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Written by James Schmidt
Editor’s Note: We often speak of online scams in our blogs, ones that cost victims hundreds if not thousands of dollars. This account puts a face on one of those scams—along with the personal, financial, and emotional pain that they can leave in their wake. This is the story of “Meredith,” whose aunt “Leslie” fell victim to an emerging form on online elder fraud. Our thanks to James for bringing it forward and to “Meredith’s” family for sharing it, all so others can prevent such scams from happening to them.
“Embarrassing. Simply embarrassing.” She shook her head. “It’s too raw. I can’t talk about it right now. I need time.”
Her aunt had been scammed. To the tune of $100,000 dollars. My colleague—we both work in the security industry—felt a peculiar sense of loss.
“I work in this industry. I thought I’d done everything right. I’ve passed on enough warnings to my family and friends to ensure they’d avoid the fate of the scammed. Simply because I’m in this industry does not imply my circle is always aware of all the threats to them, even if I do my best to teach them.”
“My mental state, recently, borders on shame; this feeling, you know? How could someone working in my industry have something like this happen to a family member?”
I told her many people working in other industries cannot control what happens to people in their families even if people in that industry had knowledge that could have helped them or otherwise avoided a problem altogether.
“I know, but this simply should never have happened! My aunt is one of the smartest, most conscientious people I know, and she fell for this. It’s crazy and I can’t wrap my head around it.”
My colleague, let’s call her Meredith (not her real name as she’s a bit ashamed to know this happened to a family member), told me the beginnings.
Let’s call her aunt Leslie.
Her story unfolds, the overall picture a pastiche of millions of people in the United States today. Her aunt is retired, bored, lonely, and isolated. She feels adrift without something to occupy her time; she was looking for companionship, connections, someone (anyone) to talk to. Her feelings intensified during the pandemic. She morphed into perfect prey for scammers of what is now known as the “Pig Butchering Scam.”
The term “Pig Butchering” has a visceral and raw feel to it, which falls right in line with how brutal this scam can be. It’s a long con game, where the scammer befriends the victim and encourages them to make small investments through the scammer, which get bigger and bigger over time. The scammer builds trust early with what appear to be small investment wins. None of it is legit. The money goes right into the scammer’s pocket, even as the scammer shows the victim phony financial statements and dashboards to show off the bogus returns. Confidence grows. The scammer wrings even larger sums out of the victim. And then disappears.
It was a targeted attack that started innocuously enough with a “fake wrong number”. An SMS arrives. A text conversation starts. The scammer then apologizes but tells Leslie someone gave them the number to initiate the text.
The scammer then uses emotional and psychological techniques to keep Leslie hooked. “How are you, are you having a nice day?” Leslie, being bored and interested, engages willingly.
The scammer asks to talk directly, not via text: and a phone conversation ensues. The scammer proceeds to describe—in very soothing detail—what they are doing, helping people, like Leslie, invest their “hard-earned money” into something that will make them more money, to help them out in retirement.
Of course, it is too good to be true.
“The craziest part of all of this is my aunt refuses—to this day—to believe she’s been scammed!”
She still thinks this scammer is a “friend” even though the entire family is up in arms over this, all of whom beg her aunt to “open her eyes.”
“My aunt still thinks she’d going to see that money again, or even make some money, which is crazy. The scammers are so good at emotional intelligence; really leveraging heartstrings and psychological makeup of the forlorn in society. My aunt finally agreed to stop sending more money to the scammers, but only after the entire family threatened to cut her off from the rest of the family. It took a lot to get her to stop trusting the scammers.”
Meredith feels this is doubly sad as the aunt in question is not someone they’d ever imagine would in this predicament. She was always the upright one, always the diligent and hardworking and the best with money. She is smart and savvy and we could never imagine her to be taken by these people and taken so easily. It boggles the mind.”
She did start to change in the last few years. And the pandemic created a weird situation. Retirement, loneliness from loss of a partner, and the added burden of the pandemic created a perfect storm for her to open herself up to someone willingly, simply for the sake of connection.
“No one deserves this. It has rocked my family to the core. It is not only about the money, but we’ve found family bonds stretched. She believes these random people, these scammers, more than she believes her own family. Have we been neglectful of our aunt? Does she no longer put her faith in people she knows, rather gives money to complete strangers?”
Being a security professional does not provide magical protection. We are more aware of scams and scammers, and how they work, and what to look for, and we try to do all we can to keep our family aware of scams out there in the big wide world, but we are human. We fall short.
Diligence is action. Awareness is action. Education is action.
We need to be better, all of us, at socializing risky things. We need to consistently educate our family and friends to protect themselves, not only via security software (which everyone should have as default) but by providing tips and tricks and warnings for things we all need to be on the lookout. This is not a one-time thing. The cliché holds true: “If you see something say something.” Repetition helps.
In today’s world, the need for protecting people’s security, identity, and privacy is critical to keeping them safe. Scammers long stopped focusing on attacking only your computer. Now focus more than ever on YOU: your identity, your privacy, your trust. If they get you there, they soon get your money.
As for contributing factors to scammers success with their victims, such as loneliness, isolation, and boredom, they all have remedies. Make connections with your loved ones, especially those easily tagged as vulnerable, those you feel might be at risk. Reach out. It may be hard sometimes due to distance and other factors but make it a point to connect. There is a reason these scammers are succeeding. They are stepping into roles of companions to people who are desperate for connection.
Most people are greatly saddened at seeing other people being “taken.” Let’s work together to help stop the scammers.
Look out for each other, and get your people protected!
Editor’s Closing Note:
If you or someone you know suspects elder fraud, the following resources can help:
For further reading on scams and scam prevention, check out the guides in our McAfee Safety Series, which provide in-depth advice on protecting your identity and privacy—and your family from scams. They’re ready to download and share.
The post A Scam in the Family—How a Close Relative Lost $100,000 to an Elder Scam appeared first on McAfee Blog.
It’s common practice to pull down the window shades at night. Homeowners invest in high fences. You may even cover the PIN pad when you type in your secret four-digit code at ATMs. Privacy is key to going about your daily life comfortably in your surroundings. Why shouldn’t privacy also extend to your digital surroundings?
This Data Privacy Day, round out your privacy protection toolbox with McAfee’s help so you can live your best online life safely.
An easy way to instantly boost the privacy of your every online move is to always connect to a virtual private network (VPN). A VPN scrambles your connected device’s internet session, meaning that it’s impossible for a cybercriminal to eavesdrop on your online comings and goings. VPNs are especially crucial for when you connect to public Wi-Fi networks or networks for which you cannot vouch for their security. Cybercriminals often lurk on public Wi-Fi networks at hotels, coffee shops, and libraries and pounce on users who connect their devices without the protection of a VPN.
Digital privacy not only implies remaining hidden from nefarious eyes, but also from the prying eyes of pesky advertisers. A VPN can assist with that too! When you have a VPN enabled, it confuses advertisers and targeted ads. The less information they have, the more privately you can surf online.
To improve your online privacy, it’s important to first know how safe you currently are. When you can identify your weakest digital privacy habits, you can make targeted improvements to them. Luckily, McAfee Protection Score can help you do just that! Protection Score is a helpful privacy tool that rates your current digital safety. Then, based on your score, the tool offers suggestions on how to boost your score.
For instance, Protection Score searches for your personally identifiable information (PII) on the dark web. If it finds a copy of your government ID or your financial records on a dubious site, your score will tank. While it may be alarming to have a low Protection Score, you can feel good that you’re making positive waves, hopefully before a cybercriminal takes advantage of your PII and uses it to steal your identity.
There are several easy ways to boost your score that require very little effort but have a huge payoff. Connecting to a VPN and running an antivirus scan on your device are just two things you can do and each only takes a few seconds. Changing your habits and turning your online safety around doesn’t have to be overwhelming! In some cases, there are services that’ll even do the work for you, like the service we’ll talk about next.
To round out your privacy protection toolbox, consider signing up for McAfee Personal Data Cleanup. This service is a great companion to Protection Score. While Protection Score identifies all the areas where you can improve your security, Personal Data Cleanup is a service that will remove your information from the web’s riskiest sites.
