Information Technology

The cybersecurity industry continues to have issues finding talent to fill all of the available roles. To address the problem, the Utah legislature is giving Utah Valley University (UVU) and Utah State University (USU) a $5 million grant. The goal is to build an academic pipeline that will prepare students to work in fields like cybersecurity, security analytics, and artificial intelligence. 

Utah has more than 4,000 unfilled tech jobs, and the grant is part of the state’s Deep Technology Talent Initiative (DTTI), which aims to expand academic tech programs and collaborate with local tech giants like Adobe, Northrup Grumman, and FireEye. Alongside the new programs at both schools, the companies will provide work experience for students through internships, capstones, and laboratory work. Both UVU’s Center for National Security Studies and USU’s Center for Anticipatory Intelligence are part of the Intermountain Intelligence, Industry and Security Consortium (I3SC), which hopes to equip students to fill roles in Utah’s “Silicon Slopes.””The next advancement in higher education requires us to play as a team. USU is excited to lead out alongside UVU in creating a leading-edge learning team — the I3SC consortium — that includes industry, state, and federal partners working together in unprecedented ways to prepare our graduates to be leaders in innovation, security, and resilience,” Jeannie Johnson, director of the Center for Anticipatory Intelligence at USU, told ZDNet.Through the DTTI, I3SC was awarded $5,013,900 to create a “multifaceted academic pipeline program” available to students at both institutions. The courses will cover a variety of topics including secure computing, artificial intelligence, security analytics, cybersecurity, anticipatory intelligence, and security studies.Thousands of students are already enrolled in tech programs at both schools, and the I3SC consortium’s goal is to build out a tech workforce that can handle the emerging threats from foreign governments, hackers, and other cybersecurity issues.”We’re at a critical point where the threat landscape presents challenges for companies at all levels. The need has never been greater for smart, experienced, and skilled professionals, and that is what we are building with our consortium,” said Ryan Vogel, director of the Center for National Security Studies at UVU.

Vogel added that they have already received a lot of interest from students across the STEM and policy disciplinary spectrum. “We need graduates ready to take jobs, professionals that are skilled and experienced. That’s our focus with this project: to meet this demand and exceed it, in cybersecurity and other technological areas,” Vogel said.  More

A North Korean hacking group has been attacking think tanks in the South through malware-laden blog posts. 

In a new campaign, tracked since June 2021, the state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been attempting to plant surveillance and theft-based malware on victim machines. On Wednesday, researchers from Cisco Talos said the Kimsuky APT, also known as Thallium or Black Banshee, is responsible for the wave of attacks, in which malicious Blogspot content is being used to lure “South Korea-based think tanks whose research focuses on political, diplomatic, and military topics pertaining to North Korea, China, Russia, and the US.” Specifically, geopolitical and aerospace organizations appear to be on the APT’s radar.  Kimsuky has been active since at least 2012. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an advisory (.PDF) on the APT in 2020, noting that the state-sponsored group is tasked by the North Korean government with “global intelligence gathering.” Past victims have been located in South Korea, Japan, and the United States. AhnLab says that compensation forms, questionnaires, and research documents attached to emails have been used in the past as phishing lures, and in the campaign detected by Talos, malicious Microsoft Office documents are still a primary attack vector. Typically, malicious VBA macros are included in the documents, and when triggered, will download the payloads from Blogspot. 

According to the team, the blogposts deliver three types of malicious content based on the Gold Dragon/Brave Prince malware family: initial beacons, file stealers, and implant deployment scripts — the latter of which is designed to infect endpoints and launch further malware components, including a keylogger, information stealer, and a file injector module for website login credential theft. While some APTs will try to steal whatever content they can from an infected machine, Kimsuky has adopted a different approach. The threat actors will, instead, scan for files of particular interest to them.  This includes content related to North Korea, denuclearization, the relationships between the US, China, and Russia, as well as rocket designs, aviation fuel research, fluid mechanics, and material science.  “The attackers knew exactly which files they were looking for,” Talos commented. “This indicates that the attackers have a deep understanding of their targets’ endpoints, likely obtained from previous compromises.”The researchers informed Google of their findings and the malicious blog content has since been removed. However, this is unlikely to stop Kimsuky’s activities.   “Kimsuky is a highly motivated threat actor targeting a number of entities in South Korea,” the researchers say. “This group has been relentlessly creating new infection chains to deliver different types of malware to their victims. Such targeted attacks can result in the leak of restricted research, unauthorized access for espionage, and even destructive attacks against target organizations.” Previous and related coverage Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

