Eliana Willis

Slack confirmed widespread outages on Tuesday morning, writing that some customers may be “experiencing issues” with loading the platform.

Some customer may be experiencing issues with loading Slack. We’ll provide a status update once we have more information. We’re sorry for the disruption. https://t.co/rd7foQMlhf— Slack Status (@SlackStatus) February 22, 2022

In another message, they apologized for the issue and said they were “digging into the problem with the highest priority.” Slack also confirmed the issues people were reporting on its status site. The situation was a major topic of discussion on social media, as some returned from long holiday weekends to find that they were unable to communicate with team members. AWS, Github and Peloton were among the other sites reporting outages alongside Slack. Downdetector noted that the reports of outages for all of the platforms began around 8:45 am ET. 
Slack
Slack said some users were reporting issues with logging in, messaging, sending files, and getting notifications. Slack previously had a major outage on January 4, 2021, which was the first working day of the year for many. The company later attributed the outage to infrastructure issues that led to a variety of problems. 

Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021, with plans to make it the glue of the company’s Customer 360 efforts. More

Many organisations that fall prey to ransomware attacks end up paying a ransom multiple times as cyber criminals exploit weaknesses in cybersecurity to squeeze their victims for as much cash as they can. According to analysis by cybersecurity researchers at Proofpoint, 58% of organisations infected with ransomware paid a ransom to cyber criminals for the decryption key – and in many cases, they paid up more than once. 

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Law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity experts warn organisations against paying ransoms, because not only is there no guarantee that the supplied decryption key will work, giving in to ransom demands just encourages more ransomware attacks as it shows cyber criminals that the attacks work.SEE: Cybersecurity: Let’s get tactical (ZDNet special report)Of those who paid the ransom, just over half – 54% – regained access to data and systems after the first payment. But another third of ransomware victims ended up paying an additional ransom demand before they received the decryption key, while a further 10% also received additional ransom demands but refused the additional payment, walking away without their data. In 4% of cases, organisations paid a ransom or ransoms but still couldn’t retrieve their data, either because of a faulty decryption key, or because the cyber criminals simply took the money and ran. When organisations fall victim to ransomware attacks, the crooks have often been inside that network for weeks or months prior to the attack. That means that even if the ransom is paid, the hackers have the necessary controls and permissions to return and trigger another attack. 

“I don’t think a lot of organisations are aware of the fact that you might pay the ransom once, but if the criminals have been in your infrastructure for eight weeks, you don’t know what else they stole,” Adenike Cosgrove, cybersecurity strategist at Proofpoint, told ZDNet.  Stolen data is commonly used as additional leverage in ransomware attacks, as the cyber criminals threaten to publish it if they don’t receive a ransom payment. While this does force some victims into paying, there’s no guarantee that the cyber criminals won’t return with additional threats to publish the stolen data later. “The first run is ‘give me a ransom so I can give you the decryption key’. The second ransom is ‘give me a ransom or I’m going to put this data on the dark web’,” Cosgrove explained. “Third might be ‘give me a ransom or I’m going to tell media publications about this data breach that you have and tell the regulators that, hey you didn’t notify customers that their privacy was impacted,'” she added. The best way to deal with ransomware attacks is to prevent them from happening in the first place.  According to Proofpoint, 75% of ransomware incidents begin with phishing attacks, which cyber criminals use to steal usernames and passwords, or plant remote access trojans to gain an initial foothold in the network. Being able to detect suspicious activity early on can, therefore, provide a means of preventing a full-scale ransomware attack. “The assumption is that a ransomware attack is the beginning of an incident, but the reality is the incident started weeks ago,” said Cosgrove. Training users to identify and report suspicious emails can help organisations detect ransomware and other malware attacks early.Enabling two-factor authentication can also provide a significant stumbling block to phishing attacks that aim to steal usernames and passwords, because without access to the authentication app, it’s much harder for cyber criminals to leverage compromised login credentials. MORE ON CYBERSECURITY More

How secure is your home or office network?I’ll assume you already have an antimalware/antivirus solution in place, such as Windows Security, which is built into Windows 10 and Windows 11 (and which I believe works particularly well). But antivirus isn’t enough.Escalating international tensions — coupled with an ever-increasing number of professionals working remotely — are driving the need for small-scale solutions and best practices to secure home- and small-business networks and mobile devices from malware, malvertising, and other threats. 

