Technology – Page 2

Survey Shows People Are Most Concerned About Data Theft

August 21, 2018 by Joseph Martin

How seriously does the average consumer take data theft? It’s an interesting (and fair) question, and one that Radware recently attempted to answer when the company sent out surveys. They contacted more than three thousand people to conduct its recent survey titled “Consumer Sentiments: Cybersecurity, Personal Data and the Impact on Customer Loyalty.”

As it turns out, today’s consumers take the matter even more seriously than many other types of crimes.

Here are some of the highlights from the recent report:

A full 55 percent of those surveyed said that data theft was their top concern

The theft of a personal wallet ranked a distant, with just 23 percent of respondents placing it as their top concern

10 percent of respondents listed auto theft as their primary concern

Just 6 percent listed the theft of their cell phone and house keys as their #1 concern

Anna Convery-Pelletier, Radware’s Chief Marketing Officer, had this to say about the report:

“It’s no surprise that data theft ranks so high in the minds of Americans as a major risk. It’s easy to buy a new car or a new cell phone, but having private data exposed can have permanent consequences for both the consumer and the brand where the breach occurred. When an organization does not properly secure its network, it is putting its brand reputation in jeopardy and risking its customer base.”

While that’s true, some of the results are curious. After all, the theft of a cell phone ranks quite low in terms of top concerns, but cellphones contain a treasure trove of personal data, which points to an odd disconnect in the survey results.

Additionally, while 54 percent of survey respondents said that having their social security number stolen was a major concern, only 18 percent said they were worried about having their banking information stolen, and only 9 percent listed the theft of healthcare information as a big issue.

In the end then, the survey raises at least as many questions as it answers, but it does shine a much needed light on a fascinating topic. Clearly, more study and education is needed.

Joseph Martin

President & CEO
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PGA Golf Organization Gets Hit By Ransomware

August 20, 2018 by Joseph Martin

These days, we expect giant corporations, government agencies and medical facilities to be the targets of hackers. However, golf is something new.

According to a recent report from GolfWeek, the PGA’s offices have been hacked and infected with what appears to be the “BitPaymer” ransomware. That’s the same strain that recently hit the town of Matanuska-Susitna, in Alaska, forcing city officials to resort to the use of typewriters for a week until they got their system back.

The interesting thing about this is the fact that BitPaymer isn’t a new ransomware strain. It’s actually been in the wild for quite some time. Until very recently, it’s kept a low profile and hasn’t been widely used.

That appears to be changing. While the recent spike in BitPaymer infections can’t be called a serious trend on the web as a whole, it is true that the ransomware is suddenly getting a surge of attention from hackers.

One of its hallmarks is the fact that the people using it tend to demand much higher ransom amounts than average to decrypt files locked by the malicious software. Unfortunately for those affected by it, BitPaymer is quite secure, so victims have no choice but to pay up or restore their files from their most recent backup.

This represents a disturbing event on two fronts. First, it seems that no target is safe from hacking, not even something as innocuous as golf. Second, if the current trend continues, (and there’s no reason to think that it won’t), we’re going to be hearing more about BitPaymer attacks in the weeks and months ahead.

As ever, vigilance is the best defense. Make sure your IT staff is aware of this latest threat to system security. It may be time for another round of email education for all employees, to stress the importance of not opening messages from unknown parties and being wary of downloading files or clicking links unless the sender’s identity can be confirmed.

Joseph Martin

Android Gets New OS Update Named Android Pie

August 17, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Android 9 is finally here, at least for some users. As of today, if you have any of the following phones, you can get the latest update:

The Google Pixel

The Pixel XL

The Pixel 2

The Pixel 2 XL

The Essential Phone

The company is currently working with other vendors to make the new update available. So if you’ve got an Android device other than those listed above, you should have access to the new version later this fall.

As to features, there’s a lot to like. Google borrowed from Apple’s playbook in at least one way by changing its navigation. It replaced its three-button navigation bar with a new gesture-based system that allows you to switch from one app to another by using natural gestures, which is a nice addition.

Additionally, the new OS makes excellent and much heavier use of machine learning and AI than any of its predecessors. Among other things, these changes subtly impact your phone’s brightness and battery power prioritization, which extends the time between recharges.

The phone learns how you use it and adapts accordingly. It also adapts to environmental conditions, adjusting display brightness as those conditions change.

