phishing

November 6, 2018 by Joseph Martin

McAfee has long been a popular target of scammers, but recently, they’ve changed the nature of their game.

In years past, they’d display a webpage informing you that any McAfee products on your computer are out of date and provide a link to the company’s virtual storefront where you could renew.

Unbeknownst to the people clicking on those links, they were being redirected by an affiliate link, so any purchases made would generate a commission for the site owners.

It was an unscrupulous, underhanded tactic, but not an especially malicious one. Now though, they’re doing something a bit different and darker.

The same page pops up as before, notifying users that their products are out of date. This time, when a user clicks to renew their products, instead of being sent to the McAfee website, they’re simply presented with a capture box that asks for their credit card and personal information.

Assuming you enter that information in, it gets worse.

After “paying” for your purchase, you’re redirected to another webpage with a technical support phone number. The idea is, you call this number and the technician on the other end of the line will help you install your new software.

When you get someone on the phone, the “tech support representative” will ask to remotely connect to your computer.

Once they have access, they’ll tell you that your credit card information didn’t go through, and that you need to purchase the software again. They’d then helpfully open a browser and guide you to the McAfee website, via an affiliate link.

It’s a triple play. Not only are they earning a nice commission when you purchase the software via their affiliate link, but they also manage to get your credit card and personal information. That information will no doubt be put to use not long after you hang up the phone, and on top of that, they’ve got access to your device.

As ever, the best defense against scams like these is vigilance.

Joseph Martin

President & CEO
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November 1, 2018 by Joseph Martin

If you take a lot of photos with your Android device, you’re probably constantly on the lookout for a better way to organize them and access them. That’s exactly what the authors of the malicious app called “The Album, by Google Photos” are hoping for.

The app put in a brief appearance on the Microsoft store, where it claimed to be from Google but it’s clearly not. Unfortunately, the authors have gone to great lengths to make it appear legitimate, and as such, it has been downloaded and installed an alarming number of times.

When this app is installed and run for the first time, users are presented with a (legitimate) Google sign in page. It is not known whether the authors of the app siphon user login credentials from this page, but it’s certainly possible. So if you have installed the app but haven’t run it yet, don’t log in.

Once you’re logged in, the app will connect to a malicious URL and download a configuration file. Using the information contained in the config file, it will begin running in the background, displaying ads invisibly and then clicking on them, earning revenue for the app’s creators and slowing your Android device to a crawl in the process.

Note that the authors were careful, but only to a point. Although the ads themselves are invisible, if those ads have an audio component, the user will hear the sounds associated with the ad, although of course, they won’t have any clear indication of where the sounds are coming from. This is, in fact, how researchers became aware of the malicious nature of the app.

If you’ve downloaded this app, please uninstall it immediately. Doing so will improve your device’s performance and stop those sounds that have no apparent source from troubling you further.

Joseph Martin

October 31, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Anthem is one of the largest insurance providers in the United States. Unfortunately in 2015, they had the dubious honor of suffering the largest health data breach in history. It left protected health information of nearly 79 million of their customers exposed.

As a result, a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services called the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), levied the largest fine against the company in the agency’s history. They were fined a staggering sixteen million dollars.

An investigation into the matter revealed that Anthem had not put sufficient safeguards in place to protect patient data. As a result, hackers were able to breach the system via a phishing attack and make off with customer names, addresses, dates of birth, social security numbers, email addresses and employment information.

The Director of OCR, Roger Serverino, had this to say:

“The largest health data breach in US history fully merits the largest HIPAA settlement in history. Unfortunately, Anthem failed to implement appropriate measures for detecting hackers who had gained access to their system to harvest passwords and steal people’s private information. We know that large health care entities are attractive targets for hackers, which is why they are expected to have strong password policies and to monitor and respond to security incidents in a timely fashion or risk enforcement by OCR.”

Tim Sadler, the CEO of Tessian, added the following:

“During the three years since the Anthem breach took place, spear-phishing attacks have increased significantly in their indistinguishability and effectiveness. Yet human error has remained inherent, inevitable, and largely ignored as a security vulnerability by organizations.”

He concluded his remarks by pointing out that advanced AI algorithms and machine learning could be employed to help spot the kinds of attacks used to such great effect against Anthem, in order to minimize the risks going forward.

