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Attackers specifically craft business email compromise (BEC) and phishing emails using a combination of malicious techniques, expertly selected from an ever-evolving bag of tricks. They’ll use these techniques to impersonate a person or business that’s well-known to the targeted recipient and hide their true intentions, while attempting to avoid detection by security controls.
As a result of the requisite expertise needed to combat these complex attacks, email security has traditionally been siloed away in disparate teams and security controls. Practitioners are buried under an ever-growing pile of RFCs, requiring extensive domain-specific knowledge, unending vigilance, and meticulous manual interventions, such as tweaking trust levels and cultivating allow/block lists with IPs, domains, senders, and vendors.
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is leading the industry forward with a major shift, elevating email security into a new era; where administration will consist of merely associating specific business risks with the appropriate due diligence response required to remediate against them.
Email Threat Defense has introduced a new Threat Profile that provides the customer with deep insights into the specific business risks of individual email threats and the confidence to act quickly. This new visualization is powered by a new patent-pending threat detection engine. This engine leverages intelligence distilled from Talos global-scale threat research across a massive volume of email traffic into machine learning, behavioral modeling, and natural language understanding.
The detection engine granularly identifies specific underlying threat techniques utilized in the message by the attacker. The identified techniques provide the full context of the threat message as the supporting foundation for the engine to determine threat categorization and the specific risk to the business. These malicious Techniques, together with the threat category and specific business risk, are used to populate the Threat Profile.
Each message’s Threat Profile is identified in real-time, automatically remediated per policy, and surfaced directly to the operator in the message detail views, providing deep contextual insights into the attacker’s intent and the associated risks to the business. As part of a larger Extended Detection and Response (XDR) strategy, the actionable intelligence in Email Threat Defense is integrated with the wider enterprise orchestration of security controls via SecureX, easing the operational burden by decreasing your mean time to remediation (MTTR).
Email Threat Defense delivers a distinct understanding of malicious messages, the most vulnerable targets within the organization, and the most effective means of protecting them from phishing, scams, and BEC attacks. With a clean design and core focus on simplifying administration, Email Threat Defense deploys in minutes to strengthen protection of your existing Microsoft 365 Exchange Online platform against the most advanced email threats.
For more information, visit the Cisco Secure Email product pages, read the Email Threat Defense data sheet, and view the demo video below.
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InfraGard, a program run by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to build cyber and physical threat information sharing partnerships with the private sector, this week saw its database of contact information on more than 80,000 members go up for sale on an English-language cybercrime forum. Meanwhile, the hackers responsible are communicating directly with members through the InfraGard portal online — using a new account under the assumed identity of a financial industry CEO that was vetted by the FBI itself.
On Dec. 10, 2022, the relatively new cybercrime forum Breached featured a bombshell new sales thread: The user database for InfraGard, including names and contact information for tens of thousands of InfraGard members.
The FBI’s InfraGard program is supposed to be a vetted Who’s Who of key people in private sector roles involving both cyber and physical security at companies that manage most of the nation’s critical infrastructures — including drinking water and power utilities, communications and financial services firms, transportation and manufacturing companies, healthcare providers, and nuclear energy firms.
“InfraGard connects critical infrastructure owners, operators, and stakeholders with the FBI to provide education, networking, and information-sharing on security threats and risks,” the FBI’s InfraGard fact sheet reads.
In response to information shared by KrebsOnSecurity, the FBI said it is aware of a potential false account associated with the InfraGard Portal and that it is actively looking into the matter.
“This is an ongoing situation, and we are not able to provide any additional information at this time,” the FBI said in a written statement.
KrebsOnSecurity contacted the seller of the InfraGard database, a Breached forum member who uses the handle “USDoD” and whose avatar is the seal of the U.S. Department of Defense.
USDoD’s InfraGard sales thread on Breached.
USDoD said they gained access to the FBI’s InfraGard system by applying for a new account using the name, Social Security Number, date of birth and other personal details of a chief executive officer at a company that was highly likely to be granted InfraGard membership.
The CEO in question — currently the head of a major U.S. financial corporation that has a direct impact on the creditworthiness of most Americans — told KrebsOnSecurity they were never contacted by the FBI seeking to vet an InfraGard application.
USDoD told KrebsOnSecurity their phony application was submitted in November in the CEO’s name, and that the application included a contact email address that they controlled — but also the CEO’s real mobile phone number.
“When you register they said that to be approved can take at least three months,” USDoD said. “I wasn’t expected to be approve[d].”
But USDoD said that in early December, their email address in the name of the CEO received a reply saying the application had been approved (see redacted screenshot to the right). While the FBI’s InfraGard system requires multi-factor authentication by default, users can choose between receiving a one-time code via SMS or email.
“If it was only the phone I will be in [a] bad situation,” USDoD said. “Because I used the person[‘s] phone that I’m impersonating.”
USDoD said the InfraGard user data was made easily available via an Application Programming Interface (API) that is built into several key components of the website that help InfraGard members connect and communicate with each other.
USDoD said after their InfraGard membership was approved, they asked a friend to code a script in Python to query that API and retrieve all available InfraGard user data.