Another new feature called ‘Slices’ brings relevant segments of certain apps forward, as needed. For example, if you’re searching for a ride, your phone will bring real-time pricing and driver ETAs from services like Lyft and Uber to the foreground.

There’s also a new suite of features under the general heading of “Digital Wellbeing,” which includes a “Do Not Disturb” mode that blocks notifications and sounds, and also grays out the screen to help eliminate unwanted intrusions.

The Digital Wellbeing dashboard also tracks and displays how much time you’re spending on each of the apps on your phone and allows you to set App Timers which will help you better manage the time you’re spending.

On balance, we love the robust new feature set, and we think you will too! If you have one of the devices mentioned above, you can download the update now by going to “Settings – System – System Update”, and then tapping “download and install.”

Joseph Martin

Click Rates For Spam Emails Are Increasing

August 14, 2018 by Joseph Martin

F-Secure recently published a new report, and their findings are disturbing.

The click rates on spam emails increased to 14.2 percent for the second half of 2017, up from 13.4 percent reported in the first half of 2017.

The increase seems to be driven by two factors.

First, more intense targeting of smartphone users, who are typically more distracted and not paying as much attention when opening and reading emails.

Second, a slight increase in sophistication. For instance, an email that appears to come from a known sender is 12 percent more likely to be opened and responded to, so hackers are using this approach more often.

Even so, the report isn’t all bad news. While spam is still the most common means of attack, it’s highly inefficient, relying on brute force (volume) rather than an abundance of sophistication. Second, the report reveals that 85 percent of malicious attachments are made up of just five file types:

*.7z

*.PDF

*.XLS

*.DOC

*.ZIP

Knowing this, a savvy user who’s paying attention can more easily avoid falling into the trap of the hackers.

Other highlights from the report include:

46 percent of all spam campaigns are related to online dating

23 percent contain the malicious attachments described above

31 percent contain links to malicious websites

Sean Sullivan, an F-Secure Security Advisor had this to say about the report:

“We’ve reduced criminals to spam, one of the least effective methods of infection. Anti-malware is containing nearly all commoditized bulk threats. And honestly, I don’t see anything coming over the horizon that could lead to another gold rush, so criminals are stuck with spam.”

Overall, the report is bad news mixed with some good. One thing it clearly underscores is the continuing importance of ongoing email education for all employees of companies of any size.

Joseph Martin

The Internet May Be Hurting Your Sleep

August 14, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Can you imagine life without the always-on internet? If you’re like most people today, it’s a simply indispensable tool, and the thought of suddenly being without it makes you shudder and brings images of the Dark Ages to mind.

It’s glorious, no doubt, and it really is a remarkable tool, but unfortunately, it’s not all upside. A recent study funded by the European Research Council has concluded that access to broadband internet access costs you as much as 25 minutes of lost sleep every night. Considering that most of us are already getting by on far too little sleep, that’s not good.

Luca Stella, one of the researchers responsible for the study, had this to say about it:

“Internet addiction and technology use near bedtime are often blamed as a major cause of the sleep deprivation epidemic. Yet the empirical evidence on this relationship is still limited. In our study, we first show descriptive evidence that the use of digital services at night is correlated with shorter sleep duration. Then, exploiting differences in the access to high-speed internet caused by the pre-existing telephone infrastructure in Germany, we analyze the relationship between high-speed internet and sleep. We find that access to broadband internet reduces sleep duration and sleep satisfaction.”

While the report is clearly bad news, in many ways, it merely confirms what we already knew. It seems self-evident that if you spend time surfing the web just before bed, you’re probably going to get sucked in, which is going to cut further into your already limited sleep time. Sure enough, we now have evidence that supports this notion.

What is interesting in the report, and something that runs counter to most people’s assumptions, is that people in the 30-59 year age range suffered more sleep loss than those in the under 30 crowd.

A fair question then, is how much sleep are you getting? If you’d like more, it might be time to consider curtailing late-night internet use.

Joseph Martin

Connecting To Aiport Wi-Fi Puts Your Data At Risk

August 9, 2018 by Joseph Martin

File this away under things you already knew. Coronet recently released a report entitled “Attention All Passengers: Airport Networks Are Putting Your Devices & Cloud Apps At Severe Risk,” and the news is about what you’d expect.

The report was more than five months in the making. The analysts poured over oceans of data on device vulnerabilities and Wi-Fi network risks from more than a quarter of a million consumer and corporate endpoints that passed through the 45 busiest airports in the United States.