If your business is in any way connected to the healthcare industry, this approach certainly bears further investigation.

Joseph Martin

October 9, 2018 by Joseph Martin

According to this year’s Traveler’s Risk Index, published by The Traveler’s Indemnity Company, a majority of business owners have a somewhat fatalistic view of hacking and data breaches.

The index includes 52 percent of survey respondents indicating that they believe a cyber-attack is inevitable.

The other statistics in the report paint a grim picture. Here’s a quick overview:

55 percent of business owners say that they have not completed a cyber risk assessment

63 percent say that they have not yet completed a cyber risk assessment on vendors who have access to their data

62 percent indicate that they have not yet developed any kind of business continuity plan, which means they don’t even have the basic outline of the steps they’ll need to take in the face of a successful attack against their company

The number of survey participants saying they have been the victim of a cyber attack has doubled from 10 percent in 2015 to 20 percent in this year’s survey

Yet in spite of this staggering lack of preparation, fully half of all survey respondents say they have cyber insurance.

Tim Francis, the Enterprise Cyber-Lead at Travelers, had this to say about the report:

“Cyber risks carry serious consequences for any business, threatening everything from revenue to operations. These findings reveal some surprising things about how companies view their cyber exposure, their relative confidence in dealing with them and the clear opportunity that exists for them to be better prepared for a cyber-attack.”

It’s a thorny problem, for sure. Most small to medium sized business are strapped for cash and simply can’t dedicate the level of resources they’d like to toward data security.

The good news is that this most recent survey reveals a few simple, low-cost things you could do starting today that would dramatically improve your chances of dealing with a cyber-attack. Given that most people agree it’s inevitable and just a matter of time, that would be an excellent place to start.

Joseph Martin

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

September 5, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Quick question – how much do the world’s cyber criminals make every sixty seconds?

If you guessed a quarter of a million dollars, you’d be wrong. If you doubled that value, you’d be wrong again.

According to research conducted by RiskIQ, cybercriminals are raking in a cool million dollars per minute, compared with businesses spending $171,233 per minute on security measures. It’s a lopsided battle, and businesses aren’t winning.

Some other interesting tidbits culled from the company’s research. Every sixty seconds:

Four new potentially vulnerable web components are discovered.

A new website appears running the CoinHive cryptocurrency mining script.

1.5 companies fall victim to a ransomware attack, with an average cost to the victimized company of $15,221.

In addition to that, RiskIQ discovered that a site running the CoinHive script was deleted every ten minutes, and that a new phishing domain appears about every five minutes.

Raef Meeuwisse, a security researcher and author, had this to say about the report and its findings:

“Cybercrime and cybersecurity co-exist in a constant cycle of innovation. As one particular criminal trend towards a particular technique increases, so the security functions create or strengthen the required defenses.

However, it is evident at both the level of personal and organizational cybersecurity that spending is unusually low. In fact, most of these cybercriminals are not going after the hard targets with great defenses, they are targeting the low hanging fruit – and there is still far too much of it.”

The simple truth is that until and unless we start taking cybersecurity more seriously, and until the aforementioned “low hanging fruit” ramps up spending to properly secure their systems, we can expect to see the number of cybercrimes continue to increase. Unfortunately, despite the crimewave, there doesn’t seem to be much motivation to do that.

Joseph Martin

August 29, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Google has introduced a new Gmail feature called “Confidential Mode,” which seeks to make sending and receiving important or sensitive emails more secure. Unfortunately, it may have inadvertently created as many problems as it solves.

Here’s how the new feature works, and why you may be leery of using it:

To send a confidential email, compose your message as normal, and then, click the “lock” icon located at the bottom of the email screen. When this button is pressed, you’ll be presented with a number of options that will enable you to specify a self-destruct time ranging from one day to five years. The email will auto-delete after the amount of time specified.

You’ll also be able to specify whether the email requires a password to open, and of course, giving you the ability to set that password. Also, a message sent in Confidential mode cannot be forwarded to any other user or be printed out.

The new service works across all email systems because Confidential messages aren’t actually sent. The user will get a notification that they’ve received a confidential mail, and a link to click to access it, which points back to Google’s own servers where the email is housed.

Given this, the sender of the message also has the ability to selectively remove access to confidential emails if one was inadvertently sent to the wrong recipient.