Did you know that, on average, a person has their PII for sale on 31 sites? Plus, 95% of people haven’t even given their permission and have their personal information for sale on data brokerage sites. Data brokerage sites are legal and anyone can buy your information. Online advertisers are the usual clients, but a cybercriminal can jump in and buy valuable PII, as well.
You should care about data privacy every day not just when the calendar reminds you on Data Privacy Day. Take the steps and invest in the right solutions to shore up your online defenses. McAfee+ Ultimate is an all-in-one service that includes unlimited VPN, Protection Score, a full-service Personal Data Cleanup, and 13 other high-quality identity, privacy, and device security tools.
Live your online life more confidently with McAfee, knowing that cybercriminals are less likely to slip by and damage your credit, identity, or online reputation.
The post 3 Tools to Round Out Your Privacy Protection Toolbox appeared first on McAfee Blog.
When the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) announced the TLS 1.3 standard in RFC 8446 in August 2018, plenty of tools and utilities were already supporting it (even as early as the year prior, some web browsers had implemented it as their default standard, only having to roll it back due to compatibility issues. Needless to say, the rollout was not perfect).
Toward the end of 2018, EMA conducted a survey of customers regarding their TLS 1.3 implementation and migration plans. In the January 2019 report, EMA concluded:
Some participants’ organizations may find they have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a Plan B to enable TLS 1.3 without losing visibility, introducing unacceptable performance bottlenecks and greatly increasing operational overhead. Whether they feel they have no choice but to enable TLS 1.3 because major web server and browser vendors have already pushed ahead with it or because they need to keep pace with the industry as it embraces the new standard is unclear. What is clear is that security practitioners see the new standard as offering greater privacy and end-to-end data security for their organizations, and that the long wait for its advancement is over.
When EMA asked many of the same questions in an updated survey of 204 technology and business leaders toward the end of 2022, they found that nearly all the conclusions in the 2018/2019 report still hold true today. Here are the three biggest takeaways from this most recent survey:
While regulatory frameworks and vendor controls continue to push the adoption of the TLS 1.3 standard, adoption still comes with a significant price tag – one that many organizations are just not yet ready or able to consume. Technology improvements will increase rates of adoption over time, such as Cisco Secure Firewall’s ability to decrypt and inspect encrypted traffic. More recent and unique technologies, like Cisco’s encrypted visibility engine, allow the firewall to recognize attack patterns in encrypted traffic without decryption. This latter functionality preserves performance and privacy of the encrypted flows without sacrificing the visibility and monitoring that 94% of respondents were concerned about.
Readers wishing to read the full EMA report can do so here and readers wishing to learn more about Cisco Secure Firewall’s encyrpted visibility engine can do so here.
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
Most people who operate DDoS-for-hire businesses attempt to hide their true identities and location. Proprietors of these so-called “booter” or “stresser” services — designed to knock websites and users offline — have long operated in a legally murky area of cybercrime law. But until recently, their biggest concern wasn’t avoiding capture or shutdown by the feds: It was minimizing harassment from unhappy customers or victims, and insulating themselves against incessant attacks from competing DDoS-for-hire services.
And then there are booter store operators like John Dobbs, a 32-year-old computer science graduate student living in Honolulu, Hawaii. For at least a decade until late last year, Dobbs openly operated IPStresser[.]com, a popular and powerful attack-for-hire service that he registered with the state of Hawaii using his real name and address. Likewise, the domain was registered in Dobbs’s name and hometown in Pennsylvania.
Dobbs, in an undated photo from his Github profile. Image: john-dobbs.github.io
The only work experience Dobbs listed on his resume was as a freelance developer from 2013 to the present day. Dobbs’s resume doesn’t name his booter service, but in it he brags about maintaining websites with half a million page views daily, and “designing server deployments for performance, high-availability and security.”
In December 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice seized Dobbs’s IPStresser website and charged him with one count of aiding and abetting computer intrusions. Prosecutors say his service attracted more than two million registered users, and was responsible for launching a staggering 30 million distinct DDoS attacks.
The government seized four-dozen booter domains, and criminally charged Dobbs and five other U.S. men for allegedly operating stresser services. This was the Justice Department’s second such mass takedown targeting DDoS-for-hire services and their accused operators. In 2018, the feds seized 15 stresser sites, and levied cybercrime charges against three men for their operation of booter services.
Dobbs’s booter service, IPStresser, in June 2020. Image: archive.org.
Many accused stresser site operators have pleaded guilty over the years after being hit with federal criminal charges. But the government’s core claim — that operating a booter site is a violation of U.S. computer crime laws — wasn’t properly tested in the courts until September 2021.
That was when a jury handed down a guilty verdict against Matthew Gatrel, a then 32-year-old St. Charles, Ill. man charged in the government’s first 2018 mass booter bust-up. Despite admitting to FBI agents that he ran two booter services (and turning over plenty of incriminating evidence in the process), Gatrel opted to take his case to trial, defended the entire time by court-appointed attorneys.
Prosecutors said Gatrel’s booter services — downthem[.]org and ampnode[.]com — helped some 2,000 paying customers launch debilitating digital assaults on more than 20,000 targets, including many government, banking, university and gaming websites.
Gatrel was convicted on all three charges of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, including conspiracy to commit unauthorized impairment of a protected computer, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
Now, it appears Dobbs is also planning to take his chances with a jury. On Jan. 4, Dobbs entered a plea of not guilty. Neither Dobbs nor his court-appointed attorney responded to requests for comment.
But as it happens, Dobbs himself provided some perspective on his thinking in an email exchange with KrebsOnSecurity back in 2020. I’d reached out to Dobbs because it was obvious he didn’t mind if people knew he operated one of the world’s most popular DDoS-for-hire sites, and I was genuinely curious why he was so unafraid of getting raided by the feds.
“Yes, I am the owner of the domain you listed, however you are not authorized to post an article containing said domain name, my name or this email address without my prior written permission,” Dobbs replied to my initial outreach on March 10, 2020 using his email address from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
A few hours later, I received more strident instructions from Dobbs, this time via his official email address at ipstresser[.]com.
“I will state again for absolute clarity, you are not authorized to post an article containing ipstresser.com, my name, my GitHub profile and/or my hawaii.edu email address,” Dobbs wrote, as if taking dictation from a lawyer who doesn’t understand how the media works.
When pressed for particulars on his business, Dobbs replied that the number of IPStresser customers was “privileged information,” and said he didn’t even advertise the service. When asked whether he was concerned that many of his competitors were by then serving jail time for operating similar booter services, Dobbs maintained that the way he’d set up the business insulated him from any liability.
“I have been aware of the recent law enforcement actions against other operators of stress testing services,” Dobbs explained. “I cannot speak to the actions of these other services, but we take proactive measures to prevent misuse of our service and we work with law enforcement agencies regarding any reported abuse of our service.”
What were those proactive measures? In a 2015 interview with ZDNet France, Dobbs asserted that he was immune from liability because his clients all had to submit a digital signature attesting that they wouldn’t use the site for illegal purposes.
“Our terms of use are a legal document that protects us, among other things, from certain legal consequences,” Dobbs told ZDNet. “Most other sites are satisfied with a simple checkbox, but we ask for a digital signature in order to imply real consent from our customers.”
Dobbs told KrebsOnSecurity his service didn’t generate much of a profit, but rather that he was motivated by “filling a legitimate need.”
“My reason for offering the service is to provide the ability to test network security measures before someone with malicious intent attacks said network and causes downtime,” he said. “Sure, some people see only the negatives, but there is a long list of companies I have worked with over the years who would say my service is a godsend and has helped them prevent tens of thousands of dollars in downtime resulting from a malicious attack.”
“I do not believe that providing such a service is illegal, assuming proper due diligence to prevent malicious use of the service, as is the case for IPstresser[.]com,” Dobbs continued. “Someone using such a service to conduct unauthorized testing is illegal in many countries, however, the legal liability is that of the user, not of the service provider.”
Dobbs’s profile on GitHub includes more of his ideas about his work, including a curious piece on “software engineering ethics.” In his January 2020 treatise “My Software Engineering Journey,” Dobbs laments that nothing in his formal education prepared him for the reality that a great deal of his work would be so tedious and repetitive (this tracks closely with a 2020 piece here called Career Choice Tip: Cybercrime is Mostly Boring).