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What follows is a brief guide — with product recommendations and best practices — for those of you looking to navigate the rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape. If you have limited network security experience but want to provide additional security for yourself, your small business, or your friends and family, this guide is for you. (If you’re looking for more extensive resources on networking security, CISA’s guide is a good place to start.) Below are the products I am currently using to protect my family’s home networks and mobile devices. (I expect to add more product and service recommendations when I have sufficient time to investigate them.)Mobile and device-based DNS VPN firewall

If you can have only one solution, because you or your friends or loved ones cannot afford a hardware-based firewall device, look no further than NextDNS, which combines an encrypted VPN traffic tunnel with a hosted firewall and DNS blocking and filtering service. When installed as an app on a device, the service creates a private encrypted connection (VPN) to its cloud servers. Its basic functionality includes proxying Domain Name Services (DNS) queries against a large database of potentially malicious sites and blocking them, depending on how restrictive the service is set up. This means if you try to access a site listed on its blocklists, it will stop the connection. This also includes blocklists for advertisements and pornography, if enabled. It should be noted that NextDNS is not a VPN service (such as these covered recently by David Gewirtz) for creating anonymized private connections to the public internet and for end-to-end enterprise VPN connectivity (such as with OpenVPN) even though it uses its own VPN for the service to work. However, it can work in tandem with those services as needed.The service has native clients for iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS, and can be set as the default DNS on a broadband router or an IoT device. And best of all, the lowest tier of service is absolutely free. The “Pro” service has unlimited devices, unlimited queries, unlimited configurations, and is a whole $20 per year.The only main drawback of this service is that it is client-based — meaning you need to install this software on every device you use it on. So it’s ideal for smartphones, tablets, and laptops when you are on a mobile network or using a public Wi-Fi or ethernet connection, but not suitable for “blanket” device coverage on a home or small office broadband network. It is also a DNS-based solution rather than an IP-based and connection-oriented solution, so it is not a true intrusion prevention solution such as a hardware firewall.

To begin using it, simply visit nextdns.io, and start a new configuration. The first thing you will want to take note of is your randomly-issued ID, which is how you and your family members will identify yourself to the service and how it will apply specific security settings you choose to them.NextDNS initial configuration screen web user interface
Jason Perlow/ZDNet
The clients all have similar configuration screens and are all easy to install, but the key thing to remember is the Configuration ID and to “Send Device ID”, because that ensures you are using the service with your specified configuration and that when the system logs activity, you will be able to narrow down to which device is having an event.NextDNS Client configuration in iOS
Jason Perlow/ZDNet

