Eliana Willis

RiskRecon, a Mastercard company, and the Cyentia Institute released a study on Tuesday showing that some multi-party data breaches cause 26-times the financial damage of the worst single-party breach.The organizations used Advisen’s Cyber Loss Database to examine incidents since 2008. Almost 900 multi-party breach incidents have been observed since 2008, and 147 newly uncovered ripples were observed across the entire data set, with 108 occurring in the last three years. 

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The Advisen Cyber Loss Database has over 103,000 cyber events collected from publicly verifiable sources and was used extensively for the report. Since 2008, more than 2,726 incidents in the Advisen database involve more than one organization. Still, only a subset of those are what the researchers called “ripple events” — which involve some form of B2B relationships between multiple parties. Using that as a filter, the incident base totaled 897 incidents from 2008 to 2020. More than half of the newly identified ripples were in 2019 and 2020, and the report postulated that there is a two-year delay between when an incident takes place and when the ripple effects fully unfold, with some taking as long as five years. A median multi-party breach causes 10 times the financial damage of a traditional single-party breach. In comparison, the worst of the multi-party breach events causes 26 times the financial damage of the worst single-party breach. It typically takes 379 days for a ripple event to impact 75% of its downstream victims, and the median number of organizations impacted by ripple events across the data set was 4.”While a stable number for multi-party breaches in 2020 is not likely, our analysis has already dug up 37 ripple events that swept up victims across a range of industries and scenarios last year,” the report said. “The triggering events are often different, the business relationships vary, the scope of impact can vary wildly, and the depth of downstream reach is changeable. The one unifying factor is the technical integration or data sharing — direct and indirect — that spiderwebs across the generating organization and the recipients of downstream loss events.”

The report lists a number of notable multi-party breaches, including incidents involving SolarWinds, Accellion — which affected the Washington State Auditor’s Office, New Zealand’s central bank, and the high-profile law firm Jones Day — Advanced Computer Software, which exposed hundreds of law firms, the cloud computing provider Blackbaud and more. In each incident, the personal data of millions was exposed, and the researchers found that financial and business support organizations dominate the top two slots in terms of ripple-generating victims and recipients of downstream loss events. The professional and financial sectors together are the source of over 47% of all ripples.

“Many companies are, at some point, both the generator of one ripple event and the downstream recipient of others generated by different organizations. This is a testament to the tight technical ties that bind suppliers, customers, and partners in today’s digitally dominated business environment,” the report explained. “Among those ripple events for which we have cost information, 80% involve some sort of direct financial damage. One out of five of the ripples involved ends up incurring fines and penalties, and one in 10 of them incurs response costs. While only a small fraction of ripples cause a loss of business income, such losses are particularly devastating. In those cases, the loss of income makes up 78% of costs.” The researchers found that when a ripple event triggers a loss of income, it leads to a loss of $36 million per event. Parsing through a subset of 154 ripples, the report found that most costs are borne by the initial victims of a multi-party breach. “From the data presented in this report, one thing should be crystal clear — no organization is safe from a multi-party ripple event. As firms of all shapes and sizes continue to allow companies to access their data, client information, employee details, etc., they also open up more paths for security incidents that can harm their business,” the report’s authors explained. “The reality is while you can’t protect yourself from every third-party threat, you can take control over the risks that will impact your business the most. The interconnectivity of different third- and fourth-party relationships is often hard to visualize and address.”There was a significant drop in the amount of time for ripples to disperse through third-party networks in 2012 and 2013 to less than 200 days, while the number dropped to 50 days in 2018.The report also looked at the duration of ripples from another angle, examining the intervals of time it took for some, half, and most of the downstream recipients to feel the impact of a multi-party incident.”Overall, 25% of firms are involved within 32 days after the initial event, 50% by 151 days, and 75% by just over a year at 379 days. This shows that the fastest impacts rippled out from incidents within healthcare, likely due to the strong reporting requirements in that space. Meantime, the hospitality and information industries take approximately a year before most downstream victims fully feel a ripple,” the report found.  More

HackerOne has expanded the Internet Bug Bounty project to bolster overall open source security. 