“One area of software engineering that I think should be covered more in university classes is maintenance,” Dobbs wrote. “Projects are often worked on for at most a few months, and students do not experience the maintenance aspect of software engineering until they reach the workplace. Let’s face it, ongoing maintenance of a project is boring; there is nothing like the euphoria of completing a project you have been working on for months and releasing it to the world, but I would say that half of my professional career has been related to maintenance.”
Allison Nixon is chief research officer at the New York-based cybersecurity firm Unit 221B. Nixon is part of a small group of researchers who have been closely tracking the DDoS-for-hire industry for years, and she said Dobbs’s claim that what he’s doing is legal makes sense given that it took years for the government to recognize the size of the problem.
“These guys are arguing that their services are legal because for a long time nothing happened to them,” Nixon said. “It’s difficult to argue something is illegal if no one has ever been arrested for it before.”
Nixon says the government’s fight against the booter services — and by extension other types of cybercrimes — is hampered by a legal system that often takes years to cycle through cybercrime cases.
“With cybercrime, the cycle between the crime and investigation and arrest can often take a year or more, and that’s for a really fast case,” Nixon said. “If someone robbed a store, we’d expect a police response within a few minutes. If someone robs a bank’s website, there might be some indication of police activity within a year.”
Nixon praised the 2022 and 2018 booter takedown operations as “huge steps forward,” but added that “there need to be more of them, and faster.”
“This time lag is part of the reason it’s so difficult to shut down the pipeline of new talent going into cybercrime,” she said. “They think what they’re doing is legal because nothing has happened, and because of the amount of time it takes to shut these things down. And it’s really a big problem, where we see a lot of people becoming criminals on the basis that what they’re doing isn’t really illegal because the cops won’t do anything.”
In December 2020, Dobbs filed an application with the state of Hawaii to withdraw IP Stresser Inc. from its roster of active companies. But according to prosecutors, Dobbs would continue to operate his DDoS-for-hire site until at least November 2022.
Two months after our 2020 email interview, Dobbs would earn his second bachelor’s degree (in computer science; his resume says he earned a bachelor’s in civil engineering from Drexel University in 2013). The federal charges against Dobbs came just as he was preparing to enter his final semester toward a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Hawaii.
Nixon says she has a message for anyone involved in operating a DDoS-for-hire service.
“Unless you are verifying that the target owns the infrastructure you’re targeting, there is no legal way to operate a DDoS-for-hire service,” she said. “There is no Terms of Service you could put on the site that would somehow make it legal.”
And her message to the customers of those booter services? It’s a compelling one to ponder, particularly now that investigators in the United States, U.K. and elsewhere have started going after booter service customers.
“When a booter service claims they don’t share logs, they’re lying because logs are legal leverage for when the booter service operator gets arrested,” Nixon said. “And when they do, you’re going to be the first people they throw under the bus.”
Authored by Dennis Pang
Online protection software. Antivirus. The two words get used interchangeably often enough. But sure enough, they’re different. And yet directly related when you take a closer look.
The term “antivirus” has been with us for decades now, dating back to the first software that was designed to prevent computers from getting malware—malicious code, like viruses, that would lock up computers, scramble data, or otherwise damage computers and the data on them. Prime examples of these early types of malware include 1999’s “Melissa” virus spreads by infected email attachments and the even more devastating “ILOVEYOU” virus that incurred billions in damages worldwide.
There’s a good reason why people default to the word “antivirus” so easily. Viruses have been on our collective minds for some time. And computer purchases have often been accompanied by the question, “Do you have antivirus for your computer?” By and large, the notion of antivirus has become pretty much engrained.
Yet look ahead to today and you can see how dramatically things have changed since those early days. We still need antivirus, that’s for sure. But it takes far more than that to live life safely online right now. And that’s where online protection software comes in.
Online protection software protects you. It includes antivirus, yet it further protects your identity and privacy in addition to your devices.
The way we use our computers, tablets, and phones nowadays shows the reason why we need such broad protection. We conduct so much of our lives online. We bank, we shop, we plan our finance online. We also run portions of our homes with smart devices and smart speakers. Increasingly, we track our health and wellness with connected devices too—like workouts on our phone and biometrics with consumer-grade and even medical-grade devices.
All of this creates data. Data about who we are, what we’re doing, when we’re doing it, how often, and where. That’s precious information. Private information. Personal information. And understandably, that needs to be protected.
Put simply, today’s threats have evolved. While viruses and malware remain a problem, today’s bad actors are out for the bigger games. Like stealing personal and financial info for identity theft. Moreover, organizations large and small collect data from your devices and the things you do on them, personal data that many share and sell for profit. Some of this data collection gets quite exacting, compiled from a broad range of public sources that can include records like bankruptcies, real estate sales, and birth records—plus private sources that can further include your shopping habits, the people you chat with, and what your daily travels look like based on location information captured from your smartphone.
If you find yourself surprised by this, you’re not alone. Tremendous volumes of data collection activity occur without people’s knowledge or consent.
Now as to why anyone would want any of that kind of data about you, consider the multi-billion-dollar industry of online data brokers. They compile thousands of data points from millions of people and put these vats of data up for sale to anyone who’ll buy them. That could be advertisers, potential employers, private investigators, and background checkers. And it could be bad actors as well who could use your own data to spam, harass, impersonate, or otherwise harm you.
Once, so many of these intrusions on our privacy and identity were difficult to spot, let alone prevent. For example, your personal info gets caught up in a data breach and winds up posted for sale on the dark web. How are you to know that before it’s too late and thief racks up umpteen charges on your debit card? Also, with dozens and dozens of data brokers out there, how do you track down which ones have information posted about you and then request to have it taken down? And what if online identity theft happens to you and you’re faced with the time and dollar costs it involves to set things right?
So just as online threats have evolved, so has online protection software. We go about so much of our day online, and online protection like our own McAfee+ helps you do it more privately and more safely. It’s quite comprehensive, and the various plans for McAfee+ include:
For certain, protections like these remain a primary focus of ours, because they protect you. And that’s who thieves and bad actors are really after—you, your information, your accounts, and even your identity. Expect us to continue to roll out more protections that look after you in this way and more.
So, while antivirus and online protection software are different, they work together. Antivirus provides strong device security, which complements the additional privacy and identity features included with online protection. That reflects how times have changed. Once it was enough to protect our devices from viruses and malware. Now we have to protect ourselves as well. Antivirus alone won’t do it, but antivirus as part of online protection will.
The post The Big Difference Between Online Protection Software and Antivirus appeared first on McAfee Blog.
It’s been my pleasure to work alongside the Centre for Information Policy Leadership (CIPL) for over a decade to advocate for privacy to be respected as a fundamental human right and managed by organizations as a business imperative. CIPL works with industry leaders, regulators, and policymakers to deliver leading practices and solutions for privacy and responsible data use around the world.
Our organizations share the belief that privacy is key to trust and provides a critical competitive advantage for those who get it right. As privacy professionals, we live and breathe the importance of privacy every day and understand its value. We must help business leaders and other key stakeholders recognize and realize data privacy’s true worth and invest appropriately — beyond just meeting legal or compliance requirements.
We’re excited today to share this new, jointly-published research report Business Benefits of Investing in Data Privacy Management Programs. This report offers insights into the material business benefits that organizations are realizing from the time, monetary, and resource investments they have applied to building their Data Privacy Management Programs (DPMPs).
Here are some of the key findings:
Customers want accountability. While organizations are expected to meet their legal, compliance, and data security requirements, customers also demand organizations to be responsible stewards of their personal data. DPMPs not only enable organizations to gain a competitive edge, they empower them to earn and grow confidence and trust in the business.
Significant benefits from investing in DPMPs. Risk mitigation and compliance benefits, like avoiding regulatory scrutiny and fines, minimizing breaches, and evading damage to reputation, are among the most substantial benefits experienced by organizations that implement a DPMP. Other tangible benefits include greater agility, operational efficiency, and making the organization more attractive to investors.
Strong, attractive returns from DPMPs. More than half of organizations surveyed experienced at least $1 million in benefit from investing in privacy over the past year, with 28% realizing over $10 million in benefit.
Widespread Use of Privacy Maturity Models. Most organizations are using some form of a privacy maturity model to show accountability, including the CIPL Accountability Framework, ISO standards, Generally Accepted Privacy Principles, and the NIST Privacy Framework, among others. And CIPL members had an average score of 4.13 out of 5 with respect to implementing the seven elements of organizational accountability as described in the report.
