Information Technology

Image: Shutterstock
Zoom’s proposed $14.7 billion deal to acquire Five9 is now under investigation by a government committee for potential national security risks. In a letter sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) requested for FCC’s review of the Zoom-Five9 deal to be halted until a telecommunications security committee could assess for potential national security risks. The FCC is responsible for reviewing whether deals such as the one made between Zoom and Five9 can be approved. Meanwhile, the telecommunications security committee is responsible for providing the FCC with reviews of potential foreign threats in the telecommunications sector. The committee was established last year by former US President Donald Trump.”USDOJ believes that such risk may be raised by the foreign participation (including the foreign relationships and ownership) associated with the application, and a review by the committee is necessary to assess and make an appropriate recommendation as to how the Commission should adjudicate this application,” DOJ foreign investment review acting chief David Plotinsky wrote in the letter. Zoom announced the deal back in July, touting the move as a serious foray into contact centre-as-a-service market. “Enterprises primarily communicate with their customers through the contact center. This acquisition can bring together best-in-class video and contact centre solutions to create a leading customer engagement platform that will redefine how companies of all sizes engage with their customers,” Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said at the time. In Zoom’s most recent financial results, the company reported its total quarterly revenue exceeded $1 billion for the first time in the company’s history.

The letter to FCC was first reported by the Wall Street Journal earlier on Tuesday. Related Coverage More

Digital identity management firm FYEO says it has discovered hundreds of instances of breached credentials from employees of NEW Cooperative, the Iowa-based farm service provider hit with a ransomware attack in recent days. Tammy Kahn, COO of FYEO, told ZDNet that when researchers searched through the company’s database, they found 653 instances of breached credentials connected to NEW Cooperative.The password “chicken1″ was common among the company’s 120 employees and was used over 10 times.Kahn added that the firm’s CEO Brent Bunte appeared to have the second highest number of instances of breached credentials while other current executives also had passwords that had been leaked. NEW Cooperative did not respond to multiple requests for comment.”The NewCoop ransomware situation is concerning for a number of reasons, the first being that hackers are still going after critical infrastructure and seeking to disrupt supply chains even when explicitly stating otherwise. Beyond that, it’s indicative of a larger problem: password management,” Kahn said. “We saw that the Colonial Pipeline breach was ultimately a result of a bad password, and it’s likely a similar case here. A majority of internet users and the companies they work for are likely sitting ducks for hackers as they have a limited number of stale passwords and believe someone else should take responsibility for cybersecurity.”

FYEO built an active domain intelligence database of over 20 billion leaked credentials and passwords, offering alerts any time email addresses and passwords resulting from third party breaches appear on the darknet. By running the newcoop.com domain through the database, they found the 653 instances of credentials that have previously been exposed.Dozens of studies — and previous ransomware incidents or breaches — have shown that leaked passwords are one of the easiest ways cyberattackers routinely gain access to systems. The problem has gotten so bad that some companies, like Microsoft, are doing away with passwords altogether. “Until organizations find ways to empower their employees to practice good cybersecurity hygiene both in and out of the office, these problems will persist and grow,” Kahn said. “Especially in industries like this, password management should be the first line of defense. FireEye execs were alerted to the SolarWinds breach via 2FA — what some consider ‘basic’ in cyber hygiene can often be the most impactful.”The BlackMatter ransomware group has been implicated in the attack on NEW Cooperative, which is involved in a variety of aspects of the grain business, including running grain storage elevators, selling fertilizer, buying from farmers and providing technology to farmers.The company is in the process of helping customers transport grain to livestock and poultry farms as it tries to restore its systems, which they shut down when notified of the attack. The ransomware group is demanding a $5.9 million ransom and refused to back down when negotiators for the company said it was a critical component of the US agriculture industry and would elicit a forceful response from the US government. Critical Insight CISO Mike Hamilton said the company provides a lot of animal feed, meaning the attack “is probably going to have a long tail.” “There have been a number of recent warnings about vulnerabilities in the food and ag sector, which were apparently accurate,” Hamilton said. “The gang seems pretty adamant in their communication: no ransom, no network. They are not being swayed by the critical infrastructure argument.”Chad Anderson, senior security researcher for DomainTools, said BlackMatter has only been around a few short months and already has netted some large victims and millions in ransom payments. “As the direct heir of DarkSide, BlackMatter shares a lot of interesting features with the other, quickly-rising affiliate program LockBit: speedy encryption, stronger anti-analysis techniques than previous malware families, and double-extortion,” Anderson said. “However, one place BlackMatter interestingly differs is that unlike most ransomware families it does not have a function to check a victim computer’s locale before encrypting, making them a threat everywhere. The most recent batch of ransomware families have truly come a long way and are ever more threatening.” More

