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The Biden administration today issued its vision for beefing up the nation’s collective cybersecurity posture, including calls for legislation establishing liability for software products and services that are sold with little regard for security. The White House’s new national cybersecurity strategy also envisions a more active role by cloud providers and the U.S. military in disrupting cybercriminal infrastructure, and it names China as the single biggest cyber threat to U.S. interests.
The strategy says the White House will work with Congress and the private sector to develop legislation that would prevent companies from disavowing responsibility for the security of their software products or services.
Coupled with this stick would be a carrot: An as-yet-undefined “safe harbor framework” that would lay out what these companies could do to demonstrate that they are making cybersecurity a central concern of their design and operations.
“Any such legislation should prevent manufacturers and software publishers with market power from fully disclaiming liability by contract, and establish higher standards of care for software in specific high-risk scenarios,” the strategy explains. “To begin to shape standards of care for secure software development, the Administration will drive the development of an adaptable safe harbor framework to shield from liability companies that securely develop and maintain their software products and services.”
Brian Fox, chief technology officer and founder of the software supply chain security firm Sonatype, called the software liability push a landmark moment for the industry.
“Market forces are leading to a race to the bottom in certain industries, while contract law allows software vendors of all kinds to shield themselves from liability,” Fox said. “Regulations for other industries went through a similar transformation, and we saw a positive result — there’s now an expectation of appropriate due care, and accountability for those who fail to comply. Establishing the concept of safe harbors allows the industry to mature incrementally, leveling up security best practices in order to retain a liability shield, versus calling for sweeping reform and unrealistic outcomes as previous regulatory attempts have.”
In 2012 (approximately three national cyber strategies ago), then director of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) Keith Alexander made headlines when he remarked that years of successful cyber espionage campaigns from Chinese state-sponsored hackers represented “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
The document released today says the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “now presents the broadest, most active, and most persistent threat to both government and private sector networks,” and says China is “the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so.”
Many of the U.S. government’s efforts to restrain China’s technology prowess involve ongoing initiatives like the CHIPS Act, a new law signed by President Biden last year that sets aside more than $50 billion to expand U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing and research and to make the U.S. less dependent on foreign suppliers; the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative; and the National Strategy to Secure 5G.
As the maker of most consumer gizmos with a computer chip inside, China is also the source of an incredible number of low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are not only poorly secured, but are probably more accurately described as insecure by design.
The Biden administration said it would continue its previously announced plans to develop a system of labeling that could be applied to various IoT products and give consumers some idea of how secure the products may be. But it remains unclear how those labels might apply to products made by companies outside of the United States.
One could convincingly make the case that the world has witnessed yet another historic transfer of wealth and trade secrets over the past decade — in the form of ransomware and data ransom attacks by Russia-based cybercriminal syndicates, as well as Russian intelligence agency operations like the U.S. government-wide Solar Winds compromise.
On the ransomware front, the White House strategy seems to focus heavily on building the capability to disrupt the digital infrastructure used by adversaries that are threatening vital U.S. cyber interests. The document points to the 2021 takedown of the Emotet botnet — a cybercrime machine that was heavily used by multiple Russian ransomware groups — as a model for this activity, but says those disruptive operations need to happen faster and more often.
To that end, the Biden administration says it will expand the capacity of the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force (NCIJTF), the primary federal agency for coordinating cyber threat investigations across law enforcement agencies, the intelligence community, and the Department of Defense.
“To increase the volume and speed of these integrated disruption campaigns, the Federal Government must further develop technological and organizational platforms that enable continuous, coordinated operations,” the strategy observes. “The NCIJTF will expand its capacity to coordinate takedown and disruption campaigns with greater speed, scale, and frequency. Similarly, DoD and the Intelligence Community are committed to bringing to bear their full range of complementary authorities to disruption campaigns.”
The strategy anticipates the U.S. government working more closely with cloud and other Internet infrastructure providers to quickly identify malicious use of U.S.-based infrastructure, share reports of malicious use with the government, and make it easier for victims to report abuse of these systems.
“Given the interest of the cybersecurity community and digital infrastructure owners and operators in continuing this approach, we must sustain and expand upon this model so that collaborative disruption operations can be carried out on a continuous basis,” the strategy argues. “Threat specific collaboration should take the form of nimble, temporary cells, comprised of a small number of trusted operators, hosted and supported by a relevant hub. Using virtual collaboration platforms, members of the cell would share information bidirectionally and work rapidly to disrupt adversaries.”