There is considerable interest in further understanding the value DPMPs bring to their organization. Discussions about privacy and how DPMPs positively impact organizations will continue to be an increasing area of focus for corporate leadership, including the C-suite and at the Board level.
These findings offer valuable information and perspective for those building and operationalizing privacy. We’ll continue to research and share other qualitative and quantitative evidence that highlights privacy’s growing priority and value for organizations and the individuals they serve.
Check out this report Business Benefits of Investing in Data Privacy Management Programs and more related privacy research on consumer and organizational perspectives on the Cisco Trust Center.
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
A new law portends a future where (we hope) it will be easier for us all to repair, fix, upgrade, and just tinker with things we already own
The post Now you can legally repair your tech – sort of appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
I am excited to announce the release of Cisco’s annual flagship cybersecurity report, the Security Outcomes Report, Volume 3: Achieving Security Resilience. It’s about preparing, adapting, and overcoming security challenges and threats, and an organisation’s ability to respond and emerge stronger.It’s the organization’s ability to respond to the inevitable attacks and unexpected events that come our way. In a recent webinar on Security Trends for 2023, the team spoke about laying a good foundation, and when you do, good outcomes will come from that. The Security Outcomes Report, Vol.3 looks at the most important factors that will help you build that foundation and give you the most successful security outcomes.
When it came to the top priority security outcome for organisations, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) were in line with global findings. Preventing major security incidents and losses, mitigating financial losses from security incidents, and adapting to unexpected external change events or trends, were the top three. Interestingly, security leaders prioritised mitigating financial losses whereas more technical and operational security respondents placed the highest importance on preventing major incidents. It’s of course understandable to have differing focuses at different levels but this highlights the importance of agreeing and communicating shared objectives and goals.
When asked to their rate overall resilience, respondents from France had the highest score in EMEA, closely followed by Italy and the Netherlands. Germany had the lowest score (significantly lower than the rest of region and the globe). Slightly contrary to this, when asked how confident they would be to remain resilient in a ‘worst case’ cybersecurity event, France came out second to last with only 27% saying they are strongly confident. The most confident country is the Netherlands with 54%.
Globally across all sizes of business the security outcome that organizations most struggle with is recruiting and retaining talented security personnel; the UK and Germany also noted this as top, reinforcing the ongoing battle against the security skills gap.
The report analyses the seven success factors that have shown to improve overall security resilience:
I’d encourage you to read the full report, there are some great takeaways on how organizations can improve their resilience with a focus on these areas.
The report is based on an anonymous survey 4,751 active cybersecurity experts from 26 countries. Analysis was done by the Cyentia Institute on behalf of Cisco. EMEA countries represented are France, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Spain, The Netherlands and the UK.
The report is available in English, German and French.
To learn more about the findings from this report and the Duo Trusted Access Report, join our webinar: Trust No One – Secure Everyone: EMEA insights into a Zero Trust approach
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Cisco Secure Social Channels
As the majority of the global Covid fog finally started lifting in 2022, other events – and their associated risks – started to fill the headspace of C-level execs the world over. In my role, I regularly engage with CISOs in all kinds of sectors, representatives at industry bodies, and experts at analyst houses. This gives me an invaluable macroview not only of how the last 12 months have affected organizations and what CISOs are thinking about, but also how the upcoming year is shaping up.
Using this information, last year I wrote a blog summing up the nine top of mind issues I believed will most impact CISOs as we headed into 2022. Many of them still ring true now and will continue to do so, but some new concerns have risen up the agenda. Here are the topics that I think will be top of mind in 2023, and what CISOs can do to prepare.
One aspect that has come to the fore this year is the CISO’s position as ‘guardian of customers’ private data’ in the event of a breach, and their responsibilities over the level of disclosure they later provide. And here, we are not only talking about the legal duty to inform regulators, but the implicit moral duty to inform third parties, customers, etc. From my conversations this year, this whole area is getting CISOs thinking about their own personal liability more.
As a result of this, next year we could see CISOs tightening up the disclosure decision making process, focusing on quicker and greater clarity on breach impact, and even looking to include personal liability cover in cyber insurance contracts. CISOs will also likely be pushing more tabletop exercises with the executive leadership team to ask and answer questions around what is showed, to whom, and by whom.
Cyber insurance has become a newsworthy topic over the last 24 months, mainly due to the hardening of the market, as insurance products have become less profitable for underwriters and insurers’ costs have risen. But the topic will continue to be in focus as we move into 2023, with insurers demanding greater attribution – aka the science of identifying the perpetrator of a cybercrime by comparing the evidence gathered from an attack with evidence gathered from earlier attacks that have been attributed to known perpetrators to find similarities.
The need for greater attribution stems from the news that some insurers are announcing that they are not covering nation state attacks, including major marketplace for insurance and reinsurance, Lloyd’s – a topic I covered with colleague and co-author Martin Lee, in this blog earlier in the year.
Greater preparation and crystal-clear clarity of the extent to which attribution has taken place when negotiating contracts will be an essential element for CISOs going forward. For more practical advice on this topic, I also wrote a blog on some of the challenges and opportunities within the cyber liability insurance market back in June which you can read here.
Being a CISO has never been more complex. With more sophisticated attacks, scarcity of resources, the challenges of communicating effectively with the board, and more demanding regulatory drivers like the recently approved NIS2 in the EU, which includes a requirement to flag incidents that cause a significant financial implication or operational disruption to the service or to others within 24 hours.
With so much to consider, it is vital that CISOs have a clear understanding of the core elements of what they protect. Questions like ‘where is the data?’, ‘who is accessing it?’, ‘what applications is the organization using?’, ‘where and what is in the cloud?’ will continue to be asked, with an overarching need to make management of the security function more flexible and simpler for the user. This visibility will also inevitably help ease quicker decision making and less of an operational overhead when it comes to regulatory compliance, so the benefits of asking these questions are clear.
According to Forrester, the term Zero Trust was born in 2009. Since then, it has been used liberally by different cybersecurity vendors – with various degrees of accuracy. Zero Trust implementations, while being the most secure approach a firm can take, are long journeys that take multiple years for major enterprises to carry out, so it is vital that they start as they mean to go on. But it is clear from the interactions we have had that many CISOs still don’t know where to start, as we touched on in point #3.
However, that can be easier said than done in many cases, as the principles within Zero trust fundamentally turn traditional security methods on their head, from protecting from the outside in (guarding your company’s parameter from external threats) to protecting from in the inside out (guarding individual assets from all threats, both internal and external). This is particularly challenging for large enterprises with a multitude of different silos, stakeholders and business divisions to consider.
The key to success on a zero-trust journey is to set up the right governance mode with the relevant stakeholders and communicate all changes. It is also worth taking the opportunity to update their solutions via a tech refresh which has a multitude of benefits, as explained in our most recent Security Outcomes Study (volume 2).
For more on where to start check out our eBook which explores the five phases to achieving zero trust, and if you have already embarked on the journey, read our recently published Guide to Zero Trust Maturity to help you find quick wins along the way.
As with last year, ransomware continues to be the main tactical issue and concern facing CISOs. More specifically, the uncertainty around when and how an attack could be launched against the organization is a constant threat.
Increased regulation on the payment of ransomware and declaring payments is predicted, on top of the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 (CIRCIA), the Ransom Disclosure Act, but that doesn’t help alleviate ransomware worries, especially as this will again put the CISO in the firing line.
CISOs will continue to keep a focus on the core basics to prevent or limit the impact of an attack, and again have a closer look at how any ransomware payment may or may not be paid and who will authorize payment. For more on how executives can prepare for ransomware attacks, read this blog from Cisco Talos.
Traditionally CISOs have talked about the importance of improving security awareness which has resulted in the growth of those test phishing emails we all know and love so much. Joking aside, there is increased discussion now about the limited impact of this approach, including this in depth study from the computer science department of ETH Zurich.
The study, which was the largest both in terms of scale and length at time of publishing, revealed that ‘embedded training during simulated phishing exercises, as commonly deployed in the industry today, does not make employees more resilient to phishing, but instead it can have unexpected side effects that can make employees even more susceptible to phishing’.