The US Treasury Department announced on Tuesday that it was going after Russia-based cryptocurrency exchange Suex for facilitating ransomware payments in some of the first public, concrete action taken against ransomware groups.Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Treasury Department was planning some sort of ransomware-related sanctions but US officials explained its plans in detail on Tuesday. The Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) said Suex was being sanctioned for its role in facilitating “transactions involving illicit proceeds from at least eight ransomware variants.”Data showed that more than 40% of Suex’s transactions involved “illicit actors” according to the Treasury Department, which added that virtual currency exchanges like Suex are “critical to the profitability of ransomware attacks, which help fund additional cybercriminal activity.”US officials said it was the first sanctions designation against a virtual currency exchange and was done in coordination with the FBI. They noted that not all virtual currency exchanges are working with ransomware actors and explained that some are often exploited by malicious actors. But a number of exchanges work directly with ransomware gangs to increase profits. “As a result of today’s designation, all property and interests in property of the designated target that are subject to US jurisdiction are blocked, and US persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them. Additionally, any entities 50% or more owned by one or more designated persons are also blocked,” the Treasury Department said of Suex. 

“In addition, financial institutions and other persons that engage in certain transactions or activities with the sanctioned entities and individuals may expose themselves to sanctions or be subject to an enforcement action. Today’s action against Suex does not implicate a sanctions nexus to any particular Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) or variant.”Blockchain analysis company Chainalysis — which assisted in the investigation — said that while Suex is registered in the Czech Republic, it does not have a physical office there and has multiple branches in Moscow and St. Petersburg. There are also Suex branches across Russia and in the Middle East.The exchange has become popular among cybercriminals because it claims to be able to convert cryptocurrency holdings into cash at branch locations and even facilitate the exchange of cryptocurrency for physical assets like real estate, cars and yachts, according to Chainalysis. The sanctions are part of a larger effort to disrupt ransomware, which brought in at least $400 million in ransoms in 2020. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen highlighted that ransomware groups have not stopped their attacks on businesses, schools and hospitals since the White House ramped up efforts to stop the spate of incidents crippling hundreds of organizations. This week a US agriculture company was knocked out of commission due to a ransomware attack. “We will continue to crack down on malicious actors,” Yellen said. “As cyber criminals use increasingly sophisticated methods and technology, we are committed to using the full range of measures, to include sanctions and regulatory tools, to disrupt, deter, and prevent ransomware attacks.”The US is trying to institute an anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) framework among virtual currency exchanges and companies as a way to disrupt how ransomware groups manage to get away with their crimes. OFAC also released an updated advisory discouraging companies from paying ransoms and urging organizations to promote more stringent cybersecurity practices. The advisory implores organizations to contact US government agencies in the event of an attack and work with them “to avail themselves of OFAC’s significant mitigation related to OFAC enforcement matters and receive voluntary self-disclosure credit in the event a sanctions nexus is later determined.”The government noted that through its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, it has been collecting information on ransomware payments. The Treasury Department used the Chainalysis platform and tools from the company to conduct its investigation into Suex.Gurvais Grigg, global public sector CTO at Chainalysis, told ZDNet the company has a long history of supporting government efforts by providing insight into how cryptocurrencies are used, and in some cases, abused by bad actors.”With Suex specifically, we have been following them for a while. We first identified them in 2019 as one of a relatively small group of OTC brokers who were helping bad actors cash out a large amount of ill-gotten gains,” Grigg said. “It’s a common misconception that cryptocurrency is anonymous and untraceable. Chainalysis has a long history of providing technology to government agencies to help them investigate illicit activity using cryptocurrency. Our investigative tools have been used in some of the most high-profile recent cybercrime investigations including ransomware, child sexual abuse, darknet markets, and more.” Grigg added that the company anticipates further actions as governments and agencies grow their proficiency and access to the data and tools necessary to conduct investigations into cryptocurrency.When asked whether the company was working with other law enforcement agencies around the world, Grigg said they work “with many partners around the world and our data and services are leveraged in over 60 countries.”  “These partners are actively working similar cases and leverage our data and tools in a similar manner as did Treasury in the actions taken today,” Grigg said.The company released a blog post explaining some of their role in the investigation, noting that Suex has moved hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency — mostly in Bitcoin, Ether, and Tether — much of which is from illicit and high-risk sources. 
Chainalysis
“In Bitcoin alone, Suex’s deposit addresses hosted at large exchanges have received over $160 million from ransomware actors, scammers, and darknet market operators. Chainalysis’ investigation reveals that the OTC is converting cryptocurrency into cash at physical branches located in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and possibly also at other offices outside of Russia as well,” Chainalysis said. “Suex is also found to have received over $50 million worth of Bitcoin sent from addresses hosted at illicit cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e from 2018 through 2021, well after BTC-e was shut down by U.S. authorities for its own money laundering activity on behalf of cybercriminals.”Chainalysis said it had been tracking money laundering on Suex for a while, finding that multiple addresses associated with the site are included in the group of 273 service deposit addresses they identified as receiving 55% of all funds sent from illicit addresses in 2020 in their recent Crypto Crime Report. Suex addresses also appeared widely in other lists of addresses connected to money laundering. The company said due to Suex’s size, shutting it down would “represent a significant blow to many of the biggest cyber threat actors operating today, including leading ransomware attackers, scammers and darknet market operators.””Suex operates as a nested service, meaning it operates using addresses hosted by larger exchanges in order to tap into those exchanges’ liquidity and trading pairs. While many nested services are legitimate, some exchanges don’t hold nested services to high enough compliance standards, meaning they can be exploited for money laundering,” Chainalysis found. “Blockchain analysis reveals that Suex has received tens of millions worth of cryptocurrency payments from addresses associated with several forms of cybercrime, as well as from addresses associated with the now-shuttered exchange BTC-e.”Chainalysis researchers said there are significant financial ties between SUEX and BTC-e. Despite being shut down in 2017, Suex facilitated transfers on behalf of BTC-e administrators, associates, or former users who were “attempting to liquidate cryptocurrency trapped at the exchange.” Some of the BTC-e transfers took place this year even, despite the platform being shut down years ago. $481 million in Bitcoin has made its way to Suex since it emerged in February 2018, including almost $13 million from ransomware gangs like Ryuk, Conti, Maze and others. Other cybercriminals, like those involved in Finiko, have also spent millions on the site. “A small group of illicit services facilitate the majority of cryptocurrency-based money laundering, and Suex is one of the worst offenders, so today’s action represents a positive step forward in the fight against cybercrime,” Chainalysis said. “We commend OFAC for making this designation and look forward to working with our partners in the public and private sectors to continue the fight against money laundering service providers.” More