The bottom line is simply that airport Wi-Fi is woefully unsafe, especially as compared to most corporate networks, and anyone connecting to those networks is asking for trouble.

Some offenders proved to be worse than others. The report names the San Diego International Airport, John Wayne Airport – Orange County (CA), and the William P. Hobby International Airport (Houston, TX) as being among the least secure in the nation.

The risk is that while traveling, most people don’t think about what network they’re connecting to or how secure it might be. This is an incredible opportunity for hackers, because once an employee’s laptop or mobile device is infected, the integrity of the employers’ cloud-based work apps is jeopardized.

Coronet’s founder, Dror Liwer, had this to say about the findings:

“Far too many US airports have sacrificed the security of their Wi-Fi networks for consumer convenience. As a result, business travelers in particular put not just their devices, but their company’s entire digital infrastructure, at risk every time they connect to Wi-Fi that is unencrypted, unsecured, or improperly configured.

Until such time when airports take responsibility and improve their cybersecurity posture, the accountability is on each individual flyer to be aware of the risks and take the appropriate steps to minimize the danger.”

Be sure your employees are aware of the risks any time they travel. Your company’s future might depend on it.

Joseph Martin

E-Mail Is A Big Threat To Your Organization

August 4, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Mimecast’s 2018 “State of Email Security” report is out, and although it’s contents are hardly a surprise, the news it contains is mostly bad.

For starters, it confirms what most IT professionals already know:

Email continues to be a big threat for organizations of all sizes.

Unfortunately, the C-Suite (CEO’s, CIO’s, CFO’s, and the like) are a major part of the problem, representing a significant weak link in Enterprise security. Not only are they a prime target for hackers, but according to the survey, 40 percent of respondents agreed that their organization’s CEO was a painfully “weak link” in their organization’s cyber-security operations.

Just as alarming, 31 percent of respondents said that C-level employees are very likely to have accidentally sent sensitive or proprietary information to the wrong person, a statistic up 9 percent from last year.

In addition to that, email is the primary means by which ransomware winds up getting inside company networks. This comes with a staggering 92 percent of successful ransomware attacks arriving via that channel, resulting in three or more days of downtime for the impacted companies.

Phishing attacks also continue to be a major issue, with 90 percent of respondents reporting an increase in the number of phishing attacks they were subjected to.

In light of these statistics, one would imagine that companies would be devoting significant resources to countering the threat. Unfortunately, that’s just not happening. Sure, money is being spent on infrastructure, but humans are the weakest link in this chain, and not just in the C-Suite. According to the survey, only 11 percent of organizations continuously train their employees on how to spot cyberattacks, and just over half (52 percent) perform training just once a year.

Matthew Gardiner, a cyber-resilience expert at Mimecast, summarizes it this way :

“Security awareness is an important part of any high-functioning security program. But like all security controls, there is no silver bullet solution. The best security programs seek a balance between technical controls, boosting their human firewalls, and having IT enabled business processes that are resilient to failures, whether man-made or caused by technology.”

Indeed.

Joseph Martin

Chrome Now Shows Sites Without SSL as Not Secure

August 2, 2018 by Joseph Martin

There is a small but significant change from Google, with the release of Chrome 68. The updated browser will now prominently notify browsers when they surf their way to non-HTTPS websites, displaying them as “Not Secure.”

This is Google’s latest step in a long campaign to try and make the web a safer and more secure place for internet users around the world.

If you’re not especially tech-savvy, here’s why it matters:

Anything sent over a non-HTTPS connection is in plain text, including sensitive information like credit card payment info and passwords. This makes it a trivial matter for hackers to snoop and/or steal data. The new “Not Secure” message that Chrome displays is a clear indication to browsers that there’s no SSL Certificate to encrypt the connection between your website’s server and the user’s computer.

Non-HTTPS connections have been considered dangerous for a number of years, but as hackers have gained increasing levels of sophistication, the dangers have only grown over time.

Google has intentionally taken a slow, measured approach to making this change in order to give business owners plenty of time to respond. They began the process in January 2017, with the release of Chrome 56, by displaying a subtle “Not Secure” warning in the address bar of any non-secure websites that were collecting passwords and credit card information on their customers.