“InfraGard is a social media intelligence hub for high profile persons,” USDoD said. “They even got [a] forum to discuss things.”
To prove they still had access to InfraGard as of publication time Tuesday evening, USDoD sent a direct note through InfraGard’s messaging system to an InfraGard member whose personal details were initially published as a teaser on the database sales thread.
That InfraGard member, who is head of security at a major U.S. technology firm, confirmed receipt of USDoD’s message but asked to remain anonymous for this story.
USDoD acknowledged that their $50,000 asking price for the InfraGard database may be a tad high, given that it is a fairly basic list of people who are already very security-conscious. Also, only about half of the user accounts contain an email address, and most of the other database fields — like Social Security Number and Date of Birth — are completely empty.
“I don’t think someone will pay that price, but I have to [price it] a bit higher to [negotiate] the price that I want,” they explained.
While the data exposed by the infiltration at InfraGard may be minimal, the user data might not have been the true end game for the intruders.
USDoD said they were hoping the imposter account would last long enough for them to finish sending direct messages as the CEO to other executives using the InfraGuard messaging portal. USDoD shared the following redacted screenshot from what they claimed was one such message, although they provided no additional context about it.
A screenshot shared by USDoD showing a message thread in the FBI’s InfraGard system.
USDoD said in their sales thread that the guarantor for the transaction would be Pompompurin, the administrator of the cybercrime forum Breached. By purchasing the database through the forum administrator’s escrow service, would-be buyers can theoretically avoid getting ripped off and ensure the transaction will be consummated to the satisfaction of both parties before money exchanges hands.
Pompompurin has been a thorn in the side of the FBI for years. Their Breached forum is widely considered to be the second incarnation of RaidForums, a remarkably similar English-language cybercrime forum shuttered by the U.S. Department of Justice in April. Prior to its infiltration by the FBI, RaidForums sold access to more than 10 billion consumer records stolen in some of the world’s largest data breaches.
In November 2021, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Pompompurin abused a vulnerability in an FBI online portal designed to share information with state and local law enforcement authorities, and how that access was used to blast out thousands of hoax email messages — all sent from an FBI email and Internet address.
Update, 10:58 p.m. ET: Updated the story after hearing from the financial company CEO whose identity was used to fool the FBI into approving an InfraGard membership. That CEO said they were never contacted by the FBI.
Update, 11:15 p.m. ET: The FBI just confirmed that it is aware of a potential false account associated with the InfraGard portal. The story now includes their full statement.
This is a developing story. Updates will be noted here with timestamps.
In our last blog, we gave a rundown of what the Telecommunications (Security) Act (TSA) is, why it’s been introduced, who it affects, when it starts, and how firms can prepare. Here, we take a closer look into the themes introduced by the Act, explore how the telecoms industry can explore zero trust to further improve its security posture, and outline the benefits that can be gained when complying.
When the Telecoms Security Act (TSA) was introduced, it was labelled as ‘one of the strongest telecoms security regimes in the world, a rise in standards across the board, set by the government rather than the industry’ by Matt Warman, former Minister of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. The industry is certainly feeling the impending impact of the act – with one industry pundit at an event we ran recently describing it as a ‘multi-generational change’ for the sector.
One of the headline grabbers stemming from the Act are the associated fines. With the new powers granted to it by the Act, Ofcom now has the responsibility to oversee operators’ security policies and impose fines of up to 10 percent of turnover or £100,000 a day in case operators don’t comply or the blanket ban of telecoms vendors such as Huawei. Sounds like the typical ‘stick’-based costly compliance messaging that no-one particularly wants to hear, right? But what if the TSA had some ‘carrot’-based business benefits that are much less discussed?
The TSA introduces a new security framework for the UK telecoms sector to ensure that public telecommunications providers operate secure and resilient networks and services and manage their supply chains appropriately. ny of the themes introduced in the code of practice can be aligned with the themes in a zero trust security model, which are also a focus for CISOs.
Zero trust security is a concept (also known as ‘never trust, always verify’) which establishes trust in users and devices through authentication and continuous monitoring of each access attempt, with custom security policies that protect every application. At Duo, our approach to zero trust is:
A crucial point to note here: much like a solution that claims to help with all aspects of the TSA, telecom providers should be wary of any vendor who claims to have a zero-trust product. Both are far much bigger than any ‘silver bullet’ solution purports to offer. But there is a good reason a zero-trust framework has been mandated by the US White House for all federal agencies, and recommended by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
As well as helping to mitigate the significant cyber risks presented to the telecoms industry, a zero-trust strategy provides many business benefits. Our recent Guide to Zero Trust Maturity shows that:
A robust zero-trust security program includes phishing-resistant multi factor authentication (MFA), access controls for devices and applications, risk-signalling, dynamic authentication, firewalls, analytics, web monitoring and more. As I said previously there is no one answer to zero trust, or indeed the TSA, but getting the basics right like strong MFA, single sign on (SSO) and device trust are an easy and effective way to get started.
The TSA will be a huge undertaking for industry, but it is important to focus on the benefits such a wide-reaching set of regulatory rules will inevitably result in. As another guest from our recent event put it: ‘the TSA is full of the latest and modern best practice around security, so the aim really is to raise the tide and all ships, which can only be a good thing.’