Once you have the clients connected to the NextDNS VPN, you can verify they are using the service and that it is logging the connections with the Logs tab at the top of the web portal UX. The logs page allows you to look at traffic logs on a device per device basis, for all DNS queries or just blocked queries.Logs menu of NextDNS user interface
Jason Perlow/ZDNet
Security protection options can be set in the Security menu tab where various services can be enabled, such as for AI-Driven Threats, Google Safe Browsing, Cryptojacking, DNS Rebinding, IDN Homograph Attacks, Typosquatting, Domain Generation Algorithms, Newly Registered Domains, Parked Domains, and Child Sexual Abuse Material. I have all of these currently turned on in my own configuration.Tracking and Ad blocking are enabled in the Privacy menu tab. The two blocklists I currently have enabled are NextDNS’s maintained list and OISD, which covers enough ground to protect mobile devices for most regular browsing and mobile app use while keeping functionality the least restrictive as possible. If you enable too many lists, you may find that certain apps (such as Facebook, with its Graph API) may begin to misbehave, and then you will need to disable NextDNS for them to work again temporarily. So I would only start adding more blocklists such as AdGuard and a few others on their curated list one at a time to see how it affects your usability. NextDNS Privacy menu
Jason Perlow/ZDNet
NextDNS also has a Parental Controls menu for locking out specific websites, apps, and games, as well as the ability to lock out pornography, piracy, dating, and social networks. NextDNS has the ability to have multiple Configuration IDs per account, so if you want to configure your children’s devices, you might want to assign them a separate Configuration ID as well as enter a Parental Passcode in their NextDNS app settings screen so it cannot be altered. You’ll also want to set Parental Controls on their devices using native app restrictions (Such as the Content and Privacy Restrictions menu on iOS) so the NextDNS app cannot be deleted.Open Source wide-spectrum DNS blocking

If you are inclined to host your own DNS proxy, and want the most flexible control over the domains you want to block on your premises, look no further than Pi-Hole. Originally built for the Raspberry Pi embedded development board, the open source project has become hugely popular with cybersecurity and privacy enthusiasts alike for its ability to block not just advertisers and trackers, but also malicious domains. 

The easiest way to run it is to download Docker Desktop for your operating system (Windows, Mac), or Docker Engine for Linux, and then install Pi-Hole into a Docker Container. This sounds scarier than it actually is – the Docker Desktop is an easy wizard-based install, and the Pi-Hole part involves issuing a single command line to pull the Pi-Hole repository (docker pull pihole/pihole), and another command line to fire up the container:docker run -d –name pihole -e ServerIP=172.16.154.130 -e WEBPASSWORD=password -e TZ=Europe/Copenhagen -e DNS1=127.17.0.1 -e DNS2=1.1.1.1 -e DNS3=8.8.8.8 -p 80:80 -p 53:53/tcp -p 53:53/udp -p 443:443 –restart=unless-stopped pihole/pihole:latestYou will want to change the bolded sections to reflect your actual local IP address for ServerIP, the desired password, and the Time Zone (I used America/New_York). More elaborate instructions for Windows documented by Andrew Denty on his blog can be found here and Mac can be found in Nathan Alderman’s article at iMore here.You will also want to make sure the system you intend to run it on has a static rather than a dynamic IP.Once you have Pi-Hole installed, you’ll want to connect via browser to the administrative interface on the system running it. Pi-Hole administrative interface
Jason Perlow/ZDNet
As you can see, I have over two million domains set to be blocked. How do you do the same? You go into Group Management, choose Adlist (this is what Pi-Hole uses to refer to community-sourced lists of domains to be blocked), and then plug in the URL of the Adlist.Which Adlists should you use? Well, there are many lists you can choose from, all of which have different purposes such as Advertising, Suspected Malware, Malvertising, and others. But I consulted with Jason Ford, a principal engineer at a prominent Silicon Valley-based infosec company, and asked him what he used on his Pi-Hole. He was nice enough to give me his lists and his regular expressions for domain blocking. These include some very popular ones such as OISD, Steven Black, and some curated ones from Firebog. If you decide to use all of his lists, you’ll have over 2 million domains blocked on your Pi-Hole.Once you have pasted the URLs of the Adlists into the UX, you’ll want to go into Tools and choose Update Gravity. This is what refreshes the local database and populates the blocking engine. If there are specific domains you want to block or permit, you want to go into the Blacklist or Whitelist menus and put them in individually.(Note to Pi-Hole’s project team: These are considered noninclusive terminology; we suggest you use Denylist and Allowlist instead and have a look at the Inclusive Naming Initiative.)To begin using Pi-Hole on your devices and clients, change your DNS settings to reflect that of the Pi-Hole machine. So, for example, my Pi-Hole is running on my 192.168.1.78 Windows machine – so I’ve set my Mac and my wife’s Windows PC and a few other things to use it as the DNS.If you find the Pi-Hole is blocking a specific site or functionality that you need to use (such as a needed tracking cookie or script), simply whitelist the site, or temporarily, click on Disable from the left-hand administrative menu. You can choose to disable it indefinitely, for 10 seconds, for 30 seconds, for 5 minutes, or a custom time.Enterprise-grade firewall appliance for home and SMB: FirewallaWhile there are many hardware firewall and network intrusion protection products available in the medium/large SMB and the Enterprise space (such as Cisco Meraki, Sonicwall, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Ubiquiti, Watchguard, and Sophos), there are very few priced for home and smaller SMBs. What I currently use for myself, my immediate family, and have recommended to friends and colleagues is the Firewalla series of products, which is a company founded by a group of former Cisco engineers.Firewalla web user interface (dashboard view)
Jason Perlow/ZDNet
I like Firewalla because it is very easy to install, it isn’t particularly expensive, and it has no ongoing fees. Unlike the DNS blocking solutions above, it is a true embedded Linux, IP-based rules firewall with advanced intrusion detection capabilities that can monitor every device on your home network. Firewalla web interface (flows)
Jason Perlow/ZDNet
Firewalla also has a very good user interface and app for mobile devices for administrating it and receiving alerts and a pretty robust remote management web interface. You don’t need to be a network security genius to set rules and protect your network. Firewalla mobile device app (iPad)
Jason Perlow/ZDNet
You can certainly do some very granular protections and permissions on a per-device basis and set block lists of different target groups and lots of other things, but for the most part, the default configuration when applied to all devices on the network is likely sufficient for most home users. Firewalla’s CEO and founder, Jerry Chen, has published a best practices guide (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) that I suggest you review once you get your box running. Additionally, if you are not sure which router mode to use with your Firewalla (Router, Bridge, DHCP, Simple) read this guide, and if you want to understand how it intercepts network traffic, read here.

