This latest move by Microsoft builds on action they took back in 2016, when the company started penalizing the makers of such registry cleaners if their software didn’t provide adequate information. This missing information included why the problems they found needed to be fixed in the first place, and if they utilized a high pressure up-sell technique.

Ultimately, those moves proved to be insufficient, so Microsoft decided to take things to the next level. Now, they’re simply going to start deleting these no- or low-value programs. Late or not, that’s one less headache for you, and a very good thing.

Joseph Martin

Ransomware Affected Over 50 Percent Of Surveyed Companies

February 16, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Sophos has released the results of their annual “State of Endpoint Security Today”, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. A full 54% of companies surveyed reported having been hit by a ransomware attack in 2017. Another 31% reported that they expect to be on the receiving end of such an attack in the near future.

If the headline statistic wasn’t bad enough, it only gets worse from there. According to the data collected, the average cost of a ransomware attack (including network costs, manpower, downtime, and device replacement cost) was $133,000. Five percent of respondents reported total costs between $1.3 million and $6 million, before factoring in the cost of any ransom paid.

As bad as those figures are, what makes them even more painful is the frequency. On average, survey respondents report having been struck an average of twice in the past year.

Dan Schiappa, the Senior VP and General Manage of Products at Sophos explains: “Ransomware is not a lightning strike – it can happen again and again to the same organization. We’re aware of cyber criminals unleashing four different ransomware families in half-hour increments to ensure at least one evades security and completes the attack.

If IT managers are unable to thoroughly clean ransomware and other threats from their systems after attacks, they could be vulnerable to reinfection. No one can afford to be complacent. Cybercriminals are deploying multiple attack methods to succeed, whether using a mix of ransomware in a single campaign, taking advantage of a remote access opportunity, infecting a server, or disabling security software.”

In light of this relentless attack methodology, and in spite of the headlines all last year warning of the dangers, Schiappa warns that most companies are starting 2018 woefully unprepared for a ransomware attack. With all that said if you haven’t done so already, it’s well past time to review the state of your network security.

Joseph Martin

Malware Makers Testing Vulnerability Of Meltdown And Spectre

February 14, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Security researchers from around the web are reporting finding an increasing number of instances of proof of concept (PoC) code that incorporates the recently discovered Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.

If you somehow missed those earlier reports, Spectre and Meltdown are a pair of critical security flaws recently discovered in literally every Intel chip set made over the last decade. Exploiting these vulnerabilities would give a hacker root-level access to the impacted system.

Since the discovery, the chip giant has been scrambling to fix the issue. However, their first attempt to do so caused so many system problems for people who installed the patch that the company is now recommending that users avoid it until they can come up with a better solution.

Unfortunately, that leaves you between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Installing the patch will protect you, but cause you to experience system reboots several times a day and seriously degraded performance. Not installing it leaves you at the mercy of the hackers.

So far, at least, it appears that most of the proof of concept code found is the result of security researchers playing with the exploits. This includes testing them, seeing how they work, and how to prevent them. That said, the researchers point out that it’s all but certain that some of the PoC examples were created by teams of hackers who plan to use them in their next round of attacks.

To make matters worse, Mozilla has confirmed that the Spectre flaw can be executed remotely by inserting commands into Javascript. Given that, plus the increased appearance of PoC code fragments, it seems it’s just a matter of time before we see the first ever Spectre-based hack. The clock is ticking.

Joseph Martin

IRS Labeled Email Could Contain Ransomware

40 Percent Of All Login Attempts Are From Bots

2018 Olympics Hit By Malware

Smart TV’s May Be Tracking You And Vulnerable To Hacks

Google Will Get Tougher On Websites Not Using HTTPS

Changes To Google Images Will Make Image Theft Difficult

Almost Half Of Top Ranking Websites Are Vulnerable

Microsoft is Adding Much Needed Feature To Windows Defender

Ransomware Affected Over 50 Percent Of Surveyed Companies

Malware Makers Testing Vulnerability Of Meltdown And Spectre

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