Open source projects, ran by individuals and teams of developers worldwide, are relied upon by everything from enterprise players to SMBs.  Open source components are stored and shared publicly, and can range from full operating systems to libraries, educational tools, and server software, among many other functions.  In a recent survey, the Linux Foundation and edX found that the demand for open source programmers and experts continues to climb, but 92% of managers are facing challenges when it comes to finding the talent required to fill current job postings. With a shortage already in place, and many open source projects fuelled by developers who are not being paid for their efforts, sometimes, security issues can slip through the net. In 2020, GitHub research suggested that on average, it can take up to four years to discover open source vulnerabilties — 83% of which are caused by mistakes and human error.  As a result, the code repository said there are “clear opportunities to improve vulnerability detection” in the open source space.  It’s not just about detection, however; vulnerability fixes need to be developed and safely applied, too. 

This is where the Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) project comes in. Now managed by HackerOne, IBB is described as a project to “pool funding and incentivize security researchers to report vulnerabilities within open source software.” A new funding model has now been introduced, with participating patterns including Elastic, TikTok, Shopify, and Facebook.  There are three major changes: HackerOne clients will now be given the option to pool between 1% and 10% of their existing spend to the open source project — of which they may be using components in scope — and bounties will now be divided between hackers and maintainers with an 80/20 split.  “Since open source software maintainers volunteer to help remediate vulnerabilities that are discovered, the bounty split ensures payment for every stakeholder that contributes to vulnerability management,” HackerOne says. The third change is a streamlined procedure for vulnerability report submission.  Since its launch in 2013, over 1,000 vulnerabilities have been reported, with close to 300 bug bounty hunters earning financial awards totaling approximately $900,000. Projects currently in scope include Ruby, Node.js, Python, Django, and Curl, with more options set to be opened in the future.  “Recent cyberattacks against software supply chains demonstrate the urgency of securing these organizational blind spots. And open source software represents a growing portion of the world’s critical supply chain attack surfaces,” said Alex Rice, CTO and co-founder of HackerOne. “The new IBB empowers organizations that are beneficiaries of open source to play an active role in collectively building a more secure digital infrastructure for everyone.” Previous and related coverage Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

Consumers are spending more than ever on subscription services, according to a new report from West Monroe.West Monroe polled 2,500 consumers about how much they spend each month on a variety of subscription services, finding that people are spending 15% more than they did in 2018. The types of subscriptions have also expanded as more companies create digital platforms and offerings to lure in consistent customers. The average consumer surveyed said they spend $273 per month on subscription services, up from $237 in 2018. This extra 15% equals an additional $430 spent each year. The researchers behind the study were also very interested in people’s perception of how much they spend each month on subscriptions, finding that most people underestimate how much they dole out monthly before sitting down to calculate it. All of the respondents to the survey were unaware of how much they actually spent on subscription services off the top of their heads and most needed more than two tries to get close.In 2021, 89% underestimated what they spend each month, and in 2018, 84% underestimated what they spent each month. Nearly half of those who underestimated were off by between $100-$300.About 70% of respondents subscribed to mobile phone services and a home WiFi service as well as TV and movie providers. Half of all respondents had Amazon Prime accounts. 

The rest of the list varied widely, with respondents reporting a hodgepodge of subscriptions ranging from music streaming sites, gaming services, cloud storage sites, home security systems, newspapers, fitness apps, dating apps and meal services.There was also an increase in the number of people using subscription boxes, which now cover a range of industries like beauty, pets, toys and wellness. Services like Ipsy and Dollar Shave Club were referenced by respondents. Other subscriptions named included book services like Kindle and Audible as well as cloud storage tools like Dropbox, iCloud and OneDrive.Tinder, Match, eHarmony and other dating sites featured prominently alongside fitness apps like MyFitnessPal, Lose It! and Fitbit.Respondents also had a number of newspaper or magazine subscriptions as well as gaming services like PlayStation Now and Xbox Game Pass.ADT, Nest and Ring dominated the home security system subscriptions while identity protection services like LifeLock and Identity Guard were popular as well. Verizon, Sprint and Boost Mobile were the most popular mobile phone services and streaming sites like Spotify, Pandora and XM Radio led the way.Netflix, Hulu, cable services and premium packages were cited as well, alongside WiFi services like Comcast, AT&T and CenturyLink.
West Monroe
Dhaval Moogimane, a partner at West Monroe, said it was not surprising to see that subscription spend grew over the past three years. “It is reflective of the growth of products and services available to us as subscriptions, and the buying behavior that has changed, driven by COVID. What was most surprising to see was the perception gap between how much respondents thought they spent on subscriptions per month versus what they actually spent,” Moogimane said.”The percentage of respondents who were off by more than $200 grew to 66%, from 24% in 2018.  This increase in perception gap is indicative of how some of the subscriptions are now viewed as utilities, particularly cell phones, Wi-Fi, ID protection services, cloud storage services, and more.”Moogimane added that to capture estimates, they asked respondents to think generally about “recurring monthly expenses associated with digital services, devices, and subscription boxes” — including prompts of specific examples and service categories. Respondents were given 10 seconds to guess how much they spend each month. After recording this initial answer, they immediately asked participants to repeat the exercise with 30 seconds to think about the question more carefully. “This is how we calculated what their initial perceptions were for their monthly subscriptions. Then we took them through their subscriptions one by one and tallied up their spend per each individual subscription to determine their actual total spend,” Moogimane said.”The idea is that consumers may think they know what they are spending each month, but when they are asked what they actually pay for each subscription service and the total is added up, it reflects a different story.” More

