Information Technology

Image: ASD
The Australian Signals Directorate published a sobering The Commonwealth Cyber Security Posture in 2020 report on Thursday, with one of the bright spots being the use of scanning by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC). Under its Cyber Hygiene Improvement Programs (CHIPs), the ACSC was able to identify vulnerable, internet-exposed MobileIron systems across Commonwealth, state and territory, and local governments. “The ACSC notified all government entities operating vulnerable devices of the device details, the critical vulnerability and the urgent need to patch or otherwise mitigate the risk,” the report said. “This timely and actionable information from the ACSC allowed some government entities to pre-empt adversary exploitation of their MobileIron devices, in one case by hours.” The report said the 2020 MobileIron and Citrix vulnerabilities had some of the quickest turnarounds before exploitation attempts began to appear. “Reporting showed adversaries attempting to exploit these vulnerabilities within days of proof-of-concept codes being publicly released,” it said. “Organisations that cannot patch their internet-facing services in a very timely manner, especially legacy VPNs and websites, must improve their patching capability. Adopting software-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service cloud approaches to internet-facing services may assist.” This is bad
Image: ASD

Elsewhere, the report said while in absolute terms the cyber posture of Commonwealth entities was improving, the shift was glacial in 2020. For instance, the report said entities were improving application hardening, but only 12% of entities got better. Similarly, 10.5% were doing application control properly, and 9.5% more entities could say they were restricting admin privileges properly. The blame for the slow pace was placed with entities continuing to use obsolete and unsupported operating systems and applications, not embracing cloud services, organisations not having fast or flexible modernisation strategies, a cyber skills shortage, and organisations continuing to “misunderstand, misinterpret and inconsistently” the Essential Eight. In a government response tabled on Wednesday, the government is considering making the Essential Eight essential for its entities. This is very, very bad
Image: ASD
Restricting adherence to merely the Top Four of the Essential Eight showed 11% of organisations self-reported at the lowest level of compliance, followed by 55% at the second step of the four step system, with 33% at the third level, and only 1% being fully compliant. The policy with the lowest level of maturity was “safeguarding information from cyber threats”. On the plus side, CHIPs is now able to track “cyber hygiene indicators” across 71,300 active Commonwealth government domains, an improvement of 54,300 domains in the year from February 2020, and covers the sites of 187 entities. Across 2020, CHIPs gained the ability to scan for encrypted email use; whether government sites were running up-to-date software, displaying default websites or using expired certificates; scanning for critical vulnerabilities; and advising government entities at all levels on services they have open to the wider internet. During the year, ACSC created a Protective Domain Name System that blocks domains associated with malware, ransomware, phishing attacks, and other malicious content. “Under the pilot, the ACSC processed approximately 2 billion queries from eight Commonwealth entities over the period from April to December 2020 — and blocked 4683 unique malicious cyber threats, preventing over 150,000 threat events,” the report said. “In 2021–22, the capability will be offered to all Commonwealth entities.” Australia is so bad at cyber
Image: ASD
The report stated approximately one quarter of entities are now using DMARC to prevent email spoofing. Across the year, ACSC said it responded to 434 cyber incidents, of which 46% were self-reported and the remainder were found through “ACSC investigations, reporting from international partners and third parties, and analysis of a variety of classified and open-source material”. The next report will be handed to government in November 2022 and cover from January 2021 to June 2022. From 2023, the reports will focus on cyber posture across a single financial year. Related Coverage More