For the most effective security awareness, culture is key. This means that everyone should see themselves as part of the security team, like the approach that has been taken when approaching the issue of safety in many high-risk industries. In 2023, CISOs will now be keen to bring about a change to a security culture by making security inclusive, looking to create security champions within the business unit, and finding new methods to communicate the security message.
Last year, we talked about preparing for the ‘great resignation’ and how to prevent staff leaving as WFH became a norm rather than an exception. In the past year, the conversations I have had have altered to focus on how to ensure recruitment and retention of key staff within the business by ensuring they work in an environment that supports their role.
Overly restrictive security practices, burdensome security with too many friction points, and limitations around what resources and tools can be used may deter the best talent from joining – or indeed staying – with an organization. And CISOs don’t need that extra worry of being the reason behind that kind of ‘brain drain’. So, security will need to focus on supporting the introduction of flexibility and the ease of user experience, such as passwordless or risk-based authentication.
Just when we thought it was safe to go back into the organization with MFA protecting us, along came methods of attack that rely on push-based authentication vulnerabilities including:
There has been a lot written about this kind of technique and how it works (including guidance from Duo) due to some recent high-profile cases. So, in the forthcoming year CISOs will look to update their solutions and introduce new ways to authenticate, along with increased communications to users on the topic.
This issue was highlighted again this year driven by regulations in different sectors such as the UK Telecoms (Security) Act which went live in the UK in November 2022 and the new EU regulation on digital operational resilience for financial services firms (DORA), which the European Parliament voted to adopt, also in November 2022. Both prompt greater focus on compliance, more reporting and understanding the dependency and interaction organizations have with the supply chain and other third parties.
CISOs will focus on obtaining reassurance from third parties as to their posture and will receive a lot of requests from others about where their organization stands, so it is crucial more robust insight into third parties is gained, documented, and communicated.
When writing this blog, and comparing it to last year’s, the 2023 top nine topics fit into three categories. Some themes make a reappearance, seem to repeat themselves such as the need to improve security’s interaction with users and the need to keep up to date with digital change. Others appear as almost incremental changes to current capabilities such as an adjusted approach to MFA to cope with push fatigue. But, perhaps one of the most striking differences to previous years is the new focus on the role of the CISO in the firing line and the personal impact that may have. We will of course continue to monitor all changes over the year and lend our viewpoint to give guidance. We wish you a secure and prosperous new year!
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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Microsoft today released updates to fix nearly 100 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and other software. Highlights from the first Patch Tuesday of 2023 include a zero-day vulnerability in Windows, printer software flaws reported by the U.S. National Security Agency, and a critical Microsoft SharePoint Server bug that allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to make an anonymous connection.
At least 11 of the patches released today are rated “Critical” by Microsoft, meaning they could be exploited by malware or malcontents to seize remote control over vulnerable Windows systems with little or no help from users.
Of particular concern for organizations running Microsoft SharePoint Server is CVE-2023-21743. This is a Critical security bypass flaw that could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to make an anonymous connection to a vulnerable SharePoint server. Microsoft says this flaw is “more likely to be exploited” at some point.
But patching this bug may not be as simple as deploying Microsoft updates. Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, said sysadmins need to take additional measures to be fully protected from this vulnerability.
“To fully resolve this bug, you must also trigger a SharePoint upgrade action that’s also included in this update,” Childs said. “Full details on how to do this are in the bulletin. Situations like this are why people who scream ‘Just patch it!’ show they have never actually had to patch an enterprise in the real world.”
Eighty-seven of the vulnerabilities earned Redmond’s slightly less dire “Important” severity rating. That designation describes vulnerabilities “whose exploitation could result in compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of user data, or of the integrity or availability of processing resources.”
Among the more Important bugs this month is CVE-2023-21674, which is an “elevation of privilege” weakness in most supported versions of Windows that has already been abused in active attacks.
Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said although details about the flaw were not available at the time Microsoft published its advisory on Patch Tuesday, it appears this was likely chained together with a vulnerability in a Chromium-based browser such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge in order to break out of a browser’s sandbox and gain full system access.
“Vulnerabilities like CVE-2023-21674 are typically the work of advanced persistent threat (APT) groups as part of targeted attacks,” Narang said. “The likelihood of future widespread exploitation of an exploit chain like this is limited due to auto-update functionality used to patch browsers.”
By the way, when was the last time you completely closed out your Web browser and restarted it? Some browsers will automatically download and install new security updates, but the protection from those updates usually only happens after you restart the browser.
Speaking of APT groups, the U.S. National Security Agency is credited with reporting CVE-2023-21678, which is another “important” vulnerability in the Windows Print Spooler software.
There have been so many vulnerabilities patched in Microsoft’s printing software over the past year (including the dastardly PrintNightmare attacks and borked patches) that KrebsOnSecurity has joked about Patch Tuesday reports being sponsored by Print Spooler. Tenable’s Narang points out that this is the third Print Spooler flaw the NSA has reported in the last year.
Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs called special attention to CVE-2023-21563, which is a security feature bypass in BitLocker, the data and disk encryption technology built into enterprise versions of Windows.
“For organizations that have remote users, or users that travel, this vulnerability may be of interest,” Breen said. “We rely on BitLocker and full-disk encryption tools to keep our files and data safe in the event a laptop or device is stolen. While information is light, this appears to suggest that it could be possible for an attacker to bypass this protection and gain access to the underlying operating system and its contents. If security teams are not able to apply this patch, one potential mitigation could be to ensure Remote Device Management is deployed with the ability to remotely disable and wipe assets.”
There are also two Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities patched this month — CVE-2023-21762 and CVE-2023-21745. Given the rapidity with which threat actors exploit new Exchange bugs to steal corporate email and infiltrate vulnerable systems, organizations using Exchange should patch immediately. Microsoft’s advisory says these Exchange flaws are indeed “more likely to be exploited.”
Adobe released four patches addressing 29 flaws in Adobe Acrobat and Reader, InDesign, InCopy, and Adobe Dimension. The update for Reader fixes 15 bugs with eight of these being ranked Critical in severity (allowing arbitrary code execution if an affected system opened a specially crafted file).
For a more granular rundown on the updates released today, see the SANS Internet Storm Center roundup. Nearly 100 updates is a lot, and there are bound to be a few patches that cause problems for organizations and end users. When that happens, AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown.
Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And please sound off in the comments if you experience any problems as a result of these patches.
Are you an online oversharer? Do you give your full birthday to all your online shopping accounts? Have a few companies you have accounts with been breached but you didn’t take any action at the time? If you have bad digital habits, now is an excellent time to reset your digital presence.
In isolation, these small digital transgressions don’t seem like a problem; however, cybercriminals can gather the bits and pieces of information you release into the world and Frankenstein them together to create believable impersonations or entirely new identities.
To protect your identity, here are a few ways to limit the amount of personally identifiable information (PII) you share online, plus a few tools that can help you identify and close your current security holes.
Most digital bad habits seem insignificant; however, the more bad habits you have that pile-up, the more at risk your PII and your identity can be. Check out this list of three common habits that you should consider breaking today and why.
When you sign up for new online shopping accounts, some companies ask for your birthday, your age, your middle name, and primary and secondary phone numbers and email addresses. While it might be nice to receive a special coupon on your birthday, you may want to reconsider volunteering unnecessary private details. To compromise you can sign up with a nickname and leave your birth year blank. That way, if a cybergang ever breaches the company, the criminals won’t get far with your personal details. To steal an identity and ruin someone’s credit, sometimes all it takes it a full name, birthday, and phone number.
Do you post your every thought and movement on social media? While curating the perfect online profile can be fun, it can also be dangerous to your online safety. For instance, posting “get to know you” quizzes are a gold mine for social engineers and cyber criminals, as the results often reveal potential password inspiration, security question answers, and your likes and dislikes. From here, criminals can take educated guesses at your passwords or tailor a social engineering scheme that’s most likely to fool you. Consider setting your social media profiles to private and blocking followers you don’t know personally. Or, just keep parts of your life a mystery to the wider world.
We can all agree that increasingly strict password requirements are leading to longer and more complex passwords that are confusing to cyber criminals and to the rightful account holders, too! It’s tempting to reuse passwords to reduce the burden on your memory, but this puts your valuable PII in danger. Password and username combinations are often information that’s leaked in company breaches. In what’s called a brute force attack, a cybercriminal can plug that same pairing into hundreds of websites and wait for a hit. Since unique passwords for all your dozens of accounts is imperative, entrust their safekeeping to a password manager.