Some systems at the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) are still offline after being hit by a nation-state backed cyberattack in May. As a result of the incident, an unknown number of people have potentially had their personal information stolen. This information could include full names, dates of birth, social security numbers, telephone numbers, health information, financial information and other data which cyber attackers could exploit. 

Because of the sensitive nature of the information and the potential for it to be abused, DHSS has urged all Alaskans who provided data to or had their data stored by DHSS to take action to protect themselves from identity theft. A free credit monitoring service is being made available to public members concerned that they may be caught up in the breach. See also: A winning strategy for cybersecurity (ZDNet special report).The potential breach of personal information has only just been revealed, despite the incident being first detected in May and previous updates about the attack in June and August — according to a DHSS statement, this was delayed until now to avoid interference with a criminal investigation. And four months from the initial attack, some DHSS online services still haven’t been restored, and there’s no timeline for when they’ll be back. “All affected systems remain offline as we diligently and meticulously move through the three phases of our response. Work is continuing to restore online services in a manner that will better shield DHSS and Alaskans from future cyberattacks,” said Scott McCutcheon, technology officer at DHSS. 

The attack started with the use of an unspecified exploit against a vulnerable website and spread from there. The state isn’t providing additional information at this time because “providing any further specific details could give our attackers information that would help them, and others, be more successful in future cyberattacks.” Cybersecurity company FireEye was brought into investigating the attack and have identified those behind it as “a highly sophisticated group known to conduct complex cyberattacks against organizations that include state governments and health care entities” — but no additional information is currently being revealed. However, DHSS does state this wasn’t a ransomware attack.See also: Ransomware: This new free tool lets you test if your cybersecurity is strong enough to stop an attack.While the exact motives behind the attack aren’t currently clear, healthcare is a frequent target for cyberattacks by both nation-state groups and cyber-criminal gangs. The amount of sensitive personal information involved in healthcare provides attackers with a lot of information about individuals, potentially useful for foreign intelligence services.As a result of the attack, DHSS says it is taking action to boost the cybersecurity of networks to prevent additional incidents in future. “As systems are being brought back online, steps are being taken to build them back to be as resilient as possible to be protected from future cyberattacks. Additional steps are being planned for post-incident hardening of our IT infrastructure,” the department said in a statement. More on cybersecurity: More

The Turla hacking group is back with new weaponry, recently used in attacks against the US, Germany, and Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, Cisco Talos said that the advanced persistent threat (APT) group, Russian in origin, has developed a new backdoor for persistence and stealth.  Dubbed TinyTurla, the previously unknown backdoor is simple in design but suitable for particular purposes: dropping payloads and staying under the radar if Turla’s primary malware is wiped from a compromised machine.  Active since at least 2004, Turla, also known as Snake and Uroburos, is a sophisticated operation with a long list of high-profile victims in its portfolio. Past targets include the Pentagon, government and diplomatic agencies, military groups, research institutions, and more in at least 45 countries. Now, it appears the APT is honing in on the US, Germany, and also Afghanistan — the latter of which being targeted before the Taliban took over the country and Western military forces pulled out.  Talos says it is likely the malware was used in attempts to compromise the systems of the previous government.  A sample acquired by the team revealed that the backdoor, which is formed as a .DLL, was installed as a service on a Windows machine. The file is named w64time.dll, and as there is a legitimate Windows w32time.dll, it may not immediately appear to be malicious.