Firewalla Red is for residences with 100 meg broadband or less. It’s a small red box powered by a USB cable that plugs into one of the spare ports of your home broadband router. It uses ARP spoofing or DHCP mode to monitor all your network devices. 

Firewalla Blue Plus is for residences with 500 meg broadband or less. In addition to the faster network port and the capabilities of the Red, it has Geo-IP filtering so you can block entire countries off your network, not just IP ranges or domains. It also incorporates a VPN Server, VPN Client, and Site to Site VPN. Because of the Geo-IP filtering, and the currently evolving situation in Eastern Europe, my suggestion is that the Blue Plus should be the minimum considered configuration unless you are really on a budget or have a minimalistic device footprint at home.

Firewalla Purple is for residences with 1 gig of broadband or less. It is the newest product released by the company and is pretty much the ultimate home network defense device you can buy for the money. In addition to the capabilities of the Blue Plus, it is a complete router replacement (which can act in bridge mode if the existing broadband router needs to stay in place) with twin gigabit Ethernet ports. It has a short-range Wi-Fi access point for tethering to a smartphone as backup internet connectivity.

Firewalla Gold is a powerful intrusion detection, IP firewall, and multi-gigabit router for SMBs (100 employees or less). Introduced before the Purple, it is essentially a Firewalla Purple on steroids, with four gigabit Ethernet ports, powered by an x86-based chip rather than an Arm-based chip the Purple, Red, and Blue all use. However, it’s probably overkill for most homes unless you have a broadband connection with higher than gigabit network traffic requirements.

Open Source Firewalls: OPNSense and pfSenseIf you are inclined to set up an actual software-based firewall on a border gateway on your premises and want something that is robust but not expensive, then look no further than OPNsense. 