But here, again, there is a carrot-and-stick approach: The administration said it is taking steps to implement Executive Order (EO) 13984 –issued by the Trump administration in January 2021 — which requires cloud providers to verify the identity of foreign persons using their services.
“All service providers must make reasonable attempts to secure the use of their infrastructure against abuse or other criminal behavior,” the strategy states. “The Administration will prioritize adoption and enforcement of a risk-based approach to cybersecurity across Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers that addresses known methods and indicators of malicious activity including through implementation of EO 13984.”
Ted Schlein, founding partner of the cybersecurity venture capital firm Ballistic Ventures, said how this gets implemented will determine whether it can be effective.
“Adversaries know the NSA, which is the elite portion of the nation’s cyber defense, cannot monitor U.S.-based infrastructure, so they just use U.S.-based cloud infrastructure to perpetrate their attacks,” Schlein said. “We have to fix this. I believe some of this section is a bit pollyannaish, as it assumes a bad actor with a desire to do a bad thing will self-identify themselves, as the major recommendation here is around KYC (‘know your customer’).”
One brief but interesting section of the strategy titled “Explore a Federal Cyber Insurance Backdrop” contemplates the government’s liability and response to a too-big-to-fail scenario or “catastrophic cyber incident.”
“We will explore how the government can stabilize insurance markets against catastrophic risk to drive better cybersecurity practices and to provide market certainty when catastrophic events do occur,” the strategy reads.
When the Bush administration released the first U.S. national cybersecurity strategy 20 years ago after the 9/11 attacks, the popular term for that same scenario was a “digital Pearl Harbor,” and there was a great deal of talk then about how the cyber insurance market would soon help companies shore up their cybersecurity practices.
In the wake of countless ransomware intrusions, many companies now hold cybersecurity insurance to help cover the considerable costs of responding to such intrusions. Leaving aside the question of whether insurance coverage has helped companies improve security, what happens if every one of these companies has to make a claim at the same time?
The notion of a Digital Pearl Harbor incident struck many experts at the time as a hyperbolic justification for expanding the government’s digital surveillance capabilities, and an overstatement of the capabilities of our adversaries. But back in 2003, most of the world’s companies didn’t host their entire business in the cloud.
Today, nobody questions the capabilities, goals and outcomes of dozens of nation-state level cyber adversaries. And these days, a catastrophic cyber incident could be little more than an extended, simultaneous outage at multiple cloud providers.
The full national cybersecurity strategy is available from the White House website (PDF).
Image: Shutterstock.com
Three different cybercriminal groups claimed access to internal networks at communications giant T-Mobile in more than 100 separate incidents throughout 2022, new data suggests. In each case, the goal of the attackers was the same: Phish T-Mobile employees for access to internal company tools, and then convert that access into a cybercrime service that could be hired to divert any T-Mobile user’s text messages and phone calls to another device.
The conclusions above are based on an extensive analysis of Telegram chat logs from three distinct cybercrime groups or actors that have been identified by security researchers as particularly active in and effective at “SIM-swapping,” which involves temporarily seizing control over a target’s mobile phone number.
Countless websites and online services use SMS text messages for both password resets and multi-factor authentication. This means that stealing someone’s phone number often can let cybercriminals hijack the target’s entire digital life in short order — including access to any financial, email and social media accounts tied to that phone number.
All three SIM-swapping entities that were tracked for this story remain active in 2023, and they all conduct business in open channels on the instant messaging platform Telegram. KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those channels or groups here because they will simply migrate to more private servers if exposed publicly, and for now those servers remain a useful source of intelligence about their activities.
Each advertises their claimed access to T-Mobile systems in a similar way. At a minimum, every SIM-swapping opportunity is announced with a brief “Tmobile up!” or “Tmo up!” message to channel participants. Other information in the announcements includes the price for a single SIM-swap request, and the handle of the person who takes the payment and information about the targeted subscriber.
The information required from the customer of the SIM-swapping service includes the target’s phone number, and the serial number tied to the new SIM card that will be used to receive text messages and phone calls from the hijacked phone number.