Legislation will enter Parliament later this year that will allow non-government entities to provide digital identification services to Australians.The Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) has been working on Australia’s digital identity system for a number of years, going live with myGovID — developed by the Australian Taxation Office — and accrediting an equivalent identity service from Australia Post in 2019.myGovID and the Australia Post Digital ID are essentially just forms of digital identification that then allow the user to access certain online services, such as the government’s online portal myGov.The digital identity system is touted by the government as a simple, safe, and secure way to verify identity online, as well as one allowing for better interaction with government services. But it also believes digital ID can “enable innovative digital sectors of the economy to flourish”.See also: More privacy conscious and not Australia Card 2.0: DTA defends digital identity playWhile the DTA has developed the Trusted Digital Identity Framework (TDIF), which sets out the operating model for digital identity, it is a set of rules that only Australian government entities can follow — it can’t be applied to states and territories, or to the private sector. This is why legislation is required.”It is important to note, today we’re using myGovID, but into the future, you’ll be able to use a choice of identity provider, there’ll be additional providers … it could be a bank, it could be a state and territory identity provider,” DTA CDO Peter Alexander said during Senate Estimates in October. “So individuals and businesses dealing with the Australian government and national services will be able to make a choice.”

Instead of listening to researchers recommending the Australian government abandon its existing digital identity system and start again from scratch, after highlighting again security flaws in two of the systems already accredited, the government has opened a second round of consultation, this time on the development of legislation.Highlighting eight “key” elements, the government wishes to discuss with those interested in the structure of the legislation, scope and interoperability of the system, governance, privacy and other consumer safeguards, trustmarks, liability and redress options, penalties and enforcement, and the administration of the scheme.The purpose of the legislation, the government states [PDF], is to allow for independent oversight of the system, by formalising the powers and governance arrangements of the oversight authority; enable expansion of the system to state and territory governments and the private sector; provide privacy protections, consumer safeguards, and security requirements to build trust in the system; provide for a legally enforceable set of rules that set the standards for participating in the Digital Identity system, including the TDIF rules; and allow for entities to be TDIF accredited for their activities whether they are on the system or not.It is expected the legislation will consist of primary legislation with privacy and consumer safeguards and rules and policies, including accreditation standards. The government believes the legislation will leverage existing laws, not duplicate them.The legislation, it said, will have a “clearly defined scope”.It said the legislation will not limit a person to having one digital identity with one provider, nor will it be intended to regulate all digital identities and digital identity systems. It said entities decide whether they will use the system or provide services on the system.The legislation will also require entities generating, transmitting, managing, using, and reusing digital identities to provide a “seamless user experience with the digital identity system”.Rules will be enforced by the oversight authority and Information Commissioner. The oversight authority will be extended powers to suspend or revoke accreditation and access to the system, and issue directions for remedial action to address a breach.On privacy and consumer safeguards, the legislation is hoping to “protect personal information” and “ensure accessibility” for all.It will prohibit the creation of a single identifier used across the system and all government services and create a voluntary system giving users the right to create and use a digital identity, including the right to deregister and not use a digital identity at any time.It will require individuals to expressly consent before their attributes are shared with a relying party.With the DTA flagging previously its biometric testing with regards to the digital ID, the legislation is expected to limit the system to one-to-one biometric matching only and prohibit anyone other than those involved in proofing or authentication from collecting or using biometric information. It will also aim to prevent biometric information being sent to third parties not required to perform or proofing or authenticate a person and require biometric information to be deleted once it has been used for its intended purpose. However, the legislation will contain a caveat to allow users to consent to their biometric information being accessed for fraud or security investigations.The government is hoping to also prevent “data profiling”.Must read: Human Rights Commission calls for a freeze on ‘high-risk’ facial recognition”Prohibit the collection, use, and disclosure of information about a user’s behaviour on the system except to verify their identity, assist them to receive a digital service, allow them to view their own behaviour (for example, a dashboard), or support identity fraud management,” the government writes.It will also enforce record-keeping of metadata and activity logs for a minimum seven years to maintain the system’s integrity, and to allow for fraud or criminal investigations. With talk around the digital ID’s use in verifying an individual is of age before accessing online services such as pornography, the legislation will set a minimum age of 15 years for the use of a digital identity.Meanwhile, a liability and redress framework will aim to ensure accredited participants are not liable for loss or damage suffered “provided they were acting in good faith, and complied with the legislative rules and requirements relating to the system”.It will also establish a mechanism available to users affected by a cybersecurity incident, identity theft, inappropriate disclosure of information, or system failure.Submissions to the consultation close 15 July 2021.Elsewhere in Canberra, the government has funded an additional 51 projects, totalling AU$27 million, in the latest round of the Regional Connectivity Program (RCP).The funding contributes to co-funding from the applicant, and from other levels of government, as well as industry and other organisations. The first tranche of the RCP funded, in theory, 81 projects.The program, previously pinned at AU$60 million available, formed part of the government’s response to the 2018 Regional Telecommunications Review.”The federal government’s total contribution of AU$117.4 million (GST inclusive) towards round 1 RCP projects will deliver total new investment of more than AU$232 million (GST inclusive) together with co-contributions from the funding recipients, state and territory governments and other third parties, including local governments, regional businesses, and community development organisations,” a statement from Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts Paul Fletcher and Minister for Regional Health, Regional Communications and Local Government Mark Coulton said.HERE’S MORE ON DIGITAL IDResearchers want Australia’s digital ID system thrown out and redesigned from scratchResearchers find myGovID is subject to an easily-implemented code proxying attack, while the digital identity solution from Australia Post does not possess a fundamental requirement for accreditation.Minister says law enforcement to be denied access in new digital ID legislationAlso flags privately-owned PharmacyID and payments company Eftpos as eager to provide identity services once the Bill becomes law.Canberra considers its digital ID for use in verifying age before accessing pornThe Australian government has said the Digital Transformation Agency is well placed to explore extending the digital identity program to online age verification to access things such as pornography. More