Major comic book company Diamond Comic Distributors is struggling to keep up with its planned shipments after being hit with a ransomware attack on Sunday. In a statement, the company said its planned shipments for Wednesday would be delayed about two to four days throughout the country due to the attack; reorders are expected to resume within the next 72 hours. The delays will also affect international retailers. The company said it was dealing with a ransomware attack affecting its order processing systems as well as its internal communications platforms.”Our IT department and a team of third-party experts are working around the clock to address these issues and restore full operations,” Diamond Comic Distributors said. “We want to assure you that customer data and financial information is not stored on our network, and as such, we have no reason to believe it has been impacted by this attack.”Based in Maryland, Diamond Comic Distributors said it was working with Agility Recovery to deal with the incident and added that law enforcement has been contacted.The company is one of the biggest print comic book distributors in the world, and hundreds of retailers depend on them for some of the biggest comics available. 

Josh Rickard, security solutions architect at cybersecurity firm Swimlane, said the attack was evidence that — even without the theft of customer or business data — ransomware groups could still cause significant damage. “Diamond Comic Distributors’ website has been temporarily taken down, and its ability to process customer orders has been disrupted, affecting not only Diamond Comic Distributors’ business and success, but also the other retailers it is responsible for selling several comic book publications to on a regular basis,” Rickard explained. More

Researchers with cybersecurity firm Randori have discovered a remote code execution vulnerability in Palo Alto Networks firewalls using the GlobalProtect Portal VPN. 

ZDNet Recommends

The zero-day — which has a severity rating of 9.8 — allows for unauthenticated, remote code execution on vulnerable installations of the product. The issue affects multiple versions of PAN-OS 8.1 prior to 8.1.17, and Randori said it found numerous vulnerable instances exposed on internet-facing assets, in excess of 70,000 assets. It is used by a number of Fortune 500 companies and other global enterprises.Palo Alto has released an update that patches CVE-2021-3064 after being notified about the issue in September. Aaron Portnoy, principal scientist at Randori, told ZDNet that the original catalyst for their research into Palo Alto Networks firewalls was identifying its presence on customer perimeters.”Once an attacker has control over the firewall, they will have visibility into the internal network and can proceed to move laterally. Randori believes the best way to identify potential points of attack is to assess the attack surface. We then devoted resources into assessing the attack surface of the firewall itself in a lab environment. This process allowed us to identify the components an attacker would have to exploit in order to compromise the device,” Portnoy explained.”As is the case with many closed-source products, simply setting up an environment in which to develop an exploit is challenging. Complex products such as PAN firewalls include protections that make this process difficult regardless of the vulnerability. We have found the overall security posture of the affected devices to be on par with other vendors in the space.” 

Portnoy said that exploitation is difficult but possible on devices with ASLR enabled, which appears to be the case in most hardware devices. “On virtualized devices (VM-series firewalls), exploitation is significantly easier due to lack of ASLR, and Randori expects public exploits will surface,” Portnoy said. According to Portnoy, in October 2020, his team was tasked with researching vulnerabilities with the GlobalProtect Portal VPN. By November 2020, his team discovered CVE-2021-3064, began authorized exploitation of Randori customers, and successfully landed it at one of their customers — over the internet — not just in a lab.The exploit gains root privileges — complete control over the device — and can execute arbitrary code. Portnoy said his team was able to gain a shell on the affected target, access sensitive configuration data, extract credentials and more while moving laterally from there and gaining visibility into the internal network. Randori exploited Palo Alto Networks PA-5220, including PAN-OS 8.1.16 and PAN-OS 8.1.15.”The vulnerability chain consists of a method for bypassing validations made by an external web server (HTTP smuggling) and a stack-based buffer overflow. Exploitation of the vulnerability chain has been proven and allows for remote code execution on both physical and virtual firewall products. Publicly available exploit code does not exist at this time,” Randori said.”VPN devices are attractive targets for malicious actors, and exploitation of PA-VM virtual devices, in particular, is made easier due to their lack of Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). CVE-2021-3064 is a buffer overflow that occurs while parsing user-supplied input into a fixed-length location on the stack. The problematic code is not reachable externally without utilizing an HTTP smuggling technique. The exploitation of these together yields remote code execution as a low privileged user on the firewall device.”Randori noted that in order to exploit the vulnerability, the attacker must have network access to the device on the global protect service port (default port 443). As the affected product is a VPN portal, they added that this port is often accessible over the internet. In addition to the patch, Randori suggested affected organizations look through the available Threat Prevention signatures 91820 and 91855 that Palo Alto Networks made available. They can be enabled to thwart exploitation while organizations plan for the software upgrade. For those that do not use the VPN capability as part of the firewall, Randori recommended disabling the VPN functionality.Portnoy and Randori touted the situation as an example of the ethical use of zero-days to protect companies from the kind of threats they face from nation-state actors. Portnoy estimates that the vulnerability would be worth several hundred thousand dollars on the black market. More