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Cybersecurity has changed dramatically since the dawn of firewalls in the 1980s. But despite all the upheaval and innovation, they have stood the test of time. The basic concept of allowing “good” traffic to flow and blocking the bad stuff remains essential. Of course, it looks much different now than in the era of Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Kids.
Today’s workers, data, and applications are everywhere, and firewalls must be as well. There’s no longer just one finite space to defend. With the recent explosion of hybrid work and the rapid transition to multi-cloud environments, it’s imperative that firewalls evolve alongside a business — and be ready for whatever’s next.
So, can your firewall grow with you? Or is it stuck in the age of Hair Bands and He-Man?
The past few years have brought about a keen focus on resilience — remaining strong, yet adaptable in the face of unexpected and even unfathomable challenges. But an organization cannot persevere without security being at the forefront of any resilience strategy.
96% of executives consider security resilience highly important to their business.
– Cisco Security Outcomes Report
Firewalls are a critical foundation for building powerful, resilient security infrastructure. Yet contemporary firewalls have to be and do more than one thing. Cisco Secure Firewall delivers world-class security controls wherever you need them, with unified visibility and consistent policy management and enforcement.
As a worldwide leader in networking and security, Cisco is better positioned than any other vendor to incorporate effective firewall controls into your infrastructure — anywhere your data and applications reside. According to a study conducted on behalf of Cisco by Forrester Research, Cisco Secure Firewall customers can:
Cisco Secure Firewall delivers on several key aspects necessary for security resilience: visibility, flexibility, intelligence, integration, and unified controls. Together, they enable organizations to close gaps, see and detect threats faster, and adapt quickly to change.
Watch video: Cisco Secure Firewall Overview
With most of today’s internet traffic being encrypted, security measures can become obsolete without the ability to see into all traffic, encrypted or not. While decryption is commonplace, it is simply not feasible in many cases, and can have serious impacts on network performance. With its Encrypted Visibility Engine, Cisco Secure Firewall leverages deep packet inspection (DPI) to identify potentially malicious applications in encrypted traffic without offloading to another appliance and degrading performance.
Due to a highly distributed network and workforce, as well as constantly maturing attacks, the ability to see into every corner of your ecosystem is crucial. Cisco Secure Firewall blends multiple technologies to detect and block more threats in more places. By combining traditional firewall capabilities with URL filtering, application visibility and control, malware defense, and Snort 3 intrusion prevention, organizations gain robust protection against even the most sophisticated threats.
Cisco offers a wide variety of firewalls for defending the different areas of your network — including physical, virtual, and cloud-native — as well as cloud-delivered. We can secure businesses and offices of all types and sizes, from the data center to the cloud.
Cisco Secure also provides flexible firewall management options, enabling you to deploy and operate your security architecture in a way that is tailored to the unique requirements of your NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps teams. No matter which firewall models you choose or environments you operate in (physical or virtual), you can use a single, simplified application to manage all your firewalls from one place.
The threat landscape changes every day, and our defenses must change with it. Cisco Talos is one of the largest and most trusted threat intelligence groups in the world. Its in-depth insight into global threats, and advanced research and analysis, enable us to quickly incorporate protections for new threats into our products via hourly updates. That way, Cisco customers are continuously safeguarded from both known and unknown threats.
“When the Log4j vulnerability was discovered, we were protected before we even completed our patching,” said Paul Smith, network administrator at Marian University. “As a result of automated hourly updates from Talos, Cisco Secure Firewall had an early detection signature, so it was already blocking the concerning traffic from infiltrating our network.”
Another differentiator for Cisco Secure Firewall is that it’s part of an integrated security ecosystem. With Cisco SecureX, organizations can correlate data from multiple technologies and unleash XDR capabilities for a centralized, automated response to threats.
“At the end of the day, it’s about protecting the data, and we do that with the integration of [Cisco] Secure Endpoint, Umbrella, and Secure Firewall, which combine to protect the networks, endpoints, workstations, and servers — and all of this can be correlated easily within SecureX.”
– Elliott Bujan, IT Security Manager, Marine Credit Union
The new Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center leverages the cloud to facilitate agile, simplified operations for a distributed, hybrid network. It provides efficiency at scale by allowing security teams to swiftly deploy and update policies across their environment with just a few clicks, as well as take coordinated actions to prioritize, investigate, and remediate threats within a single pane of glass. And with a cloud-delivered management center, Cisco regularly updates its software behind the scenes, which reduces risk, maintains compliance, and gives your team more time to focus on other priorities.
Additionally, Cisco Secure Firewall dynamically shares policies driven by intelligence from Cisco Secure Workload, which uses microsegmentation to prevent lateral movement of attackers throughout a network. This allows security policies to be harmonized across both the network and application environments, boosting efficacy and fostering collaboration between teams.
These are just some examples of what makes up a comprehensive, modernized firewall. But Cisco is not stopping there. We continue to innovate to meet evolving business needs. For example, the new enterprise-class 3100 Series firewalls are specially designed for hybrid work, supporting more end users with high-performance remote access for increased organizational flexibility.