Image: Getty Images
US President Joe Biden has revoked and replaced various executive orders made by former President Donald Trump that had sought to block apps like AliPay, TikTok, and WeChat from US app stores. When Trump made those orders, he had labelled the Chinese apps as national security threats with respect to  information and communications technology, and services supply chain. With the latest directive, AliPay, CamScanner, TikTok, QQ Wallet, SHAREit, Tencent QQ, VMate, WeChat, WeChat Pay, and WPS Office are no longer set to be banned. The Trump administration ordered for TikTok to be banned unless it was divested to a US company. After months of negotiations following the Trump order, TikTok had come to a preliminary deal to be sold to Oracle and Walmart. That deal was then shelved indefinitely, however, after Biden came into office, according to The Wall Street Journal.While TikTok is no longer set to be banned, the executive order does not address the potential sale of the app, which is currently being reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. In addition to being a replacement of Trump’s executive orders, the new directive also sets new criteria that the Commerce Department must use to review whether apps tied to foreign adversaries pose an “unacceptable risk,” according to a White House fact sheet. The criteria for determining if an app poses an “unacceptable risk” is if it is owned, controlled, or managed by persons that support foreign adversary military or intelligence activities, or are involved in malicious cyber activities, or involve applications that collect sensitive personal data, the fact sheet said.

The executive order also directs the Commerce Department to work with other agencies to come up with recommendations to protect US consumer data from foreign adversaries, as well as make recommendations for additional executive and legislative actions to further address the risk associated with foreign adversary connected software applications. Related Coverage More

RSA Security is spinning out its Fraud & Risk Intelligence business into a new standalone company called Outseer. The new organization will be led by CEO Reed Taussig.

Outseer said it will continue to build out RSA’s anti-fraud and payments security portfolio, which includes fraud detection and management, and payments authentication services. All of the RSA-branded products are being renamed to match Outseer’s new corporate identity. Outseer said its product portfolio is supported by deep investments in data and science, including a global network of verified fraud and transaction data, and a risk engine that the company said delivers 95% fraud detection rates.  Payments fraud and risk tend to receive less public attention than topics such as ransomware and cybersecurity, but payment card schemes, issuing banks, and commerce providers have experienced a record number of fraudulent transactions and orchestrated attacks in payment networks during the pandemic.Outseer plans to work its portfolio toward the EMV 3-D Secure payment standard and incorporate new technology integrations across its payments and commerce ecosystem. EMV 3-D Secure is a messaging protocol that enables consumers to authenticate card-not-present (CNP) e-commerce transactions with their card issuer.”RSA’s Fraud & Risk Intelligence business provides Outseer with a solid foundation to address the urgent need to protect both the customers and the revenues of the digital economy,” said Taussig. “At Outseer, we want to liberate the world from digital transaction fraud and fill an apparent gap in the market by delivering science-driven solutions for 3-D Secure payment authentication and account monitoring. 3D Secure Card Not Present Authentication is a well-proven solution in Europe and in our view, will be the dominant solution to combat card not present fraud as we move into the future.”RSA announced in 2020 that it would operate as an independent company via acquisition by Symphony Technology Group, valuing the company at $2.1 billion. More

