Information Technology

Cyber criminals are constantly adapting techniques to distribute phishing emails, but simply having your email address or other personal details exposed in a data breach makes you five times more likely to be targeted.
Google teamed with Stanford University to analyse over a billion of phishing emails cyber criminals attempted to send to Gmail users between April and August last year and found that having personal information leaked in a third-party data breach following a hacking incident drastically increases the odds of being targeted with phishing emails, compared with users who haven’t had their details published.
Other factors that might make it more likely for you to be hit with phishing according to Google’s model include;

Where you live also: in Australia, users faced 2X the odds of attack compared to the US, even though the US is the most most popular target by volume (not per capita). 

The odds of experiencing an attack was 1.64X higher for 55- to 64-year-olds, compared to 18- to 24-year-olds.

Mobile-only users experienced lower odds of attack: 0.80X compared to multi-device users. Google said this “may stem from socioeconomic factors related to device ownership and attackers targeting wealthier groups.”

Google says it prevents 99 percent  of the over one hundred million emails containing spam, phishing links and malware sent out cyber criminals each day from reaching inboxes – but there are common tricks which attackers use in an effort to bypass protections.
This involves a reliance on fast-churning campaigns, with certain email templates only sent out over a brief period. Sometimes campaigns can last less than a day before cyber criminals move on to attempting to use a different template for email scams.
SEE: Security Awareness and Training policy (TechRepublic Premium)
However, the research paper also notes that phishing is an ever-evolving area and continued study is required to ensure users are as protected as much as possible from attacks.

“Our measurements act as a first step towards understanding how to evaluate personal security risks. Ultimately, such estimates would enable automatically identifying, recommending, and tailoring protections to those users who need it most,” says the paper.
While the users targeted by phishing emails tends to change on a week to week basis, the pattern of attacks remains largely the same.
Geography also plays a large role in whether cyber criminals will attempt a phishing with users in the US the most popular targets, accounting for 42 percent of attacks. That’s followed by the UK, which is targeted by one in ten phishing attacks and Japan, which is targeted by one in twenty phishing attacks.
While most attackers don’t localise their efforts, using English in messages sent to countries around the world, there are regions where the emails are tailored towards particular languages. For example, 78 percent of the attacks targeting users in Japan occurred in Japanese, while 66 percent of attacks targeting Brazilian users occurred in Portuguese.
Google notes that Gmail’s phishing and malware are turned on by default, but also encourage users to use the Security Checkup function for personalised advice on how to keep their inbox safe from phishing and other malicious attacks.
It’s also recommended that enterprise users deploy Google’s advanced phishing and malware protection.
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Eight men were arrested across England and Scotland this week as part of a coordinated crackdown against a SIM swapping gang that has hijacked the identities and social media profiles of US celebrities.

The UK National Crime Agency, which made the arrests on Tuesday, said the gang targeted well-known sports stars, musicians, and influencers, primarily located in the US.
“These arrests follow earlier ones in Malta (1) and Belgium (1) of other members belonging to the same criminal network,” Europol, which coordinated the multi-national investigation, said today.
Officials said this gang engaged in SIM swapping attacks, where they tricked US mobile operators into assigning a celebrity’s phone number to a new SIM card under the attacker’s control.
While they had access to the victim’s phone number, the SIM swappers would reset passwords and bypass two-factor authentication on the victim’s accounts.
“This enabled them to steal money, bitcoin and personal information, including contacts synced with online accounts,” the NCA said.
Europol said the gang stole more than $100 million worth of cryptocurrency using this method.