Initially, the goal of this project was to count how many times each entity claimed access to T-Mobile throughout 2022, by cataloging the various “Tmo up!” posts from each day and working backwards from Dec. 31, 2022.
But by the time we got to claims made in the middle of May 2022, completing the rest of the year’s timeline seemed unnecessary. The tally shows that in the last seven-and-a-half months of 2022, these groups collectively made SIM-swapping claims against T-Mobile on 104 separate days — often with multiple groups claiming access on the same days.
The 104 days in the latter half of 2022 in which different known SIM-swapping groups claimed access to T-Mobile employee tools.
KrebsOnSecurity shared a large amount of data gathered for this story with T-Mobile. The company declined to confirm or deny any of these claimed intrusions. But in a written statement, T-Mobile said this type of activity affects the entire wireless industry.
“And we are constantly working to fight against it,” the statement reads. “We have continued to drive enhancements that further protect against unauthorized access, including enhancing multi-factor authentication controls, hardening environments, limiting access to data, apps or services, and more. We are also focused on gathering threat intelligence data, like what you have shared, to help further strengthen these ongoing efforts.”
While it is true that each of these cybercriminal actors periodically offer SIM-swapping services for other mobile phone providers — including AT&T, Verizon and smaller carriers — those solicitations appear far less frequently in these group chats than T-Mobile swap offers. And when those offers do materialize, they are considerably more expensive.
The prices advertised for a SIM-swap against T-Mobile customers in the latter half of 2022 ranged between USD $1,000 and $1,500, while SIM-swaps offered against AT&T and Verizon customers often cost well more than twice that amount.
To be clear, KrebsOnSecurity is not aware of specific SIM-swapping incidents tied to any of these breach claims. However, the vast majority of advertisements for SIM-swapping claims against T-Mobile tracked in this story had two things in common that set them apart from random SIM-swapping ads on Telegram.
First, they included an offer to use a mutually trusted “middleman” or escrow provider for the transaction (to protect either party from getting scammed). More importantly, the cybercriminal handles that were posting ads for SIM-swapping opportunities from these groups generally did so on a daily or near-daily basis — often teasing their upcoming swap events in the hours before posting a “Tmo up!” message announcement.
In other words, if the crooks offering these SIM-swapping services were ripping off their customers or claiming to have access that they didn’t, this would be almost immediately obvious from the responses of the more seasoned and serious cybercriminals in the same chat channel.
There are plenty of people on Telegram claiming to have SIM-swap access at major telecommunications firms, but a great many such offers are simply four-figure scams, and any pretenders on this front are soon identified and banned (if not worse).
One of the groups that reliably posted “Tmo up!” messages to announce SIM-swap availability against T-Mobile customers also reliably posted “Tmo down!” follow-up messages announcing exactly when their claimed access to T-Mobile employee tools was discovered and revoked by the mobile giant.
A review of the timestamps associated with this group’s incessant “Tmo up” and “Tmo down” posts indicates that while their claimed access to employee tools usually lasted less than an hour, in some cases that access apparently went undiscovered for several hours or even days.
How could these SIM-swapping groups be gaining access to T-Mobile’s network as frequently as they claim? Peppered throughout the daily chit-chat on their Telegram channels are solicitations for people urgently needed to serve as “callers,” or those who can be hired to social engineer employees over the phone into navigating to a phishing website and entering their employee credentials.
Allison Nixon is chief research officer for the New York City-based cybersecurity firm Unit 221B. Nixon said these SIM-swapping groups will typically call employees on their mobile devices, pretend to be someone from the company’s IT department, and then try to get the person on the other end of the line to visit a phishing website that mimics the company’s employee login page.
Nixon argues that many people in the security community tend to discount the threat from voice phishing attacks as somehow “low tech” and “low probability” threats.
“I see it as not low-tech at all, because there are a lot of moving parts to phishing these days,” Nixon said. “You have the caller who has the employee on the line, and the person operating the phish kit who needs to spin it up and down fast enough so that it doesn’t get flagged by security companies. Then they have to get the employee on that phishing site and steal their credentials.”
In addition, she said, often there will be yet another co-conspirator whose job it is to use the stolen credentials and log into employee tools. That person may also need to figure out how to make their device pass “posture checks,” a form of device authentication that some companies use to verify that each login is coming only from employer-issued phones or laptops.
