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The Federal Bureau of Investigation has sent a private industry notification (PIN) on Monday to partners in the US private sector about the dangers of continuing to use Windows 7 after the operating system reached its official end-of-life (EOL) earlier this year.
“The FBI has observed cyber criminals targeting computer network infrastructure after an operating system achieves end of life status,” the agency said.
“Continuing to use Windows 7 within an enterprise may provide cyber criminals access in to computer systems. As time passes, Windows 7 becomes more vulnerable to exploitation due to lack of security updates and new vulnerabilities discovered.
“With fewer customers able to maintain a patched Windows 7 system after its end of life, cyber criminals will continue to view Windows 7 as a soft target,” the FBI warned.
FBI urges companies to update devices
The Bureau is now asking companies to look into upgrading their workstations to newer versions of the Windows operating system.
To this day, Microsoft still allows Windows 7 systems to be upgraded to Windows 10 at no cost — even if this offer officially ended in July 2016.
However, in some cases, the PC’s underlying hardware may not support the (free) upgrade to a much more powerful system like Windows 10, a challenge that the FBI acknowledged in its alert, citing costs that companies might need to support to buy new hardware and software.
“However, these challenges do not outweigh the loss of intellectual property and threats to an organization,” the FBI said — suggesting that companies should keep an eye on the bigger picture down the road and how future losses from possible hacks might easily outweigh today’s upgrade costs.
The agency specifically cited the previous Windows XP migration debacle as the perfect example of why companies should migrate systems as soon as possible, rather than delay.
“Increased compromises have been observed in the healthcare industry when an operating system has achieved end of life status. After the Windows XP end of life on 28 April 2014, the healthcare industry saw a large increase of exposed records the following year,” the FBI said.
Weaponized Windows 7 vulnerabilities already exist
Furthermore, the FBI also cited several powerful Windows 7 vulnerabilities that have been frequently weaponized over the past few years.
This includes the EternalBlue exploit (used in the original WannaCry and by multiple subsequent crypto-mining operations, financial crime gangs, and ransomware gangs) and the BlueKeep exploit (which allows attackers to break into Windows 7 devices that have their RDP endpoint enabled).
The agency said that despite the presence of patches for these issues, companies have failed to patch impacted systems. In this case, replacing older and abandoned systems may be the best solution overall.
While companies are looking into upgrading systems, the FBI recommends that they also look into:
Ensuring anti-virus, spam filters, and firewalls are up to date, properly configured, and secure.
Auditing network configurations and isolate computer systems that cannot be updated.
Auditing your network for systems using RDP, closing unused RDP ports, applying two-factor authentication wherever possible, and logging RDP login attempts. More

screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET Apple has released emergency security patches for its core products just days after rolling out brand new versions of their operating systems. On Thursday, the company updated iOS 17/iPadOS 17 and WatchOS 10 with fixes aimed at squashing several zero-day vulnerabilities that could leave a device open to malicious attacks. On […] More

IT professionals have seen increased cyber risk over the last 12 months, according to a survey from cybersecurity company Armis.Armis and Censuswide spoke with 400 IT professionals working in healthcare organizations across the US as well as 2,030 general respondents, finding that nearly 60% of IT respondents had dealt with a ransomware incident at their organization over the last year.  According to Armis, there are about 430 million connected medical devices already in deployment worldwide, leaving many hospitals vulnerable to a variety of cybersecurity flaws in pneumatic tubes, technologies used in HVAC systems, B. Braun infusion pumps and more.

More than 32% of general respondents said they had been the victim of a healthcare cybersecurity attack and IT professionals said they are most worried about the kind of hospital data breaches that have become commonplace in recent years. More than half of IT respondents said data breaches leading to the leak of confidential patient data was a top concern. After data breaches, 23% of IT professionals were most concerned about attacks on hospital operations and 13% cited ransomware attacks as a concern. Building systems like HVACs and electrical devices were the most risky from a cybersecurity perspective, according to 54% of IT professionals, followed by imaging machines, medication dispensing equipment, check-in kiosks and vital sign monitoring equipment.Thankfully, many IT respondents said their healthcare organization was taking steps to make cybersecurity a priority, with 86% saying their organization has hired a CISO and 95% saying their connected devices were up to date with the latest software. 

But 75% said recent attacks have been the driving force behind cybersecurity changes. More than half of IT workers said their healthcare organization is allocating more money as a way to secure systems. More than 62% of respondents said their healthcare organization has had to submit a cyber insurance claim. “Continuous visibility, context and alignment of security analytics to enterprise risk is the beacon to which we need to move to improve how we view device and asset management,” said Oscar Miranda, CTO for healthcare at Armis. “It is critical for healthcare organizations to take the entire patient journey into consideration when thinking about security. A strong healthcare security strategy is multi-faceted and requires a holistic view.”From a potential patient perspective, nearly half of respondents said they would change hospitals if they knew their hospital had been hit with a ransomware attack and 37% were concerned about hospitals using online portals for patient information. The survey comes on the heels of a report from Forescout Technologies and Medigate about more than a dozen vulnerabilities in Siemens software affecting about 4,000 devices made by a range of vendors. First reported by CNN, the vulnerabilities affect versions of the Nucleus Real-time Operating System, which manages patient monitors, anesthesia tools, ultrasound machines and x-ray devices. More

Australian Federal Police (AFP) has ordered an individual to forfeit AU$1.66 million for stealing the log-ins and passwords for Hulu, Netflix, and Spotify accounts. The culprit, based in Sydney, conspired with another individual from the US to steal the log-ins and passwords of streaming service customers and then sold them online at a cheaper rate. The AFP began investigating the matter in May 2018, after it was tipped by the FBI about a now-defunct account generator website called WickedGen.com. WickedGen was a website that sold stolen account details for online subscription services, including Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu. The account details belonged to unknowing victims in Australia and internationally, including the US. The Sydney individual was found to be the creator, administrator, and primary financial beneficiary of WickedGen and three other sites that offered similar services. Across the four websites, the offender had over 150,000 registered users and provided almost 86,000 subscriptions to illegally access legitimate streaming services. The Sydney-based individual pleaded guilty to stealing these log-ins and passwords in October last year. After the guilty plea, the AFP’s Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce (CACT) obtained restraining orders over the individual’s cryptocurrency, and bank and PayPal accounts that were held under false names. All up, the AFP has collected AU$1.66 million from the charged individual, with AU$1.2 million of that amount being cryptocurrency.

The funds will be redistributed by the Department of Home Affairs for supporting crime prevention, law enforcement, and community-safety related initiatives, the AFP said. The charged individual will now face a two years and two months prison sentence. The use of online subscriptions have been on the rise in Australia, with almost the same number of Australians watching content from online subscription streaming services, like Netflix, when compared to those who watch free-to-air television. The findings, published by the Australian Bureau of Communications, Arts and Regional Research, found that the popularity of over-the-top services have continued to grow as 70% of Australians watched this type of content as of the end of last year, which is almost triple the amount from 2016. Related Coverage More