Entropy is a term used for the statistical uncertainty of a piece of data, one example of which are the randomly generated numbers that are used in cryptographic keys, and that are hard to crack to the extent that such strings are truly hard for a computer to predicts.  Arguing that today’s encryption isn’t unpredictable enough, New York-based startup Qrypt on Wednesday formally publicly announced its intent to offer “entropy-as-a-service,” or EaaS, to provide businesses as well as individuals with truly random number generation capabilities.  “Everyone has an inherent right to privacy; we believe that right is under attack by Russia, China, any bad actor you want to pick,” said founder and CEO Kevin Chalker in an interview with ZDNet via Zoom.  Qrypt’s main claim is that the current regime of cryptographic tools, based on things such as the RSA algorithm and the public-private key exchange, is already vulnerable because the pseudo-random number generation capabilities of such a network can be cracked with sufficient compute power.  Down the road, quantum computing should have sufficient power to routinely crack the pseudorandom code, a looming risk that has already been widely discussed as the extinction of conventional cryptographic tools. Also: Quantum computers could crack today’s encrypted messages. That’s a problem In cases where codes can’t be broken at the moment, malicious types who steal data will park that data in its encrypted form on disk, as a harvest awaiting the day when the quantum tools are available to decrypt the data.

The inspiration comes from the one-time pad cryptographic cipher generators used for covert operations. While full details of Qrypt’s approach are still somewhat limited, basically, Qrypt partners with a Barcelona-based, privately held company called Quside Technologies, for quantum-based random number generation.  Quside, which spun out of Barcelona’s Institute of Photonic Sciences, uses semiconductors lasers to generate interference patterns that can be sampled to produce a random number.  Sampling a real-world physical process in this way, such as the interference pattern of photons, is generally regarded as the most secure way to arrive at a truly random “seed” for a random-number generator. The quantum nature of such measurement is deemed more random than a roll of the die, which is a classical mechanical operation.  The Qrypt EaaS, using appliances connected together in a distributed fashion, take the Quside seed and use it to generate what’s called a source of entropy, raw randomness, that can then be used to generate a one-time pad at each communicating party’s computer on either end of an otherwise non-secure communications line. The service is an alternative to quantum key distribution, or QKD.  Where a QKD network has two key generator devices connected over a trusted communications line, Qrypt’s EaaS network distributes the raw random sources digitally to the users in a distributed fashion, and then runs a so-called BLAST algorithm that generates the one-time pads simultaneously on either end of the communication.  The BLAST algorithm was developed by Yevgeniy Dodis, the firm’s chief cryptographer, who is a fellow with the International Association for Cryptologic Research and who has numerous publications on techniques of things such as key exchange.  CEO Chalker previously was a CIA “operations officer,” a covert operative in the field within what’s called clandestine services, focused on Iran. Qrypt’s chief technical officer is Denis Mandich, also formerly with the CIA, also a covert operative, focused on Russia. Both individuals make the point that the Qrypt EaaS is designed to bring to the retail/consumer market the same level of cryptographic strength for secure messaging and other applications.  “We’re trying to democratize that same level of security that we relied on for all these years,” said Chalker.  “We can do it right now with commercial, off-the-shelf infrastructure, you don’t have to build anything new, completely digitally, from here to the other side of the world,” said Mandich. Existing encryption, notes Mandich, can be broken even without quantum, especially in cases of poor practices in the use of one-time pads. “If you re-use one-time pads, or your don’t have really random one-time pads, they become breakable.”  The Qrypt appliances are placed in data centers around the world, “geographically, politically distributed,” said Mandich.  Qrypt has been funded by Chalker out-of-pocket thus far. He declined to disclose that total funding amount.  Qrypt’s service is available for trial via a free account on the Web site that invites one to set up a free account.  In addition to Qrypt’s data sheet on its Web site, additional interesting material can be found in two U.S. patents issued to the firm in 2019. One, “End-to-end double-ratchet encryption with epoch key exchange,” credited to Mandich and Dodis, describes an algorithm for distributing to two communicating devices an asymmetric key-generation function.  A second patent, “Multi-source entropy and randomness aggregation and distribution network,” describes an as-a-service network for distributing entropy. 