Additionally, Cisco Secure Firewall serves as a key component of advanced security strategies including XDR, SASE, and zero trust, helping businesses keep pace with accelerating digital transformation. According to Cisco’s most recent Security Outcomes Report, organizations with mature XDR, SASE, and zero trust implementations all boast significantly higher levels of security resilience.
Fuel and energy retailer, Ampol, uses a variety of Cisco technologies, including Secure Firewall, to segment and safeguard its network. “Cisco was an integral part of our success during COVID-19 as we were able to serve customers without interruption in stores,” said Amir Yassa, senior project specialist at Ampol. “Deploying our retail resilience project, mostly comprised of Cisco products, enabled us to reduce our IT-related incidents by 90%, thus enabling us to serve our customers better now and into the future.”
Is your firewall keeping up with future demands, or is it still stuck in the 80s teasing its hair? If it’s the latter, we can help. Visit cisco.com/go/firewall and learn how to refresh your firewall.
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Today, we released the latest issue of The Domain Name Industry Brief, which shows that the third quarter of 2022 closed with 349.9 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains, a decrease of 1.6 million domain name registrations, or 0.4%, compared to the second quarter of 2022.1,2 Domain name registrations have increased by 11.5 million, or 3.4%, year over year.1,2
Check out the latest issue of The Domain Name Industry Brief to see domain name stats from the third quarter of 2022, including:
• Top 10 Largest TLDs by Number of Reported Domain Names
• Top 10 Largest ccTLDs by Number of Reported Domain Names
• ngTLDs as Percentage of Total TLDs
• Geographical ngTLDs as Percentage of Total Corresponding Geographical TLDs
To see past issues of The Domain Name Industry Brief, please visit verisign.com/dnibarchives.
The post Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief: 349.9 Million Domain Name Registrations in the Third Quarter of 2022 appeared first on Verisign Blog.
Ransomware groups are constantly devising new methods for infecting victims and convincing them to pay up, but a couple of strategies tested recently seem especially devious. The first centers on targeting healthcare organizations that offer consultations over the Internet and sending them booby-trapped medical records for the “patient.” The other involves carefully editing email inboxes of public company executives to make it appear that some were involved in insider trading.
Alex Holden is founder of Hold Security, a Milwaukee-based cybersecurity firm. Holden’s team gained visibility into discussions among members of two different ransom groups: CLOP (a.k.a. “Cl0p” a.k.a. “TA505“), and a newer ransom group known as Venus.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) warned that Venus ransomware attacks were targeting a number of U.S. healthcare organizations. First spotted in mid-August 2022, Venus is known for hacking into victims’ publicly-exposed Remote Desktop services to encrypt Windows devices.
Holden said the internal discussions among the Venus group members indicate this gang has no problem gaining access to victim organizations.
“The Venus group has problems getting paid,” Holden said. “They are targeting a lot of U.S. companies, but nobody wants to pay them.”
Which might explain why their latest scheme centers on trying to frame executives at public companies for insider trading charges. Venus indicated it recently had success with a method that involves carefully editing one or more email inbox files at a victim firm — to insert messages discussing plans to trade large volumes of the company’s stock based on non-public information.
“We imitate correspondence of the [CEO] with a certain insider who shares financial reports of his companies through which your victim allegedly trades in the stock market, which naturally is a criminal offense and — according to US federal laws [includes the possibility of up to] 20 years in prison,” one Venus member wrote to an underling.
“You need to create this file and inject into the machine(s) like this so that metadata would say that they were created on his computer,” they continued. “One of my clients did it, I don’t know how. In addition to pst, you need to decompose several files into different places, so that metadata says the files are native from a certain date and time rather than created yesterday on an unknown machine.”
Holden said it’s not easy to plant emails into an inbox, but it can be done with Microsoft Outlook .pst files, which the attackers may also have access to if they’d already compromised a victim network.
“It’s not going to be forensically solid, but that’s not what they care about,” he said. “It still has the potential to be a huge scandal — at least for a while — when a victim is being threatened with the publication or release of these records.”
The Venus ransom group’s extortion note. Image: Tripwire.com
Holden said the CLOP ransomware gang has a different problem of late: Not enough victims. The intercepted CLOP communication seen by KrebsOnSecurity shows the group bragged about twice having success infiltrating new victims in the healthcare industry by sending them infected files disguised as ultrasound images or other medical documents for a patient seeking a remote consultation.
The CLOP members said one tried-and-true method of infecting healthcare providers involved gathering healthcare insurance and payment data to use in submitting requests for a remote consultation on a patient who has cirrhosis of the liver.
“Basically, they’re counting on doctors or nurses reviewing the patient’s chart and scans just before the appointment,” Holden said. “They initially discussed going in with cardiovascular issues, but decided cirrhosis or fibrosis of the liver would be more likely to be diagnosable remotely from existing test results and scans.”
While CLOP as a money making collective is a fairly young organization, security experts say CLOP members hail from a group of Threat Actors (TA) known as “TA505,” which MITRE’s ATT&CK database says is a financially motivated cybercrime group that has been active since at least 2014. “This group is known for frequently changing malware and driving global trends in criminal malware distribution,” MITRE assessed.