For aspiring criminals with little experience in scam calling, there are plenty of sample call transcripts available on these Telegram chat channels that walk one through how to impersonate an IT technician at the targeted company — and how to respond to pushback or skepticism from the employee. Here’s a snippet from one such tutorial that appeared recently in one of the SIM-swapping channels:
“Hello this is James calling from Metro IT department, how’s your day today?”
(yea im doing good, how r u)
i’m doing great, thank you for asking
i’m calling in regards to a ticket we got last week from you guys, saying you guys were having issues with the network connectivity which also interfered with [Microsoft] Edge, not letting you sign in or disconnecting you randomly. We haven’t received any updates to this ticket ever since it was created so that’s why I’m calling in just to see if there’s still an issue or not….”
The TMO UP data referenced above, combined with comments from the SIM-swappers themselves, indicate that while many of their claimed accesses to T-Mobile tools in the middle of 2022 lasted hours on end, both the frequency and duration of these events began to steadily decrease as the year wore on.
T-Mobile declined to discuss what it may have done to combat these apparent intrusions last year. However, one of the groups began to complain loudly in late October 2022 that T-Mobile must have been doing something that was causing their phished access to employee tools to die very soon after they obtained it.
One group even remarked that they suspected T-Mobile’s security team had begun monitoring their chats.
Indeed, the timestamps associated with one group’s TMO UP/TMO DOWN notices show that their claimed access was often limited to less than 15 minutes throughout November and December of 2022.
Whatever the reason, the calendar graphic above clearly shows that the frequency of claimed access to T-Mobile decreased significantly across all three SIM-swapping groups in the waning weeks of 2022.
T-Mobile US reported revenues of nearly $80 billion last year. It currently employs more than 71,000 people in the United States, any one of whom can be a target for these phishers.
T-Mobile declined to answer questions about what it may be doing to beef up employee authentication. But Nicholas Weaver, a researcher and lecturer at University of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, said T-Mobile and all the major wireless providers should be requiring employees to use physical security keys for that second factor when logging into company resources.
A U2F device made by Yubikey.
“These breaches should not happen,” Weaver said. “Because T-Mobile should have long ago issued all employees security keys and switched to security keys for the second factor. And because security keys provably block this style of attack.”
The most commonly used security keys are inexpensive USB-based devices. A security key implements a form of multi-factor authentication known as Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), which allows the user to complete the login process simply by inserting the USB key and pressing a button on the device. The key works without the need for any special software drivers.
The allure of U2F devices for multi-factor authentication is that even if an employee who has enrolled a security key for authentication tries to log in at an impostor site, the company’s systems simply refuse to request the security key if the user isn’t on their employer’s legitimate website, and the login attempt fails. Thus, the second factor cannot be phished, either over the phone or Internet.
Nixon said one confounding aspect of SIM-swapping is that these criminal groups tend to recruit teenagers to do their dirty work.
“A huge reason this problem has been allowed to spiral out of control is because children play such a prominent role in this form of breach,” Nixon said.
Nixon said SIM-swapping groups often advertise low-level jobs on places like Roblox and Minecraft, online games that are extremely popular with young adolescent males.
“Statistically speaking, that kind of recruiting is going to produce a lot of people who are underage,” she said. “They recruit children because they’re naive, you can get more out of them, and they have legal protections that other people over 18 don’t have.”
For example, she said, even when underage SIM-swappers are arrested, the offenders tend to go right back to committing the same crimes as soon as they’re released.
In January 2023, T-Mobile disclosed that a “bad actor” stole records on roughly 37 million current customers, including their name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, and T-Mobile account number.
In August 2021, T-Mobile acknowledged that hackers made off with the names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and driver’s license/ID information on more than 40 million current, former or prospective customers who applied for credit with the company. That breach came to light after a hacker began selling the records on a cybercrime forum.
In the shadow of such mega-breaches, any damage from the continuous attacks by these SIM-swapping groups can seem insignificant by comparison. But Nixon says it’s a mistake to dismiss SIM-swapping as a low volume problem.
“Logistically, you may only be able to get a few dozen or a hundred SIM-swaps in a day, but you can pick any customer you want across their entire customer base,” she said. “Just because a targeted account takeover is low volume doesn’t mean it’s low risk. These guys have crews that go and identify people who are high net worth individuals and who have a lot to lose.”