Congress passed a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill on Friday that included about $2 billion in cybersecurity funding. The bill — now heading to President Joe Biden’s desk — includes $1 billion in state, local, tribal and territorial cyberdefense grants, $100 million for the Department of Homeland Security, and $21 million for National Cyber Director Chris Inglis. 

The four-year, $1 billion grant fund is something state and local governments have been waiting for to help tackle their growing cybersecurity to-do list. To receive a portion of the millions of dollars in grant funding each year, states have to match a specified percentage of the federal dollars. The percentage starts at 10% and grows to 40% over the next four years. The idea is that states will get used to accounting for cyber funding in their budgets as a result.The Washington Post noted that for the cybersecurity grant program, 1% will go to each state and 0.25% will go to all four US territories. Another 3% will go to tribal governments. The rest of the funding will be split between states based on their population size and specifically their rural population numbers. States are required to devote at least 25% of the funding to cyber programs in rural areas. The bill says $200 million in grants will be handed out in 2022, $400 million will be spent in 2023, $300 million in 2024, and $100 million in 2025. The Federal Highway Administration is also required to create a tool that can help them respond to cyberattacks.  Jonathan Reiber, former chief strategy officer for cyber policy in the office of the US Secretary of Defense during the Obama administration, told ZDNet that the bill addresses some of the biggest concerns experts have about the country’s cybersecurity readiness and infrastructure. “This investment will help the country achieve a state of real cybersecurity readiness where it matters most. This bill also focuses on securing elements of our critical infrastructure that could cause national-level systemic risks if disrupted. Vulnerabilities in the energy sector present a strategic risk for the US — from our electric utilities to oil and gas distribution, as we saw with the Colonial Pipeline attack — and hostile actors have been targeting the energy sector for years,” said Reiber, who is now a senior director at AttackIQ. “This bill will not only help ensure cybersecurity capabilities are built and deployed — it also calls for continuous assessments to ensure that our cyberdefense investments work as intended. It’s not enough to have built the best defense capabilities; they need to be exercised and ready when the adversary attacks. These resources can help ensure effectiveness.” 