In April, 2021, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how CLOP helped pioneer another innovation aimed at pushing more victims into paying an extortion demand: Emailing the ransomware victim’s customers and partners directly and warning that their data would be leaked to the dark web unless they can convince the victim firm to pay up.
Security firm Tripwire points out that the HHS advisory on Venus says multiple threat actor groups are likely distributing the Venus ransomware. Tripwire’s tips for all organizations on avoiding ransomware attacks include:
While the above tips are important and useful, one critical area of ransomware preparedness overlooked by too many organizations is the need to develop — and then periodically rehearse — a plan for how everyone in the organization should respond in the event of a ransomware or data ransom incident. Drilling this breach response plan is key because it helps expose weaknesses in those plans that could be exploited by the intruders.
As noted in last year’s story Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups, experts say the biggest reason ransomware targets and/or their insurance providers still pay when they already have reliable backups of their systems and data is that nobody at the victim organization bothered to test in advance how long this data restoration process might take.
“Suddenly the victim notices they have a couple of petabytes of data to restore over the Internet, and they realize that even with their fast connections it’s going to take three months to download all these backup files,” said Fabian Wosar, chief technology officer at Emsisoft. “A lot of IT teams never actually make even a back-of-the-napkin calculation of how long it would take them to restore from a data rate perspective.”
Ampol has been Australia’s leading transport fuel company since 1900. What began over 125 years ago is now an organization that powers a country, operating 1,500 retail stores and stations across ANZ, plus 89 depots for refining and importing fuels and lubricants, and 8,200 employees throughout Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Singapore. And while Ampol’s history goes back a century, they are a modern organization, using internet of things (IoT) technology across operational and retail locations, with sensors on everything from electric vehicle charging units to fuel tank gauges to transportation trucks to refrigeration units inside retail stores.
As a critical energy provider to a country of over 25 million people, Ampol’s security needed to match its evolving infrastructure. As Satish Chowdhary, Network Enterprise Architect, said, “At Ampol, we have implemented sensor technology across our network: from gauges in the fuel tanks to monitor fuel quality and quantity to sensors that monitor the temperature in various refrigerators across our retail sites to ensure goods stay chilled. It’s critical to manage these devices effectively and securely, and that’s where Cisco comes in…With IoT, a major security risk is posed by dodgy legacy devices left unpatched and vulnerable within your network. Cisco’s TrustSec and VLAN segregation automatically isolate vulnerable devices, not exposing the rest of the network to risks from untrusted devices.”
In addition to securing the IoT that let’s Ampol monitor and manage its critical operations, Cisco was able to create a comprehensive security environment that solved for their three strategic goals.
“Three key components of our cyber-resilient strategy were isolation, orchestration, and rapid recovery. Cisco SecureX nailed all three providing us a single interface to see all security events, and malicious files, thus expediting how fast we can isolate events and recover,” Chowdhary explained. “Before using Cisco Secure, security was a hindrance, not an enabler for our IT team, employees, and even customers,” he added.
In fact, Cisco Secure helped Ampol improve their security posture so much that they were able to quickly pivot during the early days of the pandemic.
“When Covid triggered supply challenges during lockdowns, people not being able to access groceries turned to their local service station convenience stores to get what they needed. For Ampol, maintaining that supply continuity was critical, not just for our business, but for the customers who were relying on us to get their supplies. And all of this was done when many employees were now having to work remotely… This was possible only because we could maintain our revamped locations, staff, clients, and business partners safe on our network – while still maintaining speed and efficiency. Cisco Secure was the ticket to Ampol’s resilience in the face of major change,” Chowdhary said.
In addition to enabling flexibility against supply chain fluctuations, Ampol is readily protected against threats, cyberattacks, and other vulnerabilities. Their Cisco security solution included:
“The major force for our Cisco Secure investment was simplification by integrating the entire Security portfolio…If we ever happen to have a cyber-attack, we can quickly find it and contain it,” Chowdhary said, adding, “The greatest outcome of using Cisco Secure is simplicity at its core. We achieved great efficiency integration, better visibility, and context that’s not hidden across five, ten, or fifteen consoles, and ultimately, greater security outcomes.”
To find out how else Cisco Secure is helping protect Ampol against sophisticated threats and other challenges, read the full Ampol case study.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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A recent scoop by Reuters revealed that mobile apps for the U.S. Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were integrating software that sends visitor data to a Russian company called Pushwoosh, which claims to be based in the United States. But that story omitted an important historical detail about Pushwoosh: In 2013, one of its developers admitted to authoring the Pincer Trojan, malware designed to surreptitiously intercept and forward text messages from Android mobile devices.
Pushwoosh says it is a U.S. based company that provides code for software developers to profile smartphone app users based on their online activity, allowing them to send tailor-made notifications. But a recent investigation by Reuters raised questions about the company’s real location and truthfulness.
The Army told Reuters it removed an app containing Pushwoosh in March, citing “security concerns.” The Army app was used by soldiers at one of the nation’s main combat training bases.