“They also hijacked social media accounts to post content and send messages masquerading as the victim,” UK investigators added.
The investigation involved authorities in the US, the UK, Canada, Malta, and Belgium and got underway in 2020, after the infamous Twitter hack, where SIM swapping was also involved.
Former telco employee also charged in the US in unrelated case
Authorities previously noted a rise in SIM swapping-related incidents, as criminal groups find the technique easier to carry out when compared to orchestrating highly-technical phishing and malware campaigns.
The practice usually relies on tricking telco call center staff into assigning a phone number to a new SIM card, but it often also relies on rogue employees inside telephone companies willing to cooperate with criminal gangs.
One such employee was charged in the US on Monday. The US Department of Justice indicted Stephen Daniel Defiore for his role in helping SIM swappers steal the identities of at least 19 people while working as an employee for an unnamed US phone company between August 2017 and November 2018.
US authorities said Defiore received $2,325 in a series of twelve payments for his role in the scheme. If found guilty, he now faces a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to $250,000. More

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Wall Street’s acceptance of data breaches and investor “fatigue” has numbed the reaction of traders following a cybersecurity incident, new research suggests.

Over the past decade, the rush to harness data to improve business operations, management, and customer relationships did not occur in tandem with improving cybersecurity hygiene in order to protect this data — and organizations are still courting huge risks to their share prices to this day as a result. 
According to IBM’s latest Cost of a Data Breach report, the enterprise sector can expect an average bill of $3.86 million — but in the case of large security incidents involving consumer records, this may rise to up to $392 million — to remedy a breach. 
Some companies will hide their head in the sand when told of a data breach, whether caused by open buckets, intrusion, insider operations, or accidental information loss. 
However, for businesses trading on public stock market platforms, failing to recognize a data breach has occurred or trying to hide it can have real, long-term repercussions. 
This week, Comparitech published its annual report on how data breaches can impact share prices which revealed that cybersecurity incidents do not have the same ramifications for the stock market as they did close to a decade ago.
This year’s research has tracked 34 companies and 40 publicly disclosed data breaches. The companies were chosen based on data breaches involving at least one million records, subsequent public disclosure, and an active listing on the NYSE. 

There are some limitations of the study, including possible sample sizes based on Comparitech’s criteria, as well as the impact of financial reports and the issue of class-action settlements. 
“If a data breach leaks particularly damaging information that ultimately incurs financial damages to a company’s customers, and the company was shown not to have adequately protected the information leaked in that breach, then customers often sue [..],” the researchers note. “These usually result in settlements, in which the company forks out millions of dollars to reimburse customers for damages. This does not always happen and the amount paid out varies, so we simply don’t have enough data to fit a practical model that shows how these settlements affect stock prices.”
However, the study still reveals some interesting trends. The share price of a breached company now falls by an average of 3.5% within 14 days of disclosure and will hit its lowest point after roughly 110 market days. A prior analysis conducted in 2019 suggested that stock prices would drop by an average of 7.27%.
Underperformance on the Nasdaq is within the range of -3.5% on average, and 21 out of 40 breaches caused worse stock performance in the six months following a breach in comparison to six months prior. On average, share prices grew by 2.6% prior to a breach and dropped 3% afterward.
One notable trend is that “older breaches” were once met with a more immediate, negative reaction by Wall Street. Share prices fell more substantially and according to the research, stocks took an average of 109 days to recover when a breach occurred in 2012 and earlier. 
For data breaches occurring between 2013 and 2016, drops in share price were “less severe” than in the earlier category, and there was less than 1% difference in value between the sixth months prior to and after a security incident’s disclosure. 
When it comes to breaches reported in 2017 and after, it took roughly 100 days for prices to recover and general performance was only “slightly poorer” in the six months after a breach. 
In today’s marketplace, technology and financial services companies suffered the most after a data breach, whereas e-commerce and social media companies are “the least affected,” according to Comparitech. 
“Breaches that leak highly sensitive information like credit card and social security numbers see more immediate drops in share price performance on average than companies that leak less sensitive info, but in the long-term, they do not necessarily suffer more,” the researchers noted. 
Data breach impacts on company stock prices do, it seems, diminish over time as memory fades and there are many other factors that can also negatively influence an organization’s stock price — such as the disruption caused by COVID-19, unrelated lawsuits, and management changes.
Previous and related coverage
Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

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There are a lot of security keys out there, but OnlyKey is the perfect choice for professionals.
It looks like a regular security key, but under epoxy are some really neat features.
The only downside — it takes some time to figure out how it works.
Must read: Better than the best password: How to use 2FA to improve your security

OK, so what is OnlyKey?
OnlyKey sort of looks like a regular USB-A security key. It’s small, has some gold-colored touchpads, has a lot of epoxy on it, and a connector on one end.
But a closer look uncovers some differences.