If you’re feeling uneasy about your online habits and the effect they may have had on your online safety, McAfee Protection Score gives you the information you need to take charge and make changes. Protection Score not only tells you how safe (or unsafe) you are, but the tool also offers suggestions on how you can raise your score, and thus be safer online. The service monitors data breaches and indicates when your email was part of a leak. Protection Score also dives into the dark web so you don’t have to. If your government ID or financial information appears, your score will take a large hit.
Protection Score not only tells you how safe (or unsafe) you are, but the tool also offers suggestions on how you can raise your score, and thus be safer online. The sooner you know your weak points, the quicker and more completely you can fortify your defenses and clean up after months (or years) of bad habits. Knowledge is power in the right against cyber criminals, so Protection Score is an excellent partner to help adopt smarter habits on the path to better online security.
With McAfee+ Ultimate, you not only get a Protection Score but a host of other top-rate tools to protect your identity, retain your online privacy, and help you recover from an identity theft. Running an antivirus, connecting to a VPN and installing web protection on your browser are all ways to increase your Protection Score, and these features are available with McAfee’s most thorough privacy, identity, and device protection service.
Make 2023 the year of living online confidently and safely!
The post New Year, New You: Start Fresh With McAfee Protection Score appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Cybersecurity attacks complication and damaging impact are always keeping SOC analyst at their edge. Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions tend to simplify for Sam, a SOC analyst, his job by simplifying the workflow and process that involve the lifecycle of a threat investigation from detection to response. In this post we will explore how SecureX, Secure Cloud Analytics (NDR), Secure Endpoint (EDR) with their seamless integration accelerate the ability to achieve XDR outcomes.
One of the first challenges for Sam is alert fatigue. With the overwhelming number of alerts coming from multiple sources and the lack of relevance or correlation, decreases the value of these alerts to the point that they become as meaningless as having none. To counter this effect, Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics and Cisco Secure Endpoint limit alert promotion to SecureX to only include high fidelity alerts with critical severity and marking them as High Impact incidents within SecureX Incident manager.
This capability reduces the noise coming from the source, while keeping the other alerts available for investigation, putting impactful incidents at the top of Sam’s to do list. Now, Sam is confident that his time is spent in a prioritized manner and helps ensure he is tackling the most important threats first. Automatic incident provisioning accelerates incident response by bringing focus on the most impactful incidents.
Understanding the mechanics and data around a specific incident is a key factor for Remi, an incident responder, in his day-to-day work. Achieving his tasks accurately is tightly coupled with his ability to scope and understand the impact of an incident and to gather all possible data from the environment which can be associated with an incident including devices, users, files hashes, email ids, domains IPs and others. SecureX Incident Manager’s automatic enrichment capability completes this data collection for high impact incidents automatically. The data is then classified into targets, observables, and indicators and added to the incident to help the analyst better understand the incident’s scope and potential impact.
The Incident Manager and automatic enrichment provides Remi with crucial information such as the associated MITRE Tactics and Techniques applied during this incident, the contributing threat vectors, and security solutions. In addition, the Incident Manager aggregates events from multiple sources into the same high impact incident that the enrichment was triggered on future providing Remi with more vital context.
This automatic enrichment for high impact incidents is essential to Remi’s understanding as much as possible about an incident as it occurs and significantly accelerates him identifying the proper response for the threat. This brings us to the next step in our incident detection to response workflow.
It is important for an XDR to correlate the right information for the Security Analyst and incident responder to understand an attack but it is equally important to provide an effective response mechanism. This is exactly what SecureX provides with the ability to apply a response to an observable with a simple a single click or through automation.
These workflows can be invoked to block a domain, IP or URL across a full environment with a simple click, leveraging existing integrations such as firewalls or umbrella and others. Workflows can be made available to the threat response pivot menu where they are useful for performing specific host specific actions, such as isolate a host, take a host snapshot, and more.
In addition to response workflows, the pivot menu provides the ability to leverage Secure Cloud Analytics (SCA) telemetry by generating a case book linking back to telemetry searches within SCA. This automation is critical to understanding the spread of a threat across an environment. A good example on this, is identifying all hosts communicating to a command-and-control destination before this destination was identified as malicious. This is a pre-existing SecureX workflow which can be taken advantage of today see workflow 0005 – SCA – Generate Case book with Flow Links.
Reducing time to remediation is a key aspect of keeping a business secure, SecureX orchestration automates responses with various solutions specially with NDR detections from SCA and use observables from these alerts to isolate hosts leveraging Secure Endpoint. SCA can send alerts via Webhooks and SecureX Orchestration receive them as triggers to launch an NDR- EDR workflow to isolate hosts automatically. (0014-SCA-Isolate endpoints from alerts)
This orchestration workflow automatically isolates rogue devices in a network or contain confirmed threat alerts received from Cisco’s Machine learning threat detection cloud and can be used for multiple different response scenarios.
The power of automation brought by SecureX, Secure Cloud Analytics and Secure Endpoint accelerates XDR outcomes drastically which simplifies Security Analyst (Sam) and Incident Responder (Remi) jobs and make it more efficient with accurate incident prioritization, automatic investigation/enrichment and most importantly automating responses.
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
As technology weaves itself into our lives in new and unexpected ways, some of it will get quite personal and close to home. That made itself clear at CES this year, which makes a strong case for your security.
The more things we connect, the more data we create. Data about ourselves that companies and others collect, share, and sell—where we are and what we’re doing, along with what we buy, watch, and search for. And today, we’re creating more of it and in more exacting detail.
We connect our homes with smart devices that create data about our comings and goings, and we connect ourselves with smart glasses and watches, rings, and things that track our health, our sleep, and wellness overall. Meanwhile, we have virtual reality and augmented reality hardware companies that want a place on your face with headsets and experiences that will take you into the metaverse.
Walking the floor of this year’s CES, you’ll see all these things, and plenty more. Yet central to it all is one thing—you. Specifically, your privacy and identity.
As technology evolves so rapidly and brings new ways of experiencing our world, it’s an exciting time. It’s also a somewhat uncertain time. What data will these devices create? Who’ll collect it? What will they do with it? And importantly, what can you do to protect yourself? Questions about your security are very much on our minds, and they’re on yours too. You’ve told us as much.
And unsurprisingly, protection is very much on your mind as well.
And that’s where we come in. Just as the floor of CES showcases the evolution of life online, we’re evolving online protection as well. McAfee+ represents that next step—a product line that gives you a full slate of online protection that covers your privacy, identity, and devices so you can enjoy life online with confidence.
At the center of that online life is you, and our definition of online protection has become quite expansive as a result. We see how it can help you monitor your credit, your identity, and where your personal information crops up online. We see how it can prevent the wrong people from getting their hands on data and info too. And we see how our industry-first Protection Score can show you how safe you are—and offer guidance that can make you safer still. In all, we see it as an online companion, one that removes uncertainty and gives you a feeling of security. Because you truly are secure.
In all, protection today demands this comprehensive approach because we go about so much of our day online. McAfee+ reflects that reality. And with that, the various plans for McAfee+ include:
And that list will only continue to grow. As the year takes shape, we’ll roll out yet more protections that will give you even more control of your privacy and identity. Particularly as you and your household rely on life online more and more.
As is true any year at CES, we see all manner of potential. New ways to make the day easier, more enjoyable, and more productive thanks to life online. Yet amidst it all, we see you. We see how you’ll use these new technologies, what the privacy, identity, and security implications are, and how we can protect you so you can benefit from these advances in technology, safely.
Like you, we’re excited for what’s next, and we’ll see to it that you can enjoy it—with protection that looks after you, your household, and your family.
The post The Case for Your Security at CES 2023 appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Identity thieves have been exploiting a glaring security weakness in the website of Experian, one of the big three consumer credit reporting bureaus. Normally, Experian requires that those seeking a copy of their credit report successfully answer several multiple choice questions about their financial history. But until the end of 2022, Experian’s website allowed anyone to bypass these questions and go straight to the consumer’s report. All that was needed was the person’s name, address, birthday and Social Security number.