Reuters said the CDC likewise recently removed Pushwoosh code from its app over security concerns, after reporters informed the agency Pushwoosh was not based in the Washington D.C. area — as the company had represented — but was instead operated from Novosibirsk, Russia.
Pushwoosh’s software also was found in apps for “a wide array of international companies, influential nonprofits and government agencies from global consumer goods company Unilever and the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to the politically powerful U.S. gun lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and Britain’s Labour Party.”
The company’s founder Max Konev told Reuters Pushwoosh “has no connection with the Russian government of any kind” and that it stores its data in the United States and Germany.
But Reuters found that while Pushwoosh’s social media and U.S. regulatory filings present it as a U.S. company based variously in California, Maryland and Washington, D.C., the company’s employees are located in Novosibirsk, Russia.
Reuters also learned that the company’s address in California does not exist, and that two LinkedIn accounts for Pushwoosh employees in Washington, D.C. were fake.
“Pushwoosh never mentioned it was Russian-based in eight annual filings in the U.S. state of Delaware, where it is registered, an omission which could violate state law,” Reuters reported.
Pushwoosh admitted the LinkedIn profiles were fake, but said they were created by a marketing firm to drum up business for the company — not misrepresent its location.
Pushwoosh told Reuters it used addresses in the Washington, D.C. area to “receive business correspondence” during the coronavirus pandemic. A review of the Pushwoosh founder’s online presence via Constella Intelligence shows his Pushwoosh email address was tied to a phone number in Washington, D.C. that was also connected to email addresses and account profiles for over a dozen other Pushwoosh employees.
Pushwoosh was incorporated in Novosibirsk, Russia in 2016.
The dust-up over Pushwoosh came in part from data gathered by Zach Edwards, a security researcher who until recently worked for the Internet Safety Labs, a nonprofit organization that funds research into online threats.
Edwards said Pushwoosh began as Arello-Mobile, and for several years the two co-branded — appearing side by side at various technology expos. Around 2016, he said, the two companies both started using the Pushwoosh name.
A search on Pushwoosh’s code base shows that one of the company’s longtime developers is a 41-year-old from Novosibirsk named Yuri Shmakov. In 2013, KrebsOnSecurity interviewed Shmakov for the story, “Who Wrote the Pincer Android Trojan?” wherein Shmakov acknowledged writing the malware as a freelance project.
Shmakov told me that, based on the client’s specifications, he suspected it might ultimately be put to nefarious uses. Even so, he completed the job and signed his work by including his nickname in the app’s code.
“I was working on this app for some months, and I was hoping that it would be really helpful,” Shmakov wrote. “[The] idea of this app is that you can set it up as a spam filter…block some calls and SMS remotely, from a Web service. I hoped that this will be [some kind of] blacklist, with logging about blocked [messages/calls]. But of course, I understood that client [did] not really want this.”
Shmakov did not respond to requests for comment. His LinkedIn profile says he stopped working for Arello Mobile in 2016, and that he currently is employed full-time as the Android team leader at an online betting company.
In a blog post responding to the Reuters story, Pushwoosh said it is a privately held company incorporated under the state laws of Delaware, USA, and that Pushwoosh Inc. was never owned by any company registered in the Russian Federation.
“Pushwoosh Inc. used to outsource development parts of the product to the Russian company in Novosibirsk, mentioned in the article,” the company said. “However, in February 2022, Pushwoosh Inc. terminated the contract.”
However, Edwards noted that dozens of developer subdomains on Pushwoosh’s main domain still point to JSC Avantel, an Internet provider based in Novosibirsk, Russia.
Pushwoosh employees posing at a company laser tag event.
Edwards said the U.S. Army’s app had a custom Pushwoosh configuration that did not appear on any other customer implementation.
“It had an extremely custom setup that existed nowhere else,” Edwards said. “Originally, it was an in-app Web browser, where it integrated a Pushwoosh javascript so that any time a user clicked on links, data went out to Pushwoosh and they could push back whatever they wanted through the in-app browser.”
An Army Times article published the day after the Reuters story ran said at least 1,000 people downloaded the app, which “delivered updates for troops at the National Training Center on Fort Irwin, Calif., a critical waypoint for deploying units to test their battlefield prowess before heading overseas.”
In April 2022, roughly 4,500 Army personnel converged on the National Training Center for a war games exercise on how to use lessons learned from Russia’s war against Ukraine to prepare for future fights against a major adversary such as Russia or China.
Edwards said despite Pushwoosh’s many prevarications, the company’s software doesn’t appear to have done anything untoward to its customers or users.
“Nothing they did has been seen to be malicious,” he said. “Other than completely lying about where they are, where their data is being hosted, and where they have infrastructure.”
Edwards also found Pushwoosh’s technology embedded in nearly two dozen mobile apps that were sold to cities and towns across Illinois as a way to help citizens access general information about their local communities and officials.
The Illinois apps that bundled Pushwoosh’s technology were produced by a company called Government 311, which is owned by Bill McCarty, the current director of the Springfield Office of Budget and Management. A 2014 story in The State Journal-Register said Gov 311’s pricing was based on population, and that the app would cost around $2,500 per year for a city with approximately 25,000 people.