First off, there’s a 6-digit keypad. This is key — pardon the pun — to much of what makes the OnlyKey different.
That keypad allows OnlyKey to be protected by a PIN code, and for a second account to be set up, along with a self-destruct PIN code.
These PINs add an additional layer of security, preventing the key from being useful to someone who finds it.
In all, you can store up to 24 passwords, up to 24 usernames/URLs, and up to 24 OTP accounts on a single OnlyKey.
Beyond that, OnlyKey supports FIDO U2F and Yubikey OTP 2 factor authentication for an unlimited number of sites.
The OnlyKey is also open source, has upgradable firmware, and can also be backed up (in case you lose the key and need to restore the data onto another).
Your OnlyKey can be set up using either an app (Windows, Mac, and Linux), or you can choose an app-free quick setup.
There’s also very in-depth documentation that guides you through all the features.
Each key also comes with a removable black silicone protective sleeve.
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Now, there’s a lot to an OnlyKey. Far more than just plugging it in and using it, like you do with a YubiKey. This is both a pro and a con. For ease of use (and not having users wipe the key by using the self-destruct PIN instead of the access PIN), YubiKey has the edge. But for professionals who take security seriously, and don’t mind putting in the time into learning how to use it, this key comes highly recommended.

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Cyberwar and the Future of Cybersecurity
Today’s security threats have expanded in scope and seriousness. There can now be millions — or even billions — of dollars at risk when information security isn’t handled properly.
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Guest editorial by Haroon Meer. Meer is the founder of Thinkst, the company behind the well regarded Thinkst Canary. Haroon has contributed to several books on information security and has published a number of papers and tools on various topics related to the field. Over the past decade (or two) he has delivered research, talks, and keynotes at conferences around the world.
The recent SolarWinds mega-hack has managed to grab mainstream media headlines around the world but the more I read, the more I think the press coverage has buried the lede. 
The incident gets called a “supply chain” attack which hints at war-time tactics and, I’m willing to bet, will launch a dozen VC-backed startups. People are (rightfully) worried about the knock-on effect since the SolarWinds attackers had access to several other development-houses and could have also poisoned those wells. 
Must read:
This is definitely scary but there’s a hard, sobering truth below that actually makes this a bit worse than you might think.
An abstracted, low resolution summary for those (very few) who haven’t paid attention to the incident:
SolarWinds make a network management product called Orion that is deployed on hundreds of thousands of networks worldwide;
Attackers broke into SolarWinds and made their way to the SolarWinds build environment;
They compromised the build pipelines, to inject malicious code into the SolarWinds update process;
Networks all over the world updated themselves with this poisoned update;
(Now-compromised) SolarWinds servers worldwide attacked internal networks of selected organizations;
Almost nobody discovered any of this for months until a security company discovered its own compromise.
Here are the four main reasons why it’s actually worse than we think.