The vulnerability in Experian’s website was exploitable after one applied to see their credit file via annualcreditreport.com.
In December, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Jenya Kushnir, a security researcher living in Ukraine who said he discovered the method being used by identity thieves after spending time on Telegram chat channels dedicated to the cashing out of compromised identities.
“I want to try and help to put a stop to it and make it more difficult for [ID thieves] to access, since [Experian is] not doing shit and regular people struggle,” Kushnir wrote in an email to KrebsOnSecurity explaining his motivations for reaching out. “If somehow I can make small change and help to improve this, inside myself I can feel that I did something that actually matters and helped others.”
Kushnir said the crooks learned they could trick Experian into giving them access to anyone’s credit report, just by editing the address displayed in the browser URL bar at a specific point in Experian’s identity verification process.
Following Kushnir’s instructions, I sought a copy of my credit report from Experian via annualcreditreport.com — a website that is required to provide all Americans with a free copy of their credit report from each of the three major reporting bureaus, once per year.
Annualcreditreport.com begins by asking for your name, address, SSN and birthday. After I supplied that and told Annualcreditreport.com I wanted my report from Experian, I was taken to Experian.com to complete the identity verification process.
Normally at this point, Experian’s website would present four or five multiple-guess questions, such as “Which of the following addresses have you lived at?”
Kushnir told me that when the questions page loads, you simply change the last part of the URL from “/acr/oow/” to “/acr/report,” and the site would display the consumer’s full credit report.
But when I tried to get my report from Experian via annualcreditreport.com, Experian’s website said it didn’t have enough information to validate my identity. It wouldn’t even show me the four multiple-guess questions. Experian said I had three options for a free credit report at this point: Mail a request along with identity documents, call a phone number for Experian, or upload proof of identity via the website.
But that didn’t stop Experian from showing me my full credit report after I changed the Experian URL as Kushnir had instructed — modifying the error page’s trailing URL from “/acr/OcwError” to simply “/acr/report”.
Experian’s website then immediately displayed my entire credit file.
Even though Experian said it couldn’t tell that I was actually me, it still coughed up my report. And thank goodness it did. The report contains so many errors that it’s probably going to take a good deal of effort on my part to straighten out.
Now I know why Experian has NEVER let me view my own file via their website. For example, there were four phone numbers on my Experian credit file: Only one of them was mine, and that one hasn’t been mine for ages.
I was so dumbfounded by Experian’s incompetence that I asked a close friend and trusted security source to try the method on her identity file at Experian. Sure enough, when she got to the part where Experian asked questions, changing the last part of the URL in her address bar to “/report” bypassed the questions and immediately displayed her full credit report. Her report also was replete with errors.
KrebsOnSecurity shared Kushnir’s findings with Experian on Dec. 23, 2022. On Dec. 27, 2022, Experian’s PR team acknowledged receipt of my Dec. 23 notification, but the company has so far ignored multiple requests for comment or clarification.
By the time Experian confirmed receipt of my report, the “exploit” Kushnir said he learned from the identity thieves on Telegram had been patched and no longer worked. But it remains unclear how long Experian’s website was making it so easy to access anyone’s credit report.
In response to information shared by KrebsOnSecurity, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said he was disappointed — but not at all surprised — to hear about yet another cybersecurity lapse at Experian.
“The credit bureaus are poorly regulated, act as if they are above the law and have thumbed their noses at Congressional oversight,” Wyden said in a written statement. “Just last year, Experian ignored repeated briefing requests from my office after you revealed another cybersecurity lapse the company.”
Sen. Wyden’s quote above references a story published here in July 2022, which broke the news that identity thieves were hijacking consumer accounts at Experian.com just by signing up as them at Experian once more, supplying the target’s static, personal information (name, DoB/SSN, address) but a different email address.
From interviews with multiple victims who contacted KrebsOnSecurity after that story, it emerged that Experian’s own customer support representatives were actually telling consumers who got locked out of their Experian accounts to recreate their accounts using their personal information and a new email address. This was Experian’s advice even for people who’d just explained that this method was what identity thieves had used to lock them in out in the first place.
Clearly, Experian found it simpler to respond this way, rather than acknowledging the problem and addressing the root causes (lazy authentication and abhorrent account recovery practices). It’s also worth mentioning that reports of hijacked Experian.com accounts persisted into late 2022. That screw-up has since prompted a class action lawsuit against Experian.
Sen. Wyden said the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) need to do much more to protect Americans from screw-ups by the credit bureaus.
“If they don’t believe they have the authority to do so, they should endorse legislation like my Mind Your Own Business Act, which gives the FTC power to set tough mandatory cybersecurity standards for companies like Experian,” Wyden said.
Sadly, none of this is terribly shocking behavior for Experian, which has shown itself a completely negligent custodian of obscene amounts of highly sensitive consumer information.
In April 2021, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how identity thieves were exploiting lax authentication on Experian’s PIN retrieval page to unfreeze consumer credit files. In those cases, Experian failed to send any notice via email when a freeze PIN was retrieved, nor did it require the PIN to be sent to an email address already associated with the consumer’s account.
A few days after that April 2021 story, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that an Experian API was exposing the credit scores of most Americans.
It’s bad enough that we can’t really opt out of companies like Experian making $2.6 billion each quarter collecting and selling gobs of our personal and financial information. But there has to be some meaningful accountability when these monopolistic companies engage in negligent and reckless behavior with the very same consumer data that feeds their quarterly profits. Or when security and privacy shortcuts are found to be intentional, like for cost-saving reasons.
And as we saw with Equifax’s consolidated class-action settlement in response to letting state-sponsored hackers from China steal data on nearly 150 million Americans back in 2017, class-actions and more laughable “free credit monitoring” services from the very same companies that created the problem aren’t going to cut it.
It is easy to adopt a defeatist attitude with the credit bureaus, who often foul things up royally even for consumers who are quite diligent about watching their consumer credit files and disputing any inaccuracies.
But there are some concrete steps that everyone can take which will dramatically lower the risk that identity thieves will ruin your financial future. And happily, most of these steps have the side benefit of costing the credit bureaus money, or at least causing the data they collect about you to become less valuable over time.
The first step is awareness. Find out what these companies are saying about you behind your back. Keep in mind that — fair or not — your credit score as collectively determined by these bureaus can affect whether you get that loan, apartment, or job. In that context, even small, unintentional errors that are unrelated to identity theft can have outsized consequences for consumers down the road.
Each bureau is required to provide a free copy of your credit report every year. The easiest way to get yours is through annualcreditreport.com.
Some consumers report that this site never works for them, and that each bureau will insist they don’t have enough information to provide a report. I am definitely in this camp. Thankfully, a financial institution that I already have a relationship with offers the ability to view your credit file through them. Your mileage on this front may vary, and you may end up having to send copies of your identity documents through the mail or website.
When you get your report, look for anything that isn’t yours, and then document and file a dispute with the corresponding credit bureau. And after you’ve reviewed your report, set a calendar reminder to recur every four months, reminding you it’s time to get another free copy of your credit file.
If you haven’t already done so, consider making 2023 the year that you freeze your credit files at the three major reporting bureaus, including Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. It is now free to people in all 50 U.S. states to place a security freeze on their credit files. It is also free to do this for your partner and/or your dependents.
Freezing your credit means no one who doesn’t already have a financial relationship with you can view your credit file, making it unlikely that potential creditors will grant new lines of credit in your name to identity thieves. Freezing your credit file also means Experian and its brethren can no longer sell peeks at your credit history to others.
Anytime you wish to apply for new credit or a new job, or open an account at a utility or communications provider, you can quickly thaw a freeze on your credit file, and set it to freeze automatically again after a specified length of time.
Please don’t confuse a credit freeze (a.k.a. “security freeze”) with the alternative that the bureaus will likely steer you towards when you ask for a freeze: “Credit lock” services.
The bureaus pitch these credit lock services as a way for consumers to easily toggle their credit file availability with push of a button on a mobile app, but they do little to prevent the bureaus from continuing to sell your information to others.
My advice: Ignore the lock services, and just freeze your credit files already.
One final note. Frequent readers here will have noticed that I’ve criticized these so-called “knowledge-based authentication” or KBA questions that Experian’s website failed to ask as part of its consumer verification process.