McCarty told KrebsOnSecurity that his company stopped using Pushwoosh “years ago,” and that it now relies on its own technology to provide push notifications through its 311 apps.
But Edwards found some of the 311 apps still try to phone home to Pushwoosh, such as the 311 app for Riverton, Ill.
“Riverton ceased being a client several years ago, which [is] probably why their app was never updated to change out Pushwoosh,” McCarty explained. “We are in the process of updating all client apps and a website refresh. As part of that, old unused apps like Riverton 311 will be deleted.”
Edwards said it’s far from clear how many other state and local government apps and Web sites rely on technology that sends user data to U.S. adversaries overseas. In July, Congress introduced an amended version of the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2023, which included a new section focusing on data drawn from online ad auctions that could be used to geolocate individuals or gain other information about them.
Business Insider reports that if this section makes it into the final version — which the Senate also has to pass — the Office for the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will have 60 days after the Act becomes law to produce a risk assessment. The assessment will look into “the counterintelligence risks of, and the exposure of intelligence community personnel to, tracking by foreign adversaries through advertising technology data,” the Act states.
Edwards says he’s hoping those changes pass, because what he found with Pushwoosh is likely just a drop in a bucket.
“I’m hoping that Congress acts on that,” he said. “If they were to put a requirement that there’s an annual audit of risks from foreign ad tech, that would at least force people to identify and document those connections.”
Authored by Dennis Pang
What is antivirus? That’s a good question. What does it really protect? That’s an even better question.
Over the years, I’ve come to recognize that different people define antivirus differently. Some see it as way to keep hackers from crashing their computers. Others see it as a comprehensive set of protections. Neither definition is entirely on the money.
With this blog, I hope to give everyone a clear definition of what antivirus does well, along with what it doesn’t do at all. The fact is that antivirus is just one form of online protection. There are other forms of protection as well, and understanding antivirus’ role in your overall mix of online protection is an important part of staying safer online.
Antivirus software protects your devices against malware and viruses through a combination of prevention, detection, and removal.
For years, people have installed antivirus software on their computers. Today, it can also protect your smartphones and tablets as well. In fact, we recommend installing it on those devices as well because they’re connected, just like a computer—and any device that connects to the internet is a potential target for malware and viruses.
In short, if it’s connected, it must get protected.
One important distinction about antivirus is its name, a name that first came into use decades ago when viruses first appeared on the scene. (More on that in a bit.) However, antivirus protects you from more than viruses. It protects against malware too.
Malware is an umbrella term that covers all types of malicious software regardless of its design, intent, or how its delivered. Viruses are a subset of malicious software that infects devices and then replicates itself so that it can infect yet more devices.
So while we popularly refer to protection software as antivirus, it protects against far more than just viruses. It protects against malware overall.
Now here’s where some confusion may come in. Some antivirus apps are standalone. They offer malware protection and that’s it. Other antivirus apps are part of comprehensive online protection software, which can include several additional far-reaching features that can protect your privacy and your identity.
The reason why antivirus gets paired up with other apps for your privacy and identity is because antivirus alone doesn’t offer these kinds of protections. Yet when paired with things like a password manager, credit monitoring, identity theft coverage, and a VPN, to name a few, you can protect your devices—along with your privacy and identity. All the things you need to stay safer online.
In short, antivirus doesn’t cut it alone.
With that, let’s take a closer look at what malware and viruses really are—how they evolved, and what they look like today, along with how antivirus protects you against them.
Viruses have a long history. And depending on how you define what a virus is, the first one arguably took root in 1971—more than 50 years ago.
It was known as Creeper, and rather than being malicious in nature, it was designed to show how a self-replicating program could identify other connected devices on a network, transfer itself to them, and find yet more devices to repeat the process. Later, the same programmer who created a follow-on version of Creeper developed Reaper, a program that could remove the Creeper program. In a way, Reaper could be considered the first piece of antivirus software.
From there, it wasn’t until the 1980’s that malware started affecting the broader population, a time when computers became more commonplace in businesses and people’s homes.
At first, malware typically spread by infected floppy disks, much like the “Brain” virus in 1986. While recognized today as the first large-scale computer virus, its authors say they never intended it to work that way. Rather they say they created Brain as an anti-piracy measure to protect their proprietary software from theft. However, Brain got loose. It went beyond their software and affected computers worldwide. Although not malicious or destructive in nature, Brain most certainly put the industry, businesses, and consumers on notice.
Computer viruses became a thing.
Another piece of malware that got passed along via floppy disks was the “PC Cyborg” attack that targeted the medical research community in and around 1989. There the malware would lie in wait until the user rebooted their computer for the 90th time. And on that 90th boot, the user was presented with a digital ransom note like the one here:
Along with that note, PC Cyborg encrypted the computer’s files, which would only get unencrypted if the victim paid a fee—making PC Cyborg the first widely recognized form of ransomware.
Shortly thereafter, the internet started connecting computers, which opened millions of doors for hackers as people went online. Among the most noteworthy was 1999’s “Melissa” virus, which spread by way of infected email attachments and overloaded hundreds of corporate and governmental email servers worldwide.