Tech Earnings More

An emerging ransomware operation appears to have links to a veteran cyber criminal group in the space – while also attempting to piggyback on the reputation of one of the most notorious forms ransomware.Prometheus ransomware first emerged in February this year and not only do the criminals behind it encrypt networks and demand a ransom for the decryption key, they also use double extortion tactics and will threaten to leak stolen data if their demands for cryptocurrency aren’t met.Analysis by cybersecurity researchers at Palo Alto Networks details how, like many ransomware operations in 2021, the group runs like a professional enterprise, even going so far as to refer to victims of cyber attacks as “customers” and communicating with them via a ticketing system.The cyber criminals behind Prometheus claim to have hit over 30 victims around the world so far, including organisations in North America, Europe and Asia. Sectors Prometheus claims to have hit include government, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, consulting, agriculture, healthcare services, insurance agencies, energy and law. However, only four victims have paid to date, according to the group’s leak site which claims that a Peruvian agricultural company, a Brazilian healthcare services provider and transportation and logistics organizations in Austria and Singapore paid ransoms, Palo Alto said.One notable trait of Prometheus is that it uses the branding of another ransomware group across its infrastructure, claiming to be ‘Group of REvil’ on the ransom note and across its communication platforms.SEE: A winning strategy for cybersecurity (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic)  

REvil is one of the most infamous and most successful ransomware operations, claiming a string of high profile victims. The FBI recently attributed the ransomware attack against meat processor JBS to the group, which is believed to work out of Russia.However, despite the use of REvil’s name, there doesn’t appear to be any link between the two operations – and it’s likely that Prometheus is attempting to use the name of an established criminal operation in order to increase their chance of receiving a ransom payment.”Since there is no solid connection other than the reference of the name, our running theory is that they are leveraging the REvil name to increase their chances of securing payment. If you search for REvil, the headlines are going to speak for themselves versus searching Prometheus ransomware where probably nothing major would’ve come up,” Doel Santos, threat intelligence analyst at Unit 42, Palo Alto Networks told ZDNet. Researchers note the operation does have strong links to Thanos ransomware.Thanos ransomware first emerged for sale on underground forums in the first half of 2020 but the behaviour and infrastructure of it is almost identical to Prometheus, which could suggest that Thanos and Prometheus are run by the same group of criminals.See: This company was hit by ransomware. Here’s what they did next, and why they didn’t pay upWhile researchers haven’t been able to identify the exact method Prometheus is delivered to victims, Thanos is known to be distributed with the aid of buying access to networks which have previously been compromised with malware, brute-force attacks against commonly used passwords and phishing attacks.After compromising victims with ransomware, Prometheus tailors the ransom depending on the target, with demands ranging from $6,000 to $100,000 – a figure that’s doubled if the victim doesn’t pay within a week. The ransom is demanded in Monero, rather than Bitcoin, a decision likely made because Monero transactions are more difficult to track than Bitcoin – so there’s less chance of the group being detected or their assets seized by law enforcement operations. It’s believed that the group is still active and will continue as long as attacks remain profitable.”As long as Prometheus keeps targeting vulnerable organizations, it will keep running campaigns,” said Santos. “Going forward we would expect this group to keep adding victims to their leak site, and change their techniques as needed,” he added.Given how Prometheus and other ransomware groups often rely on breaching user accounts to embed themselves on networks, one thing which organisations can do to help protect against ransomware attacks is use multi-factor authentication.Deploying this to all users provides an additional barrier to attacks, making it harder for cyber criminals to exploit stolen credentials as a starting point for ransomware campaigns.MORE ON CYBERSECURITY More

Content delivery network (CDN) Fastly has explained its major outage yesterday, which knocked out many of the world’s top websites, from Amazon to ZDNet.  The breadth of the outage demonstrated once again how CDNs, which bring content to end users from globally distributed points of presence (POPs), can also be a single point of failure. 