The state of enterprise security: While we’ve made progress in some areas of information security (e.g. the degree of knowledge and skill required to exploit memory corruption bugs in modern operating systems) , enterprise security is still stuck pretty firmly in the early 2000s. An enterprise network consists of an untold number of disparate products, duct-taped together through poorly documented interfaces where often the standard for product integration is “this config works, don’t touch it!”. Any moderately skilled attacker will decimate an internal corporate network long before they are discovered, and the average time it takes to gain Domain Admin is measured in hours and days instead of weeks or months. 
Most organizations, sadly, don’t know this. They know they spend money on security and they know they see charts with red and green boxes and arrows tracking progress. Most have no clue they’re sitting ducks for average attackers of moderate skill, much less nation state-backed adversaries with unlimited resources.
Enterprise Products: Even ignoring the weakness that comes with cobbling together many products (security at the joints), most enterprise products won’t hold up very well to serious security testing. Heavyweight vendors like Adobe and Microsoft were publicly spanked into upping their game years ago, but it drops off pretty steeply after them. There’s an interesting carveout for online SaaS companies who have to build security competency since they run their own infrastructure and compromising their products is the same as compromising them. But for products installed into an Enterprise network the incentives are horribly misaligned. Owning, say, Symantec’s antivirus agent doesn’t compromise Symantec, it compromises you (who are running it) and this separation makes all the difference.
Enterprise networks have too many moving parts: The past few years have seen creative hackers exploit software in places that we never knew were running software. The Thunderstrike crew ran code on Apple VGA adaptors. Ang Cui has rwritten exploits for monitors, and office phones. Bunnie and xobs ran code on SD-cards and a number of people have now run Linux on hard drive controllers. This makes it clear that the average office network is connected to dozens and dozens of types of devices that wont ever make it into a regular audit, that are nonetheless capable of hiding attackers and injecting badness into your network. 
Third Party Risk Evaluations:  The joke going around after the incident was that SolarWinds had negatively impacted hundreds of enterprises, but definitely passed their third-party risk evaluations. It’s slightly unfair, but also true. We simply do not have a good way for most organizations to test software like this, and third-party questionnaires have always been a weak substitute. Even if we could tell whether a product was meeting a minimum security bar (using safe patterns, avoiding unsafe calls, using compile time safety nets, etc.) automatic-updates mean that tomorrow’s version of the product might not be the product you tested today. And if the vendor doesn’t know when they are compromised, then they probably won’t know when their update mechanism is used to convert their product into an attacker’s proxy.
I’m not saying that auto-updates are bad. We believe they solve important problems, but they do introduce a new set of variables that need to be considered.  
The current focus on “supply chain” security will no doubt see the VC-backed creation of next-gen start-ups claiming to solve the problem, but this part of the problem seems intractable. There’s the “easy” suite of software you know about: applications installed on your infrastructure and their dependencies.  But, for one, this ignores your vendor’s own vendors. In addition, what product is going to provide guidance on the provenance of the code running in your monitors (on processors we didn’t even know were there?). Will we examine the firmware on the microphone that people are now using for their Zoom calls? Will we re-examine it post-automatic-update? There are way too many connected pieces of code to tackle the problem from this angle.
If it takes just hours or days to successfully compromise an internal network, and if the average network has enough hiding places for skilled attackers to burrow deep, what do you think happens when attackers are allowed to move around undetected for months? 
A bunch of analysts looking at the SolarWinds incident point out (correctly) that compromised SolarWinds servers were installed on so many networks that the ripples of this attack could be crazily exponential. What this analysis misses is that the average enterprise runs dozens and dozens of SolarWinds-look-alikes everywhere.
Ransomware didn’t spring up overnight. Networks hit by ransomware were typically vulnerable for years and ran along blissfully unaware until attackers figured out a way to monetize those compromises. Most enterprises have been completely vulnerable to their vendors’ horrible insecurity too, the SolarWinds incident just published a blueprint for how to abuse it.
The situation is dire not because we are fighting some fundamental laws of physics, but because we’ve deluded ourselves for a long time. If there’s a silver lining out of this, it’s that customers will hopefully demand more from their vendors. Proof that they’ve gone through more than compliance checklists and proof that they’d have a shot at knowing when they were compromised. That more enterprises will ask “how would we fare if those boxes in the corner turned evil? Would we even know?”
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Vulnerabilities in the communications protocols used by millions of Internet of Things (IoT) and operational technology (OT) devices could allow cyber attackers to intercept and manipulate data.
The vulnerabilities in some TCP/IP stacks have been detailed by cybersecurity researchers at Forescout, who’ve dubbed the set of nine new vulnerabilities as ‘Number:Jack’.