It was quickly followed in 2000 by what’s considered the among the most damaging malware to date—ILOVEYOU, which also spread by way of an attachment, this one posing as a love letter. Specifically, it was a self-replicating worm that installed itself on the victim’s computer where it destroyed some information and stole other information, then spread to other computers. One estimate puts the global cost of ILOVEYOU at $10 billion and further speculated that it infected 10% of the world’s internet-connected computers at the time.
With the advent of the internet, malware quickly established itself as a sad fact of connected life. Today, McAfee registers an average of 1.1 million new malicious programs and potentially unwanted apps (PUA) each day, which contributes to the millions and millions of malicious programs already in existence.
Apart from the sheer volume of malware out there today, another thing that distinguishes today’s malware from early malware attacks—they’re created largely for profit.
We can think of it this way:
Today’s malware is far more than an annoyance or headache. It can lead to follow-on attacks that target your finances, your identity, your privacy, or a mix of all three.
So with a million or so new threats coming online each day, and millions more out there already, how does antivirus protect you from malware? It blocks, detects, and removes malware. And it does so in a couple of ways:
However, as mentioned earlier, antivirus provides only one aspect of online protection today. While it protects your devices and the data that’s on them, your privacy and identity can come under attack as well. So while antivirus alone can protect you from malware, it can’t prevent other forms of online crime like identity theft, phishing attacks designed to steal personal information, or attacks on your accounts, to name a few of the many other types of threats out there.
Yet comprehensive online protection can.
Comprehensive online protection software like ours offers antivirus, along with specific services and features that protect your privacy and identity online as well. It gives you dozens of other features like identity theft coverage & restoration, personal data cleanup, security freezes, and an online protection score that shows you just how safe you are, along with suggestions that can make you safer still.
So while protecting your devices with antivirus is a great start, it’s only one part of staying safer online. Including privacy and identity protection rounds out your protection overall.
The post What is Antivirus and What Does It Really Protect? appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Have you ever been browsing online and clicked a link or search result that took you to a site that triggers a “your connection is not private” or “your connection is not secure” error code? If you’re not too interested in that particular result, you may simply move on to another result option. But if you’re tempted to visit the site anyway, you should be sure you understand what the warning means, what the risks are, and how to bypass the error if you need to.
A “your connection is not private” error means that your browser cannot determine with certainty that a website has safe encryption protocols in place to protect your device and data. You can bump into this error on any device connected to the internet — computer, smartphone, or tablet.
So, what exactly is going on when you see the “this connection is not private” error?
For starters, it’s important to know that seeing the error is just a warning, and it does not mean any of your private information is compromised. A “your connection is not private” error means the website you were trying to visit does not have an up-to-date SSL (secure sockets layer) security certificate.
Website owners must maintain the licensing regularly to ensure the site encryption capabilities are up to date. If the website’s SSL certificate is outdated, it means the site owners have not kept their encryption licensing current, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they are up to no good. Even major websites like LinkedIn have had momentary lapses that would throw the error. LinkedIn mistakenly let their subdomain SSL certificates lapse.
In late 2021, a significant provider of SSL certificates, Let’s Encrypt, went out of business. When their root domain officially lapsed, it created issues for many domain names and SSL certificates owned by legitimate companies. The privacy error created problems for unwitting businesses, as many of their website visitors were rightfully concerned about site security.
While it does not always mean a website is unsafe to browse, it should not be ignored. A secure internet connection is critical to protecting yourself online. Many nefarious websites are dangerous to visit, and this SSL certificate error will protect you from walking into them unaware.
SSL certification standards have helped make the web a safer place to transact. It helps ensure online activities like paying bills online, ordering products, connecting to online banking, or keeping your private email accounts safe and secure. Online security continues to improve with a new Transport Layer Security (TLS) standard, which promises to be the successor protocol to SSL.
So be careful whenever visiting sites that trigger the “connection is not private” error, as those sites can potentially make your personal data less secure and make your devices vulnerable to viruses and malware.
Note: The “your connection is not private” error is Google Chrome‘s phrasing. Microsoft Edge or Mozilla Firefox users will instead see a “your connection is not secure” error as the warning message.
If you feel confident that a website or page is safe, despite the warning from your web browser, there are a few things you can do to troubleshoot the error.
Remember, you are taking your chances anytime you ignore an error. As we mentioned, you could leave yourself vulnerable to hackers after your passwords, personal information, and other risks.
Your data and private information are valuable to hackers, so they will continue to find new ways to try and procure it. Here are some ways to protect yourself and your data when browsing online.
As we continue to do more critical business online, we must also do our best to address the risks of the internet’s many conveniences.
A comprehensive cybersecurity tool like McAfee+ Ultimate can help protect you from online scams, identity theft, and phishing attempts, and ensure you always have a secure connection. McAfee helps keep your sensitive information out of the hands of hackers and can help you keep your digital data footprints lighter with personal data cleanup.
With McAfee’s experts on your side, you can enjoy everything the web offers with the confidence of total protection.
The post “This Connection Is Not Private” – What it Means and How to Protect Your Privacy appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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