Then, in October 2017, the company upped the ante with the release of Chrome 62, which saw the browser begin to display the “Not Secure” warning for any HTTP website that had any kind of text input field. This culminated in the release of Chrome 68, which prominently displays the message for all non-secure sites, period.

The bottom line is, the change has been a long time coming, and if your company hasn’t yet enabled HTTPS on your website, the time to do so is now.

Joseph Martin

Bluetooth Vulnerability Allows Hackers To Access Devices

August 1, 2018 by Joseph Martin

There’s a new Bluetooth security vulnerability to be aware of, tracked as CVE-2018-5383, and it’s a nasty one.

It’s a cryptographic vulnerability that affects firmware or operating system software drivers from a number of major vendors, including Qualcomm, Broadcom, Intel and Apple. At this point, the implication of the bug on Linux, Android, and Google are unknown.

The flaw is related to two important Bluetooth features: BR/EDR implementations of Secure Simple Pairing in device firmware and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) of Secure Connections Pairing in OS system software.

It was discovered by researchers operating out of Israel’s Institute of Technology. They discovered that the Bluetooth specification recommends (but critically does not mandate) that devices supporting the two features make any effort to validate the public encryption key received during secure pairing.

Since the specification is optional, it’s hardly a surprise that some vendors producing Bluetooth products do not take sufficient steps to validate the parameters used to generate public keys during the exchange.

This allows a would-be hacker the possibility of executing a man-in-the-middle attack to obtain the cryptographic key used by the device. This would give them the opportunity to not only spy on the device’s owner, but also to inject malware that could allow the hacker to take full control over the device.

SIG (the Bluetooth Special Interest Group which maintains the technology), had this to say about the flaw:

“For an attack to be successful, an attacking device would need to be within wireless range of two vulnerable Bluetooth devices that were going through a pairing procedure.

The attacking device would need to intercept the public key exchange by blocking each transmission, sending an acknowledgement to the sending device, and then injecting the malicious packet to the receiving device within a narrow time window. If only one device had the vulnerability, the attack would not be successful.”

Bluetooth SIG has now updated the specification to require products to validate public keys received as part of the public key-based security procedures. Of the manufacturers mentioned above, Apple and Intel have both released patches. Broadcom has made fixes available to its OEM customers who are responsible for providing them to end-users. There has been no word yet from Qualcomm.

Joseph Martin

Girl Scouts Can Now Earn New Badges For High Technical Skills

July 31, 2018 by Joseph Martin

The girl scouts have officially moved into the 21st century.

The Girl Scouts of America recently announced the creation of a whole raft of new badges that address (in the organization’s words) “some of society’s most pressing needs.”

A total of 30 new badges will be available exclusively for girls between the ages of five to eighteen for efforts and advocacy in the following areas:

Computer Science

Cybersecurity

Environment

Robotics

Space Exploration

Badges are awarded on the basis of completing specific tasks. So, for instance, when a girl learns how to code and completes a small project, she could be awarded with the new computer science badge, and when she builds a simple robot, the robotics badge would be awarded.

This is part of an ongoing effort to boost interest and participation in fields where women are generally under-represented.

According to the Girl Scouts USA CEO, Sylvia Acevedo:

“Whether they are fighting cybercrime, exploring how engineers solve problems, or advocating for issues affecting their community, Girl Scouts are learning how to proactively address some of the foremost challenges of today, while also building skills that will set them up for a lifetime of leadership.”

In recent years, the Girl Scouts have struggled to maintain enough membership nationally to remain viable. This is at least one of the reasons why the Boy Scouts of America announced in October 2017 that they would begin accepting girls into their program.

It remains to be seen whether the move to modernize the badges available to girls in the organization will be enough to boost membership and ensure the organization’s long-term viability. Even if it’s not, it’s a fantastic idea and long overdue. Kudos to Girl Scouts’ leadership for taking innovative action, and to all the girls who earn these new badges!

Joseph Martin

Survey Shows People Are Most Concerned About Data Theft

PGA Golf Organization Gets Hit By Ransomware

Android Gets New OS Update Named Android Pie

Click Rates For Spam Emails Are Increasing

Connecting To Aiport Wi-Fi Puts Your Data At Risk

E-Mail Is A Big Threat To Your Organization

Chrome Now Shows Sites Without SSL as Not Secure

Bluetooth Vulnerability Allows Hackers To Access Devices

Girl Scouts Can Now Earn New Badges For High Technical Skills

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