Nixon said another aspect of SIM-swapping that causes cybersecurity defenders to dismiss the threat from these groups is the perception that they are full of low-skilled “script kiddies,” a derisive term used to describe novice hackers who rely mainly on point-and-click hacking tools.
“They underestimate these actors and say this person isn’t technically sophisticated,” she said. “But if you’re rolling around in millions worth of stolen crypto currency, you can buy that sophistication. I know for a fact some of these compromises were at the hands of these ‘script kiddies,’ but they’re not ripping off other people’s scripts so much as hiring people to make scripts for them. And they don’t care what gets the job done, as long as they get to steal the money.”
Web hosting giant GoDaddy made headlines this month when it disclosed that a multi-year breach allowed intruders to steal company source code, siphon customer and employee login credentials, and foist malware on customer websites. Media coverage understandably focused on GoDaddy’s admission that it suffered three different cyberattacks over as many years at the hands of the same hacking group. But it’s worth revisiting how this group typically got in to targeted companies: By calling employees and tricking them into navigating to a phishing website.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), GoDaddy said it determined that the same “sophisticated threat actor group” was responsible for three separate intrusions, including:
-March 2020: A spear-phishing attack on a GoDaddy employee compromised the hosting login credentials of approximately 28,000 GoDaddy customers, as well as login credentials for a small number employees;
-November 2021: A compromised GoDaddy password let attackers steal source code and information tied to 1.2 million customers, including website administrator passwords, sFTP credentials, and private SSL keys;
-December 2022: Hackers gained access to and installed malware on GoDaddy’s cPanel hosting servers that “intermittently redirected random customer websites to malicious sites.”
“Based on our investigation, we believe these incidents are part of a multi-year campaign by a sophisticated threat actor group that, among other things, installed malware on our systems and obtained pieces of code related to some services within GoDaddy,” the company stated in its SEC filing.
What else do we know about the cause of these incidents? We don’t know much about the source of the November 2021 incident, other than GoDaddy’s statement that it involved a compromised password, and that it took about two months for the company to detect the intrusion. GoDaddy has not disclosed the source of the breach in December 2022 that led to malware on some customer websites.
But we do know the March 2020 attack was precipitated by a spear-phishing attack against a GoDaddy employee. GoDaddy described the incident at the time in general terms as a social engineering attack, but one of its customers affected by that March 2020 breach actually spoke to one of the hackers involved.
The hackers were able to change the Domain Name System (DNS) records for the transaction brokering site escrow.com so that it pointed to an address in Malaysia that was host to just a few other domains, including the then brand-new phishing domain servicenow-godaddy[.]com.
The general manager of Escrow.com found himself on the phone with one of the GoDaddy hackers, after someone who claimed they worked at GoDaddy called and said they needed him to authorize some changes to the account.
In reality, the caller had just tricked a GoDaddy employee into giving away their credentials, and he could see from the employee’s account that Escrow.com required a specific security procedure to complete a domain transfer.
The general manager of Escrow.com said he suspected the call was a scam, but decided to play along for about an hour — all the while recording the call and coaxing information out of the scammer.
“This guy had access to the notes, and knew the number to call,” to make changes to the account, the CEO of Escrow.com told KrebsOnSecurity. “He was literally reading off the tickets to the notes of the admin panel inside GoDaddy.”
About halfway through this conversation — after being called out by the general manager as an imposter — the hacker admitted that he was not a GoDaddy employee, and that he was in fact part of a group that enjoyed repeated success with social engineering employees at targeted companies over the phone.
Absent from GoDaddy’s SEC statement is another spate of attacks in November 2020, in which unknown intruders redirected email and web traffic for multiple cryptocurrency services that used GoDaddy in some capacity.
It is possible this incident was not mentioned because it was the work of yet another group of intruders. But in response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity at the time, GoDaddy said that incident also stemmed from a “limited” number of GoDaddy employees falling for a sophisticated social engineering scam.
“As threat actors become increasingly sophisticated and aggressive in their attacks, we are constantly educating employees about new tactics that might be used against them and adopting new security measures to prevent future attacks,” GoDaddy said in a written statement back in 2020.
Voice phishing or “vishing” attacks typically target employees who work remotely. The phishers will usually claim that they’re calling from the employer’s IT department, supposedly to help troubleshoot some issue. The goal is to convince the target to enter their credentials at a website set up by the attackers that mimics the organization’s corporate email or VPN portal.