Google released the results of its Accelerate State of DevOps report on Tuesday, finding that respondents who use hybrid or multicloud were 1.6 times more likely to exceed their organizational performance targets. Elite performers in the survey deploy 973 times more frequently than low performers, have a 6,570 times faster lead time to deploy, a 3 times lower change failure rate and a 6,570 times faster time-to-recover from incidents when failure does happen. Google has worked on the report for seven years, querying more than 32,000 professionals worldwide over the last few years. Dustin Smith, research lead with Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team, said the study continues to show that excellence in software delivery and operational performance drives organizational performance in technology transformations. “This year we also investigated the effects of SRE best practices, a secure software supply chain, quality documentation, and multicloud — all while gaining a deeper understanding of how this past year affected team’s culture and burnout,” Smith said. “Based on key findings from previous Accelerate State of DevOps reports, we again used four metrics to classify teams as elite, high, medium or low performers based on their software delivery: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean-time-to-restore, and change fail rate. This year we saw that elite performers continue to accelerate their pace of software delivery, increasing their lead time for changes from less than one day to less than one hour.”Smith said they asked respondents to rate their ability to meet or exceed their reliability targets, finding that teams with varying degrees of delivery performance see better outcomes when they also prioritize operational performance.

Smith added that this year, 1,200 working professionals from a variety of industries around the globe shared their experiences with the researchers. More than half of all respondents said they used a public cloud, a 5% bump compared to 2019, and 21% additionally said they deploy multiple public clouds. About 21% said they used data centers or on-premises solutions instead of the cloud and 34% said they used hybrid clouds. The study found that those using hybrid and multi-cloud were 1.6 times more likely to exceed their organizational performance targets than those who did not and 1.4 times more likely to excel in terms of deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to recover, change failure rate and reliability.One in every four respondents said they used multiple cloud providers because of the unique benefits offered by each one, with the second most common reason being availability. Nearly 75% of respondents use on-demand self-service, a 16% increase from 2019, and 74% used broad network access, a 14% increase from 2019. How teams implement their cloud services was also a major focus of the report, with the researchers finding that elite performers were 3.5 times more likely to have met all essential NIST cloud characteristics.”Only 32% of respondents who said they were using cloud infrastructure agreed or strongly agreed that they met all five of the essential characteristics of cloud computing defined by NIST, an increase of 3% from 2019. Overall, usage of NIST’s characteristics of cloud computing have increased by 14-19%, with rapid elasticity showing the largest increase,” the study found. “73% of respondents used resource pooling, a 15% increase from 2019, 77% of respondents used rapid elasticity, a 18% increase from 2019, 78% of respondents used measured service, a 16% increase from 2019. In analyzing the results, we found evidence that teams who excel at these modern operational practices are 1.4 times more likely to report greater SDO performance, and 1.8 times more likely to report better business outcomes.” More than half of all respondents said they use SRE practices to some extent. The Google study found that regardless of performance, teams saw benefits from the increased use of SRE practices.Quality documentation is also important, and the report found that teams with higher quality documentation are 2.4 times more likely to see better software delivery and operational performance. Teams with good documentation also are 3.8 times more likely to implement security practices, 2.4 times more likely to meet or exceed their reliability targets, 3.5 times more likely to implement Site Reliability Engineering practices and 2.5 times more likely to fully leverage the cloud. Continuous testing and continuous integration are also both indicators of success, according to the report. Trunk-based development is key as well, with elite performers who meet their reliability targets being 2.3 times more likely to use it. Maintaining