KrebsOnSecurity has long assailed KBA as weak authentication because the questions and answers are drawn largely from consumer records that are public and easily accessible to organized identity theft groups.
That said, given that these KBA questions appear to be the ONLY thing standing between me and my Experian credit report, it seems like maybe they should at least take care to ensure that those questions actually get asked.
Ransomware. Even the name sounds scary.
When you get down to it, ransomware is one of the nastiest attacks a hacker can wage. They target some of our most important and precious things—our files, our photos, and the information stored on our devices. Think about suddenly losing access to all of them and being forced to pay a ransom to get access back. Worse yet, paying the ransom is no guarantee the hacker will return them.
That’s what a ransomware attack does. Broadly speaking, it’s a type of malware that infects a network or a device and then typically encrypts the files, data, and apps stored on it, digitally scrambling them so the proper owners can’t access them. Only a digital key can unlock them—one that the hacker holds.
Nasty for sure, yet you can take several steps that can greatly reduce the risk of it happening to you. Our recently published Ransomware Security Guide breaks them down for you, and in this blog we’ll look at a few reasons why ransomware protection is so vital.
The short answer is pretty bad—to the tune of billions of dollars stolen from victims each year. Ransomware targets people and their families just as explained above. Yet it also targets large organizations, governments, and even companies that run critical stretches of energy infrastructure and the food supply chain. Accordingly, the ransom amounts for these victims climb into millions of dollars.
A few recent cases of large-scale ransomware attacks include:
Who’s behind such attacks? Given the scope and scale of them, it’s often organized hacking groups. Put simply, these are big heists. It demands expertise to pull them off, not to mention further expertise to transfer large sums of cryptocurrency in ways that cover the hackers’ tracks.
As for ransomware attacks on people and their families, the individual dollar amounts of an attack are far lower, typically in the hundreds of dollars. Again, the culprits behind them may be large hacking groups that cast a wider net for individual victims, where hundreds of successful attacks at hundreds of dollars each quickly add up. One example: a hacker group that posed as a government agency and as a major retailer, which mailed out thousands of USB drives infected with malware.
Other ransomware hackers who target people and families are far less sophisticated. Small-time hackers and hacking groups can find the tools they need to conduct such attacks by shopping on the dark web, where ransomware is available for sale or for lease as a service (Ransomware as a Service, or RaaS). In effect, near-amateur hackers can grab a ready-to-deploy attack right off the shelf.
Taken together, hackers will level a ransomware attack at practically anyone or any organization—making it everyone’s concern.
Hackers have several ways of getting ransomware onto one of your devices. Like any other type of malware, it can infect your device via a phishing link or a bogus attachment. It can also end up there by downloading apps from questionable app stores, with a stolen or hacked password, or through an outdated device or network router with poor security measures in place. And as mentioned above, infected storage devices provide another avenue.
Social engineering attacks enter the mix as well, where the hacker poses as someone the victim knows and gets the victim to either download malware or provide the hacker access to an otherwise password-protected device, app, or network.
And yes, ransomware can end up on smartphones as well.
While not a prevalent as other types of malware attacks, smartphone ransomware can encrypt files, photos, and the like on a smartphone, just as it can on computers and networks. Yet other forms of mobile ransomware don’t have to encrypt data to make the phone unusable. The “Lockerpin” ransomware that has struck some Android devices in the past would change the PIN number that locked the phone. Other forms of mobile ransomware paste a window over the phone’s apps, making them unusable without decrypting the ransomware.
Part of avoiding ransomware involves reducing human error—keeping a watchful eye open for those spammy links, malicious downloads, bogus emails, and basically keeping your apps and devices up to date so that they have the latest security measures in place. The remainder relies on a good dose of prevention.
Our Ransomware Security Guide provides a checklist for both.
It gets into the details of what ransomware looks like and how it works, followed by the straightforward things you can do to prevent it, along with the steps to take if the unfortunate ends up happening to you or someone you know.
Ransomware is one of the nastiest attacks going because it targets our files, photos, and information, things we don’t know where we’d be without. Yet it’s good to know you can indeed lower your risk with a few relatively simple steps. Once you have them in place, chances are a good feeling will come over you, the one that comes with knowing you’ve protected what’s precious and important to you.
The post Your Guide to Ransomware—and Preventing It Too appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Authored by Vonny Gamot
The official 40th birthday of the internet serves as a timely reminder that while it is a fantastic place, we must practice good digital hygiene to safeguard our privacy and identity so we can protect ourselves from the latest threats.
Since its widely recognized creation on January 1st 1983, the internet has since transformed economies and the everyday lives of people. From social media, memes, and viral videos to smart homes, online shopping and even cloud computing, the internet entertains, educates, and connects us. Above all, it will continue to play a crucial role in human civilization for many generations to come.
Yet with the good comes the not-so-good. Wherever people gather, cyberthieves gather too. The internet is no exception. As the evolution of the internet continues, cybercriminals are evolving in tandem, looking for new and inventive ways, such as using Artificial Intelligence to exploit its features. With over five billion people accessing and using the Internet in 2022, that’s over 60% of the world’s population potentially at risk.
So, while we celebrate the internet’s 40th birthday, it’s also a good reminder to take stock of the latest online threats and ensure our digital hygiene is up to scratch for the year ahead. When we do this, we can take full advantage of the incredible opportunities the internet affords us.
The new year is a great moment to reflect, reset, and consider your personal online safety and protection. Stay vigilant against the latest threats and scams and use dedicated and robust online protection software such as our newly released McAfee+ plans—which comes with important features like identity monitoring that can spot your personal info on the dark web and personal data cleanup that can help remove your personal info from data broker sites that will sell it to companies and crooks alike.
It’s also a time to keep a fresh eye out for scams and phishing attacks. If that email, text, or message you received looks too good to be true, or you feel that the sender is trying to pressure you into doing sharing info or sending money, it’s always best to double check that the source is legitimate. These are often indicators that a scam is afoot.
Beyond using online protection software and keeping your guard up, you can take several other steps that can make you immediately safer than you were before. Here are four strong suggestions that will get you started:
MFA is an excellent way to frustrate cybercriminals attempting to break into online accounts. MFA means that users need more than a username and password to log in, for example, a one-time code sent to private email, text, or through an authentication app utilizing face or fingerprint scans. This adds an extra layer of security as the cybercriminal has to access the device, email, or biometric reader to get into someone’s online account.
Strong, unique passwords for each of your online accounts are a must. It’s always important for people to understand that reusing passwords is just as risky as using “password123” and puts online accounts at risk. A tactic known as “credential stuffing” is where a cybercriminal attempts to input stolen usernames and password combinations in dozens of random websites to see which door it opens. It is also important to consider using password managers which can create and safeguard all passwords in one secure desktop extension or mobile phone app.
Updating software is vital to the security of a device. These updates include security patches that cyber experts have created to foil cybercriminals. The more outdated the software is, the more time criminals have had to work out ways to infiltrate and steal information within them. Moreover, updates often include new and improved features, which makes a strong case for keeping things current.
Phishing is when a scammer sends texts or emails that appear to be from trusted sources like your favourite online clothing store, employer or, as we’re seeing during the cost-of-living crisis, energy firms, or banks. They do this to encourage people to share personal information.
Once a phishing attempt has been recognised it is vital that they are not engaged with, links are left unopened, and the potential scam email is not forwarded along to another person. Before the message is deleted, it is vital that the sender is blocked and that the message is marked as junk and reported.
If you think that you have entered your credit card details onto a phishing website, contact your bank or credit card issuing company immediately. Report your personal information as stolen, and you may want to request that your existing card be canceled depending on the circumstances.
Online protection is part mindset, part prevention, and part action. While the steps above mark a start, they’re just that. There’s plenty more you can do, and when taken in batches, the steps you take can really add up to an exceptional level of protection. The question is, where to start?
Our McAfee Safety Series can get you moving in the right direction. It’s a set of guides that cover a range of important security topics and that show you several straightforward things you can do that will make you safer. They range from phishing and privacy to online shopping and safer online media. In all, they can help you spot scams, hacks, and attacks—and potentially prevent them in the first place.
I encourage you to grab the first one that looks interesting to you. What you learn can put you several steps ahead of the hackers, scammers, and thieves out there.
The post 40 Years of the Internet – Tips for Staying Safe Online in 2023 appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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