Named “Windows Time Service,” the backdoor links to a command-and-control (C2) server controlled by Turla and contacts the system via an encrypted HTTPS channel every five seconds in order to check for any new commands or instructions.  TinyTurla is able to upload and either execute files and payloads, create subprocesses, and exfiltrate data. It may be that the backdoor was limited in its functionality and code on purpose, to prevent detection as malicious software.  Talos says that the backdoor has been in use since at least 2020.    “One public reason why we attributed this backdoor to Turla is the fact that they used the same infrastructure as they used for other attacks that have been clearly attributed to their Penguin Turla Infrastructure,” the researchers say. “It’s often difficult for an administrator to verify that all running services are legitimate. It is important to have software and/or automated systems detecting unknown running services and a team of skilled professionals who can perform proper forensic analysis on potentially infected systems.” Recently, Kaspersky researchers found code overlaps between Turla, the DarkHalo/UNC2452 APT, the Sunburst backdoor, and the Kazuar backdoor. While there are shared features between Sunburst and Kazuar, it is not possible to conclude with certainty any concrete links between the threat groups and these tools.  Previous and related coverage Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

Siemens Energy has launched a new solution for monitoring and responding to cyberthreats against the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

The industrial sector is undergoing a rapid shift from legacy, separate, on-the-floor systems to connected platforms that utilize IoT for maintenance, monitoring, and to collect data suitable for operations and future business decisions, in what is known as IIoT or Smart Factory (Industry) 4.0.  However, when you create networks and bring devices online, you run the risk of allowing threat actors access unless adequate protection is in place. As IoT continues to accelerate and operational technology (OT) becomes smarter, companies need to make sure they manage and secure endpoints and industrial networks to mitigate the risk of damage, data theft, and disruption caused by external entities.  On Tuesday, Siemens said a new offering, dubbed Eos.ii — not to be confused with the blockchain protocol EOS.IO — is an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platform that “provides CISOs with an evergreen foundation for industrial IoT cybersecurity.” The platform collects and collates data flows from IIoT endpoints for use by security teams, with insights brought together in one interface.  The data flows are also standardized to reduce complex or junk data, and Siemens says this will give analysts a better chance of spotting anomalous behavior “that might represent a cyberthreat.”

Furthermore, Eos.ii will automatically tailor defensive practices and prioritize high-impact events with the assistance of ML algorithms.  “As new threats emerge, Eos.ii seamlessly integrates their known characteristics into automated defenses, and allows for easy manual updates to its rules-based detection engine,” said Leo Simonovich, VP and Global Head of Industrial Cyber and Digital Security at Siemens. “With Eos.ii, defenders spend less time on routine tasks and more time conducting powerful investigations.” Siemens has produced a whitepaper (.PDF) describing the impact of IIoT cyberattacks and Eos.ii’s place in protecting today’s industrial systems.  Previous and related coverage Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

Apple is cracking down on how apps access your private data, such as location data, photos, camera, microphone, as well as what domains the apps are communicating with. And part of that is giving users the ability to find out what the apps that they have installed are up to.With this in mind, iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 has a new feature that allows users to gather information on what apps are up to.But you have to turn the feature on yourself.This new feature is called Record App Activity.To find this feature, fire up Settings and go to Privacy, and scroll all the way down to the bottom where you’ll find Record App Activity.Record App ActivityTap on this and you get into Record App Activity, and as the name suggests, this allows you to record what apps are up to. But you first have to turn the feature on by sliding the toggle switch. Then you have to wait a few days for a report to be generated.Record App Activity

Alternatively, you can export a JSON file that can be opened by any test editor, but this is quite a clunky method for the average user.What’s interesting is that Apple has documentation aimed at developers about this feature. This goes into depth about what data this feature records.Digging into this, it seems that this records each time an app accesses one of the following:The user’s photo libraryA cameraThe microphoneThe user’s contactsThe user’s media libraryLocation dataScreen sharingIt also records what domains any app accesses and how many times they are accesses.In short, it’s quite a deep dive into what’s going on but it’s important to note that you don’t get to know what specific data was accessed.While this is a great start in keeping app developers honest, I hope that more features and in-depth analysis will be added in future updates. More