Experts interviewed for an August 2020 story on a steep rise in successful voice phishing attacks said there are generally at least two people involved in each vishing scam: One who is social engineering the target over the phone, and another co-conspirator who takes any credentials entered at the phishing page — including multi-factor authentication codes shared by the victim — and quickly uses them to log in to the company’s website.
The attackers are usually careful to do nothing with the phishing domain until they are ready to initiate a vishing call to a potential victim. And when the attack or call is complete, they disable the website tied to the domain.
This is key because many domain registrars will only respond to external requests to take down a phishing website if the site is live at the time of the abuse complaint. This tactic also can stymie efforts by companies that focus on identifying newly-registered phishing domains before they can be used for fraud.
A U2F device made by Yubikey.
GoDaddy’s latest SEC filing indicates the company had nearly 7,000 employees as of December 2022. In addition, GoDaddy contracts with another 3,000 people who work full-time for the company via business process outsourcing companies based primarily in India, the Philippines and Colombia.
Many companies now require employees to supply a one-time password — such as one sent via SMS or produced by a mobile authenticator app — in addition to their username and password when logging in to company assets online. But both SMS and app-based codes can be undermined by phishing attacks that simply request this information in addition to the user’s password.
One multifactor option — physical security keys — appears to be immune to these advanced scams. The most commonly used security keys are inexpensive USB-based devices. A security key implements a form of multi-factor authentication known as Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), which allows the user to complete the login process simply by inserting the USB device and pressing a button on the device. The key works without the need for any special software drivers.
The allure of U2F devices for multi-factor authentication is that even if an employee who has enrolled a security key for authentication tries to log in at an impostor site, the company’s systems simply refuse to request the security key if the user isn’t on their employer’s legitimate website, and the login attempt fails. Thus, the second factor cannot be phished, either over the phone or Internet.
In July 2018, Google disclosed that it had not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical security keys in place of one-time codes.
A security firm has discovered that a six-year-old crafty botnet known as Mylobot appears to be powering a residential proxy service called BHProxies, which offers paying customers the ability to route their web traffic anonymously through compromised computers. Here’s a closer look at Mylobot, and a deep dive into who may be responsible for operating the BHProxies service.
The BHProxies website.
First identified in 2017 by the security firm Deep Instinct, Mylobot employs a number of fairly sophisticated methods to remain undetected on infected hosts, such as running exclusively in the computer’s temporary memory, and waiting 14 days before attempting to contact the botnet’s command and control servers.
Last year, researchers at Minerva Labs spotted the botnet being used to blast out sextortion scams. But according to a new report from BitSight, the Mylobot botnet’s main functionality has always been about transforming the infected system into a proxy.
The Mylobot malware includes more than 1,000 hard-coded and encrypted domain names, any one of which can be registered and used as control networks for the infected hosts. BitSight researchers found significant overlap in the Internet addresses used by those domains and a domain called BHproxies[.]com.
BHProxies sells access to “residential proxy” networks, which allow someone to rent a residential IP address to use as a relay for their Internet communications, providing anonymity and the advantage of being perceived as a residential user surfing the web. The service is currently advertising access to more than 150,000 devices globally.
“At this point, we cannot prove that BHProxies is linked to Mylobot, but we have a strong suspicion,” wrote BitSight’s Stanislas Arnoud.
To test their hypothesis, BitSight obtained 50 proxies from BHProxies. The researchers were able to use 48 of those 50 proxies to browse to a website they controlled — allowing them to record the true IP addresses of each proxy device.
“Among these 48 recovered residential proxies IP addresses, 28 (58.3%) of those were already present in our sinkhole systems, associated with the Mylobot malware family,” Arnoud continued. “This number is probably higher, but we don’t have a full visibility of the botnet. This gave us clear evidence that Mylobot infected computers are used by the BHProxies service.”
BitSight said it is currently seeing more than 50,000 unique Mylobot infected systems every day, and that India appears to be the most targeted country, followed by the United States, Indonesia and Iran.
“We believe we are only seeing part of the full botnet, which may lead to more than 150,000 infected computers as advertised by BHProxies’ operators,” Arnoud wrote.
The website BHProxies[.]com has been advertised for nearly a decade on the forum Black Hat World by the user BHProxies. BHProxies has authored 129 posts on Black Hat World since 2012, and their last post on the forum was in December 2022.