databases is very important, Google researchers found, with elite performers being 3.4 times more likely to exercise database change management compared to their low-performing counterparts.Observability was cited as another metric that separated elite performers from the rest. Teams who successfully meet their reliability targets are 4.1 times more likely to have solutions that incorporate observability into overall system health.The study takes time to note that the COVID-19 pandemic forced significant changes on how teams worked. Nearly 90% of respondents worked from home and just 20% said they had ever worked from home before the pandemic started. “Respondents who worked from home because of the pandemic experienced more burnout than those who stayed in the office (a small portion of our sample). Inclusive teams with a generative culture were half as likely to experience burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Smith said, adding that security was also an important part of the survey.”Security can no longer be an afterthought—it must be integrated throughout every stage of the software development lifecycle to build a secure software supply chain. Elite performers who met or exceeded their reliability targets were twice as likely to have shifted their security practices left, i.e., implemented security practices earlier on in the software development lifecycle, and deliver reliable software quickly, and safely.” More

A new survey from Ping Identity has found that more internet users are willing to stop using sites altogether if they find the experience cumbersome or invasive. The Ping Identity Consumer Survey queried more than 3,400 consumers across the US, UK, Germany, France and Australia about their experiences with signing up for websites and their attitudes toward online privacy.The survey found that 77% of respondents have already abandoned or stopped creating an online account for any number of reasons, which included demands for too much personal information (40%) and too many security steps (29%).More than half of respondents have outright abandoned an online service if they found logging in too frustrating and 63% said they were likely to jump ship for a competitor if they made it easier to authenticate their identity.Richard Bird, chief customer information officer for Ping Identity, said businesses need to integrate their security, privacy and user experience strategies to keep up with modern consumer expectations. “Individuals have no hesitations about finding better experiences elsewhere, so companies that prioritize customer experience now will earn loyalty in the long run,” Bird explained. Nearly 60% of respondents are OK with the idea of storing their personal information in a digital ID on their smartphone but 46% said they would prefer to use a service or site that offers an alternative to passwords.

Forty four percent said they admittedly use weak passwords, with another 29% saying they only make a small change to an old password. Fifteen percent said they simply reuse an old password. Surprisingly, 40% of respondents said they are not able to answer their security questions at least half the time.Consumers are also increasingly showing an interest in understanding how websites and online services share their information, with 85% saying they wanted to know how their personal information is shared and 72% noting that it was difficult to find this information. For German consumers, the numbers were even higher, with 90% reporting an interest in finding out how companies share their personal information. Nearly 70% of respondents in the US said they have stopped using an online service over privacy concerns. More than 70% of respondents have changed their profiles to address privacy issues, and the issue is even more prominent for Gen Z, 89% of whom adjusted their profile settings to control their privacy. Sixty percent of consumers cancelled an account due to privacy concerns and nearly half of respondents have done this more than once. Consumers are also increasingly willing to call customer service about locked accounts, with 77% of US consumers admitting to having done so compared to 62% in Germany and 66% in France.  French consumers were the most diligent about resetting their passwords with stronger ones. More than half of French respondents changed their passwords to something stronger compared to about a third of consumers in other countries. Passwords are also becoming a red line for many US consumers, with one in five saying they are more likely to use an online service that does not require one. More than 75% of respondents said they expect to spend less than five minutes creating a new account, but almost 40% said they would not spend two minutes.  More