Internet of Things

It forms ongoing research by the cybersecurity company as part of Project Memoria, an initiative examining vulnerabilities in TCP/IP stacks and how to mitigate them.
SEE: Sensor’d enterprise: IoT, ML, and big data (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic)
The latest disclosures are based around a fundamental aspect of TCP communication in embedded devices: Initial Sequence Number (ISN) generation. These ISNs are designed to ensure that every TCP between two computers or other internet-connected devices is unique and that third parties can’t interfere with or manipulate connections.
In order to ensure this, ISNs need to be randomly generated so an attacker can’t guess it, hijack it or spoof it. It’s a fundamental of computer security that was already known in the 90s – but when it comes to security of IoT devices, researchers found that this old vulnerability was present as numbers weren’t completely random, so the pattern of ISN numbers in these TCP communications could be predicted.
“This stuff has been mostly fixed in Windows and Linux and the typical IT world. But when you look into the IoT world, this stuff is happening again,” Daniel dos Santos, research manager at Forescout told ZDNet.

“It’s not difficult for us or an attacker to find this type of vulnerability because you can clearly see the way the numbers are generated by the stack is predictable,” he added.
By predicting an existing TCP connection, attackers could close it, essentially causing a denial-of-service attack by preventing the data from being transferred between devices. Alternatively, they could hijack it and inject their own data into the session, through which it’s possible to intercept unencrypted traffic, add file downloads to serve malware or use HTTP responses to direct the victim to a malicious website. It’s also possible for attackers to abuse TCP connections of the embedded devices to bypass authentication protocols, which potentially provide attackers with additional access to networks.
All of the vulnerabilities were discovered and disclosed to the relevant vendors and maintainers of affected TCP/IP stacks by October 2020.
TCP/IP stacks found to contain the vulnerabilities include several open-source stacks analysed in Forescout’s previous study, including uIP, FNET, picoTCP, Nut/Net, cycloneTCP and uC/TCP-IP. Vulnerabilities have also been discovered in Siemens’ Nucleus NET, Texas Instruments’ NDKTCPIP and Microchip’s MPLAB Net.
The majority of of the vendors have patched to protect devices against the vulnerabilities or are in the process of doing so, although researchers note that one hasn’t responded to the disclosure at all. ZDNet has attempted to contact each of the vendors detailed in the research paper for a response.
Forescout hasn’t publicly identified the exact devices that rely on the nine stacks found to have vulnerabilities in order to prevent them becoming potential victims of attacks. However, they do note that systems including medical devices, wind turbine monitoring systems and storage systems are all reliant on systems known to use the examined stacks.
SEE: What’s in your network? Shadow IT and shadow IoT challenge technology sensibilities
To help protect against attacks, Forescout Research Labs has released an open-source script to help identify stacks discovered to have vulnerabilities as part of Project Memoria.
It’s recommended that if these vulnerabilities are uncovered on the network that security patches are applied to prevent attackers from taking advantage. It’s also suggested that when it isn’t possible to patch IoT or OT devices, the affected products are segmented onto part of the network that will reduce the likelihood of compromise.
The research also serves as a reminder that, when it comes to security of IoT devices, there are security lessons to be learned from IT security that must be applied – especially when it comes to fundamentals that have been known about for decades.
“The foundations of IoT are vulnerable and not just for one vendor or specific device – it’s across several types of devices and the software components used in these devices. It’s often that they share similar types of vulnerabilities,” said dos Santos.
“The reason we’ve looked across TCP stacks is to show that history’s repeating again in several stacks. This provides proof that people should be looking at what has happened before and how that affects their operations – all down the IoT supply chain,” he added.
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