He added that Inglis is “one of the most talented cybersecurity leaders in the world” and that it was a positive step to see the amount of money given to support the office of the National Cyber Director. Drew Jaehnig, industry practice leader of the public sector at Bizagi, honed in on the parts of the bill that focused on securing industrial or operational technology (OT) systems. Jaehnig spent 20 years at the Department of Defense and said the increased funding for OT systems was sorely needed. He noted that it was also “well overdue” for the federal government to provide support for state, local, tribal, and territorial cyber training, recruitment, and non-profit security grants. “In the long run, however, this will also require state and local officials to respond proportionally. It is interesting to note that FEMA will be responsible for the allocation and distribution of the appropriate funds to state, local, and non-profit organizations. This needs to be a preventative process to avert cyber-disasters and FEMA will need to be judicious in fund allocation to maximize the effects. State and local governments should consider consolidated actions to maximize the investment impact,” Jaehnig said. “Congress got a good start on the training aspects of cybersecurity strategy. The continued focus on CyberSentry and the hardening of the federal space are welcome advances. A nod of encouragement was given to a new generation of emergency protocols for cybersecurity, but this will certainly require additional funding from state and local partners to be successful.”Experts online noted that the grants to states and local governments specifically say the funding cannot be used for ransom payments to hackers.  Mark Carrigan, vice president of OT cybersecurity at Hexagon, said the $50 billion dedicated to improving the resiliency of power and water systems was an important part of the bill considering it protects them from cyberattacks and natural disasters. The Environmental Protection Agency and CISA will get a significant slice of the funding in the bill to beef up the security of water systems after a spate of attacks over the last year. Implemented properly, this program could make a considerable difference by making the country’s critical infrastructure more resilient to inevitable events — hurricanes, droughts, floods, and cyber-attacks, Carrigan explained.Some questioned whether enough people were working in cybersecurity to enact some of the measures in the bill and wondered whether government organizations would use the funding for one-time projects instead of looking at it as a recurring investment. Lookout’s federal sales engineer Victoria Mosby said the additional funding dedicated to increasing cybersecurity across all levels of the government will have a ripple effect across multiple vectors, not just the procurement of new tools. “Funding will give many cybersecurity teams the funds needed to continue updating antiquated systems and procedures. Many of these changes will spread outside of infosec teams into general IT infrastructure and new policy adoption to account for moving certain systems to the cloud and allowing for increased remote working,” Mosby said. “Increased hiring to bolster existing security teams and training to beef up the skills of existing professionals, with the increasing reliance on the cloud and remote workforce professionals need to have a better understanding of cloud security and the concept of ‘zero trust’. It would be curious to see if some of those funds funnel down into K-12 and higher education to create a new degree and certificate programs to bolster the incoming cyber workforce.”Other experts said it was important that the federal government is using the bill to request new cybersecurity programs to protect the development of new and current highways, rail, and supply chain programs. James McQuiggan, a security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, said these programs focus on aspects of cybersecurity risk management, incident response, and require the use of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (CSF). McQuiggan touted the measures in the modernization of transportation (Division A) section that say that all-controlling and monitoring systems (SCADA) should contain security features for access control, prevent exploitation of the systems and comply with the new cybersecurity requirements for the federal government’s supply chain and the use of zero trust. He also said the billions provided for programs expanding broadband access would come with upsides and downsides. “Throughout the bill, there are many requirements for training. Training for cyber incident response, workforce development training, safety training, but missing is the need to increase a more robust cybersecurity culture within the government at the federal, state, and county levels,” McQuiggan explained. “Several key areas in the bill seem to focus on the symptoms of an issue and not the root cause. The broadband internet section (Division F – broadband) requests the implementation of higher internet speeds to people who don’t have within their areas. One item lacking is the need for the people benefitting from this to understand the internet’s benefits and dangers. Broadband providers should provide free email filters for phishing and malicious attachments to reduce the risk of people falling victim to identity theft and loss of finances due to online scams.” Some cybersecurity experts echoed McQuiggan’s concerns about the expansion of broadband access, noting how important it is for the country but also warning that it would introduce a host of cybersecurity issues. Perry Carpenter, chief evangelist, and strategy officer at KnowBe4, said the increased internet access for everyone would create a “richer” environment for cybercriminals. “We are about to potentially see the largest infrastructure upgrade of our lifetimes. It will impact us, our children, and potentially our grandchildren,” said KnowBe4’s Carpenter. “It’s imperative that we minimize mistakes of our past and start right. Build security in. Make it fundamental to how success is defined.” More

Cyber attacks targeting vulnerabilities in virtual private networks (VPN) are on the rise, and many organisations are struggling to protect their networks.The Covid-19 pandemic forced many businesses to suddenly move to higher levels of remote working than before, with many organisations dealing with it for the first time. While this was necessary to keep businesses operating, the sudden rise in remote working also provided benefits for cyber criminals, who looked to take advantage of it to carry out attacks against public-facing VPN and cloud services in order to breach networks.