Hybrid multi-cloud computing giant Nutanix made several big announcements on Tuesday, unveiling new features within the Nutanix Cloud Platform designed to help organizations build out software-defined data centers and make it easier for enterprises to simplify data management. 

ZDNet Recommends

The best cloud storage services

Free and cheap personal and small business cloud storage services are everywhere. But, which one is best for you? Let’s look at the top cloud storage options.

Read More

Rajiv Mirani, chief technology officer at Nutanix, told ZDNet that their customers are looking for cloud solutions that can adapt to their needs, with a focus on simplicity, flexibility and freedom to choose the right technology for each situation. “The Nutanix Cloud Platform continues to break down common silos within IT teams with the goals of simplifying operations so customers can focus on business needs. With these new features, we focused on addressing the common challenges many enterprises face in hybrid multi-cloud environments, including security, DR and virtual networking,” Mirani said. “Customers require a variety of ways to store data — both structured and unstructured — and are looking for ways to simplify management without needing to rely on different vendors to do so. The new features in the Nutanix Cloud Platform extend our data-centric innovation to high-performance applications to deliver a unified platform with comprehensive data services for all workloads and all variety of data.”Nutanix is launching AOS version 6, software that provides enterprises with built-in virtual networking, enhanced disaster recovery and simplified zero-trust security that otherwise would require additional specialized hardware and software.All of the platform’s functions are managed through a single interface, making it easier for IT teams to handle. 

Nutanix AOS 6 comes with a Network Virtualization offering called Flow Networking that allows organizations to create Virtual Private Clouds and offers VPN capabilities.

AOS 6 users also get access to new Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery capabilities as well as “the ability to leverage the public cloud as a secondary site, native metro clustering support for the built-in AHV hypervisor enabling automatic failover in the event of a disaster” and end-to-end encryption capabilities for DR traffic.Nutanix added that it would offer customers integration with Qualys’ vulnerability management detection and response solution. The company’s AOS, AHV, and Files products were also approved by the Department of Defense and will now be placed on the Information Network Approved Products List after going through a rigorous set of cybersecurity tests. Eric Sheppard, research vice president of IDC Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies Group, said AOS 6, along with virtual networking and security innovations in the Nutanix Cloud Platforms, “deliver an enterprise-ready, end-to-end platform to run any application, including the most critical ones, on-premises and in public cloud.” “The new features address many of the demands of enterprise customers looking to gain efficiency and reliability across clouds, to support their needs now and in the future.” The virtual networking and enterprise-grade DR features are now available to customers, but the security features are under development.Nutanix also announced that the Nutanix Cloud Platform would be able to offer unstructured data tiering from on-premises to cloud, up to a 2x storage performance increase for database workloads and 3x for big data workloads without requiring complex reconfiguration, as well as unstructured data governance service Nutanix Data Lens.The company is also offering a new one-click storage scaling and rich role-based access control called Nutanix Era. Nutanix is adding a slate of new features to make it easier to run data analytics workloads and process data faster at a reduced cost. “Nutanix Objects, the company’s S3 compatible object storage solution, supports high-performance petabyte-scale storage for building data lakes. Customers working with modern analytics applications, such as Apache Spark, will benefit from a dramatically increased query and large batch processing performance with S3 Select and optimized S3A support,” Nutanix explained. “Simplified Storage Scaling and Governance for Databases Nutanix’s database service, Era, manages the most popular database engines like PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle Database across hybrid multi-cloud environments. With Era, customers will be able to easily and quickly scale database storage online, turning days or weeks of work into a one-click operation.” Era will also be able to support multi-region failover capabilities. The Nutanix Data Lens — a new cloud service for unstructured data growth — was included in the raft of announcements. More

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. 

ZDNet Recommends

The best cyber insurance

The cyber insurance industry is likely to go mainstream and is a simple cost of doing business. Here are a few options to consider.

Read More

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