OPNSense, Hagennos, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

OPNSense is an open source firewall system based on the BSD UNIX operating system (which, in turn, is also forked from other projects such as pfSense and m0n0wall.) It has the following list of core features:Traffic Shaper Two-factor Authentication throughout the system Captive portal Forward Caching Proxy (transparent) with Blacklist support Virtual Private Network (site to site & road warrior, IPsec, OpenVPN & legacy PPTP support) High Availability & Hardware Failover ( with configuration synchronization & synchronized state tables) Intrusion Detection and Prevention Built-in reporting and monitoring tools including RRD Graphs Netflow Exporter Network Flow Monitoring Support for plugins DNS Server & DNS Forwarder DHCP Server and Relay Dynamic DNS Encrypted configuration backup to Google Drive Stateful inspection firewall Granular control over state table 802.1Q VLAN support

Image: OPNSense, Hagennos, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The complete feature list of what this software project can do extends far beyond this list. It is downloadable as a 64-bit x86 ISO or USB installer image so that you can install it on a PC with (at least two) Ethernet ports. The project also sells it pre-installed on a hardware appliance in multiple configurations, starting with 4-port gigabit networking, a 600mbps IPsec VPN, 16GB of flash storage, 4GB RAM, and a fanless casing and mainboard for 549 EUR.Similar to OPNSense is pfSense, which has a comparable feature set and similar hardware requirements. As with OPNSense, pre-configured appliances are available, from as

low as $189 for a small office/branch office configuration

. You could certainly use one of these for a home firewall solution, but you’d need a considerable amount of networking and network security experience to administrate it. More

Researchers have found almost 100,000 new variants of mobile banking Trojans in just a year.

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As our digital lives have begun to center more on handsets rather than just desktop PCs, many malware developers have shifted part of their focus to the creation of mobile threats. Many of the traditional infection routes are still workable — including phishing and the download and execution of suspicious software — but cyberattackers are also known to infiltrate official app stores, including Google Play, to lure handset owners into downloading software that appears to be trustworthy.  This technique is often associated with the distribution of Remote Access Trojans (RATs). While Google maintains security barriers to stop malicious apps from being hosted in its store, there are methods to circumvent these controls quietly.  In 2021, for example, Malwarebytes found an app in Google Play disguised as a useful barcode scanner with over 10 million active installs. While the app was submitted as legitimate software, an update was issued to the software after it had accumulated a huge user base turning the app into an aggressive adware nuisance.  The same tactic can be used to turn seemingly benign apps into banking Trojans designed to steal your financial data and account credentials from online services. In the mobile world, theft can occur by redirecting users to phishing pages or by performing overlay attacks, in which a phishing window covers a banking app’s display. Trojans may also quietly sign up their victims to premium telephone services.Recent examples of Trojans ending up in Google Play include Joker and Facestealer.

According to new research published by Kaspersky, 97,661 new mobile banking Trojan variants were detected in 2021, alongside 17,372 new mobile ransomware Trojans and a total of 3,464,756 malicious installation packages, .APKs that can be installed on jailbroken devices or those that accept apps from unknown developers.  The banking Trojans responsible for the most detected attacks over 2021 were Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Agent, Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Anubis, and Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Svpeng.
Kaspersky
Residents of Japan, Spain, Turkey, France, Australia, Germany, Norway, Italy, Croatia, and Austria are most commonly targeted by mobile banking Trojans.Kaspersky says that after a steep climb in the number of attacks detected in 2020, banking Trojan rates are now on the decline. 
Kaspersky
The cybersecurity researchers added that there is a “downward” trend on mobile attacks in general, but “attacks are becoming more sophisticated in terms of both malware functionality and vectors.” See alsoHave a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