Many organisations still aren’t taking the action required to fully protect their networks from these attacks, say researchers.”Organisations aren’t prepared for these incidents,” Bart Vanautgaerden, senior incident response consultant at Mandiant, told ZDNet. “They’re familiar with compromises on Windows, but with a VPN compromise, they’re not trained or technically prepared to deal with an incident like that”.In a presentation at Black Hat Europe, Vanautgaerden detailed how VPN vulnerabilities were being exploited by numerous cyber criminal groups. These include at least eight Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) hacking operations aimed at cyber espionage, as well as various ransomware gangs targeting vulnerabilities in VPNs to launch ransomware attacks.

Cyber attackers can breach usernames and passwords to access VPN services – especially if multi-factor authentication isn’t used as an additional layer of protection – as well as exploit vulnerabilities in VPN appliances themselves. For example, earlier this year, Mandiant disclosed vulnerabilities in Pulse Secure’s VPN. Pulse Secure later released security updates to protect against the vulnerabilities. Other providers, including Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks, have also had to release critical security updates to protect VPNs from attacks. SEE: A winning strategy for cybersecurity (ZDNet special report) Many organisations may be unaware this is an issue they need to think about – meaning patches aren’t being applied, and VPN servers remain open to compromise. “For many organisations we’ve talked to, it’s the first time they’ve had such an incident, so they’re not on the lookout for it,” said Vanautgaerden.To remain robust against cyber attacks, organisations should apply security patches as soon as possible. Not being able to use VPNs for a short time while the updates are applied isn’t ideal, but it’s better than having to uproot the entire network after a full-scale breach.”Organisations should really focus on an aggressive patching strategy, not to lose any time as soon as there’s a vulnerability disclosed to implement the patch itself,” Vanautgaerden said.”It may sound straightforward, but with so much reliance on VPN tunnels, organisations often don’t want to face the downtime that’s often required when patching these applications. It’s easier said than done, but organisations need to have systems in place to ensure they have a fast and aggressive policy.”Businesses should also ensure they have a response plan at the ready to reset accounts and assess damage in the event that a cyber security breach does take place, said Vanautgaerden. “[Organisations] need to be able to investigate and reset VPN appliances and also provide additional entry to the network so legitimate users can still access the network while they investigate.”MORE ON CYBERSECURITY 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

Well, there we have it. The Apple CEO has said it. If you want to sideload apps on a smartphone, buy an Android.Speaking at The New York Times “DealBook” summit, Cook set out the battle lines:”I think that people have that choice today, Andrew, if you want to sideload, you can buy an Android phone. That choice exists when you go into the carrier shop. If that is important to you, then you should buy an Android phone. From our point of view, it would be like if I were an automobile manufacturer telling [customers] not to put airbags and seat belts in the car. He would never think about doing this in today’s time. It’s just too risky to do that. And so, it would not be an iPhone if it didn’t maximize security and privacy.”

Putting aside the fact that the bulk of the automobile industry fought tooth and nail to not have to fit seatbelts and airbags, this is Apple flat out telling users who want the ability to sideload apps to buy an Android smartphone.And this is happening at a time when there are a lot of legal and governmental eyes on Apple’s App Store practices, and how iPhone users buy and download apps.Sideloading would allow iPhone owners the ability to bypass the Apple App Store and get their apps via a third party.While I’m all for giving users options, I think Cook is right here.The App Store offers a safe, convenient one-stop-shop for apps.

But there’s more than that.The bottom line is that the vast majority of iPhone users won’t care one jot about sideloading.Nope.Not a jot.In fact, I’d be willing to bet a steak dinner (or vegetarian equivalent) that the number of Android users who sideload is a tiny drop in the ocean.It’s a bit like iOS jailbreaking. Yes, there are people who do jailbreak, and who find it useful to be able to do so, but there’s no need to exaggerate how widespread it is.It’s a tiny fraction of iPhone users.In fact, the people who seem to care the most about this are those who own multibillion-dollar corporations who either are unhappy about Apple making money from the App Store or who are unhappy that Apple doesn’t give them unfettered access to user’s data.Changes made to iOS in recent months have companies that trade in user data — such as Facebook — worried. Being able to bypass Apple’s App Store rules would allow companies better and deeper access to user data.And it’s hard to frame that in a way that makes it sound good for users.I agree with Cook. If users want to sideload, let them go to Android.

ZDNet Recommends More