ZDNet Recommends

Fastly has POPs across the globe running on solid state drives (SSDs) that make up its “edge cloud” for delivering web content from data centers that are closer to end users. Instead of accessing a website’s servers directly, users access a cache of the site from cache storage maintained by the CDN.  SEE: Network security policy (TechRepublic Premium) Its global outage yesterday briefly prevented web users from accessing The Guardian, the Financial Times, The New York Times, ZDNet, Reddit, Twitch, Amazon, PayPal, and the UK government website gov.uk.  Nick Rockwell, Fastly’s senior vice president of engineering, said the hour-long outage happened because a customer pushed a configuration change that triggered the undiscovered software bug.  Rockwell doesn’t explain what exactly happened, other than saying that on May 12, the company deployed a software update that “introduced a bug that could be triggered by a specific customer configuration under specific circumstances.”

Then yesterday, June 8, a customer pushed a configuration change that met the conditions to trigger the bug, which caused 85% of its network to return errors. End users visiting affected sites saw the “Error 503 Service Unavailable” error message in browsers.  Fastly yesterday said that issue was causing customers to see an “increased origin load and lower Cache Hit Ratio (CHR)”. CHR is a measure of how many requests a cache can deliver compared to how many requests it receives. “Once the immediate effects were mitigated, we turned our attention to fixing the bug and communicating with our customers. We created a permanent fix for the bug and began deploying it at 17:25,” said Rockwell.  The disruption began at 9:47 UTC.  Fastly is the seventh largest CDN provider, following Google, Cloudflare, F5, Amazon CloudFront, and jsDelivr, according to Datanyze. SEE: GDPR: Fines increased by 40% last year, and they’re about to get a lot bigger The pitfall of CDNs is that when they go down, as Cloudflare did in 2019 – due to a buggy configuration change – users can’t access websites that rely on the CDN to deliver content.  Rockwell recognized that the company should have seen this bug before the customer accidentally triggered it. He also apologized to customers.  “Even though there were specific conditions that triggered this outage, we should have anticipated it. We provide mission-critical services, and we treat any action that can cause service issues with the utmost sensitivity and priority,” he wrote.   “We apologize to our customers and those who rely on them for the outage and sincerely thank the community for its support.” More

Apple has agreed to a multi-million dollar settlement to resolve a lawsuit with a woman whose explicit photos were leaked online by employees repairing her iPhone. 

The woman, a past student at the University of Oregon, handed over the mobile device in 2016 for repair for an unspecified issue at a Pegatron facility in California, as reported by The Telegraph. Pegatron has acted as a long-term supplier and partner with the iPhone and iPad maker. At the time, two employees of the firm allegedly accessed explicit images and video stored on the device. This content was then posted on the woman’s Facebook account, to appear as if she shared it.  The explicit material has been described as “photos of her in various stages of undress and a sex video.” The woman was only made aware of the technicians’ activities when a contact alerted her to the leak, and she was able to take the images and video down.  However, the damage was done and the student then launched a claim against Apple for privacy violations and the emotional distress caused. 

Apple reportedly settled for a multi-million dollar amount which was reimbursed by Pegatron. According to reports, the agreement includes a clause to prevent the woman from disclosing the value of the settlement.  The tech giant also apparently demanded confidentiality, but a legal battle between Pegatron and its insurer — which disputed the amount requested for reimbursement — resulted in Apple’s role being identified.  The technicians have been fired.  Apple said in a statement that upon learning of the incident and “egregious violation” of data privacy and security policies, “we took immediate action and have since continued to strengthen our vendor protocols.” Previous and related coverage Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More