Image: Digital Transformation Agency
The Digital Transformation Agency’s (DTA) Trusted Digital Identity Bill is in its final phase of development before it is introduced into Parliament. The Bill seeks to expand the application of Australia’s federal digital identity system to state and territory governments and the private sector. While the federal government already has its Trusted Digital Identity Framework in place, the framework is only applicable to federal government entities and not applicable to states and territories or the private sector. The Bill, if passed, would create another framework that allows state and territory governments and the private sector to facilitate online transactions requiring a digital identity, which the DTA hopes will reduce friction and delay in online environments. In this final phase, the DTA has been calling for relevant stakeholders to review the Bill’s exposure draft, with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) calling for various privacy changes ranging from consent definitions to alignment with other government regimes to limiting law enforcement access. On the consent front, the OAIC — which is set to be the regulator of the legislation’s privacy requirements — said the Bill should explicitly limit the maximum duration of an enduring consent to disclosure of attributes to 12 months. Under the exposure draft, there is currently no expiry date for a person’s consent when it comes to their digital identity being accessible by an entity providing digital identity services. The OAIC added that consent definitions contained in the Bill should align with the Consumer Data Right (CDR) in being voluntary, informed, and specific. “Alignment between privacy obligations is essential to promote clarity for individuals and regulated entities,” the OAIC said.

For instances where a cybersecurity or digital fraud incident has occurred, the OAIC also said the Bill should be amended so that only one accredited entity or participating relying party is required to notify affected individuals or businesses in relation to the particular incident. The privacy regulator said limited notifications would prevent people from having notification fatigue. “The OAIC is concerned that the numerous notifications to individuals will lead to notification fatigue such that individuals will no longer treat notifications as serious,” the regulator said. The OAIC also strongly recommended that law enforcement access to digital identity information for non-biometric information be limited further to only permit access to address misuse or fraud within the digital identity system, or pursuant to a warrant. The current drafting of the Bill allows law enforcement access to digital identity information so long as it has reasonable suspicion a person has committed an offence or breached a law. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, meanwhile, has submitted to the DTA that biometric data retention by digital identity service providers should be expanded to allow them to retain data when undertaking digital identity fraud investigations. As the DTA prepares for the potential digital identity framework expansion, the agency’s digital sourcing strategy director Ben Leech said accessibility would be at the core of any future services it builds. “When it comes to delivering quickly, having accessibility built in to the way we build and design all of our services, means that it’s not an afterthought,” Leech said on Tuesday afternoon, who spoke in a panel at the Pegasystems’ annual evolve for government APAC event. “I think that’s really important because backwards engineering something to add in accessible features down the track: one it doesn’t work, two you’re usually rushing things, and three, it slows down the process that was meant to be the quick process anyway.” Related Coverage More

US taxpayers who don’t want to submit biometric data simply to sign up for an online account with the IRS now have another option. The IRS will let taxpayers verify their identity via a live, virtual interview to create an account, the agency said Monday. 

The new option in the agency’s authentication system is now available as a short-term solution for this year’s tax filing system, the IRS said. The agency received significant criticism for previously requiring taxpayers to authenticate their identity by providing a selfie. The IRS used facial recognition software from ID.me to analyze the selfies after signing an $86 million contract with the company. Civil rights groups and members of Congress from both parties questioned how the IRS could begin the use of facial recognition without advance warning. Consequently, earlier this month, the IRS said it would stop using the ID.me facial recognition software, adding in a statement that it will “transition away from using a third-party service for facial recognition to help authenticate people creating new online accounts.”However, the announcement did little to quell outrage about the initial decision to use ID.me’s tools, and senators on both sides of the aisle continued to raise concerns about what information ID.me gained access to.The IRS said Monday that taxpayers will still have the option to verify their identity automatically with ID.me’s biometric verification tools. For taxpayers who select this option, new requirements are in place to ensure images provided by taxpayers are deleted for the account being created. Furthermore, the IRS said, any existing biometric data from taxpayers who previously created an IRS Online Account that has already been collected will also be permanently deleted over the course of the next few weeks.For future tax filing seasons, the IRS is aiming to roll out Login.Gov as an authentication tool. More