All of that sounds great in theory, but there’s a problem. That’s exactly how phishing attacks work.

Security professionals have sounded the alarm that hackers will quickly begin spoofing Google’s new service, pointing the links in their messages toward their own servers. When users are prompted to provide their login credentials to see the message, they’ll be handing access to their email account over to the hackers. Google has not yet responded to or commented on this flaw in their new system. Use with caution.

Joseph Martin

August 11, 2018 by Joseph Martin

There’s a new, surprisingly elaborate phishing scam targeting iPhone users. The scam starts with an email informing users that their phones have been locked due to “illegal activity” and instructing them to call “Apple Care” to get the problem fixed.

Of course, there is no such company as Apple Care, but it’s an official enough sounding name that it’s luring a surprising percentage of victims into calling. In fact, opening the email will open a call dialog box, making connecting to “help” a very simple, and incredibly tempting option.

Naturally, the person on the other end of the phone isn’t tech support, but a hacker who’s looking to obtain as much information about the caller as possible. It’s a well thought out, well-engineered scam and it’s taking a lot of people in.

Given that smartphones have officially overtaken PCs as the primary means of surfing the web, it should come as no great surprise that phishing attacks targeting smartphone users are on the rise. Since most people keep their whole lives on their phones these days, it’s no wonder that so many people are quick to try and get help at the first sign of trouble with their cherished device.

Hackers are all too aware of that fact and are increasingly using it to prey on unsuspecting victims. Unfortunately, people tend to be more distracted when they’re on their phones versus when they’re using a PC, which explains why phishing attacks directed at smartphone users tend to succeed more often than they do against PC users.

Don’t fall for it.

Train your brain to be more mindful of any email you get that hints at a problem with any account or device you control. The best thing you can do if you get an email like that would be to close it and test the account or device yourself to verify that it’s locked. If it isn’t, delete the email and assume it was a scam. If it is locked, reach out to the company directly, rather than clicking links embedded in an email, or calling numbers obtained from an email.

That’s still not a fool proof solution, but it will help to minimize your risks.

Joseph Martin

November 20, 2017 by Joseph Martin

Imagine this: You’re setting up your login information for your email, or maybe it’s your Cloud database account. Upon entering your password, the program prompts you to include a capitalized letter, number and possibly a symbol in your password. You wonder, “Is this really necessary? Who’s going to be THAT determined to break into my accounts?” Well to answer that question: hackers.

Hackers are going to great lengths to recover your account login credentials. And as hackers develop more ways to steal your identity, you must become more vigilant in securing your accounts.

Phishing scams are one of the most prominent ways to steal your information. This type of scam comes in the form of a fraudulent email that appears to come from a credible website or company. The email requests that you follow the link and enter your private information, such as credit card numbers, passwords and other sensitive information into a form of some sort. Many times these emails will appear urgent and prompt the reader into making a quick decision to enter their information.

A second way to crack your passwords is a crude, but effective way: educated, clever guesses. Did you know that two of the most common passwords are still “password” and “123456”? But even pet or family names that you think will be safer can be obtained just by perusing your Facebook or other social media accounts.

In reality, many hackers have a database of popular passwords that they can use to try and login to your accounts. When that fails, they can use powerful algorithms that can find 8 billion password combinations in mere seconds.

Re-thinking how strong your password is yet?

Hackers have almost endless ways to crack your password. Even if it has five numbers, six punctuation marks and your great-grandmother’s name in it. But if they crack one of your passwords and all your other account passwords have the same password then your whole internet security has now been compromised.

So what can you do?

Well here are four tips to create a safer password:

Change your password for every account you create.

Yes, it may be annoying to remember all your passwords, but if you keep a written record of them somewhere safe (that is not on your computer), that takes a lot of the hassle out of having to remember all of them.

Make it relatively lengthy.

Usually eight characters or more suffices.

Have a complex password that includes numbers, punctuation marks, and non-letter symbols.

This makes it much harder to crack than a simple “Doglover12.”

Use words or names that have nothing to do with your personal life, then try to convert that word in symbols.

Example: Sk8te1*!45

If your account becomes comprised, take immediate action to re-set the password. Be safe when setting up login credentials. Even if you think it’s a hassle to follow the tips above, remember: nothing is a hassle when it comes to your security.

Joseph Martin

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