BHProxies initially was fairly active on Black Hat World between May and November 2012, after which it suddenly ceased all activity. The account didn’t resume posting on the forum until April 2014.
According to cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, the user BHProxies also used the handle “hassan_isabad_subar” and marketed various software tools, including “Subar’s free email creator” and “Subar’s free proxy scraper.”
Intel 471’s data shows that hassan_isabad_subar registered on the forum using the email address jesus.fn.christ@gmail.com. In a June 2012 private message exchange with a website developer on Black Hat World, hassan_isabad_subar confided that they were working at the time to develop two websites, including the now-defunct customscrabblejewelry.com.
DomainTools.com reports that customscrabblejewelry.com was registered in 2012 to a Teresa Shotliff in Chesterland, Ohio. A search on jesus.fn.christ@gmail.com at Constella Intelligence, a company that tracks compromised databases, shows this email address is tied to an account at the fundraising platform omaze.com, for a Brian Shotliff from Chesterland, Ohio.
Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Shotliff said he sold his BHProxies account to another Black Hat World forum user from Egypt back in 2014. Shotliff shared an April 2014 password reset email from Black Hat World, which shows he forwarded the plaintext password to the email address legendboy2050@yahoo.com. He also shared a PayPal receipt and snippets of Facebook Messenger logs showing conversations in March 2014 with legendboy2050@yahoo.com.
Constella Intelligence confirmed that legendboy2050@yahoo.com was indeed another email address tied to the hassan_isabad_subar/BHProxies identity on Black Hat World. Constella also connects legendboy2050 to Facebook and Instagram accounts for one Abdala Tawfik from Cairo. This user’s Facebook page says Tawfik also uses the name Abdalla Khafagy.
Tawfik’s Instagram account says he is a former operations manager at the social media network TikTok, as well as a former director at Crypto.com.
Abdalla Khafagy’s LinkedIn profile says he was “global director of community” at Crypto.com for about a year ending in January 2022. Before that, the resume says he was operations manager of TikTok’s Middle East and North Africa region for approximately seven months ending in April 2020.
Khafagy’s LinkedIn profile says he is currently founder of LewkLabs, a Dubai-based “blockchain-powered, SocialFi content monetization platform” that last year reported funding of $3.26 million from private investors.
The only experience listed for Khafagy prior to the TikTok job is labeled “Marketing” at “Confidential,” from February 2014 to October 2019.
Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Khafagy told KrebsOnSecurity that he had a Black Hat World account at some point, but that he didn’t recall ever having used an account by the name BHProxies or hassan_isabad_subar. Khafagy said he couldn’t remember the name of the account he had on the forum.
“I had an account that was simply hacked from me shortly after and I never bothered about it because it wasn’t mine in the first place,” he explained.
Khafagy declined to elaborate on the five-year stint in his resume marked “Confidential.” When asked directly whether he had ever been associated with the BHProxies service, Mr. Khafagy said no.
That Confidential job listing is interesting because its start date lines up with the creation of BHproxies[.]com. Archive.org indexed its first copy of BHProxies[.]com on Mar. 5, 2014, but historic DNS records show BHproxies[.]com first came online Feb. 25, 2014.
Shortly after that conversation with Mr. Khafagy, Mr. Shotliff shared a Facebook/Meta message he received that indicated Mr. Khafagy wanted him to support the claim that the BHProxies account had somehow gone missing.
“Hey mate, it’s been a long time. Hope you are doing well. Someone from Krebs on Security reached out to me about the account I got from you on BHW,” Khafagy’s Meta account wrote. “Didn’t we try to retrieve this account? I remember mentioning to you that it got stolen and I was never able to retrieve it.”
Mr. Shotliff said Khafagy’s sudden message this week was the first time he’d heard that claim.
“He bought the account,” Shotliff said. “He might have lost the account or had it stolen, but it’s not something I remember.”
If you liked this story, you may also enjoy these other investigations into botnet-based proxy services:
A Deep Dive Into the Residential Proxy Service ‘911’
911 Proxy Service Implodes After Disclosing Breach
Meet the Administrators of the RSOCKS Proxy Botnet
The Link Between AWM Proxy & the Glupteba Botnet
15-Year-Old Malware Proxy Network VIP72 Goes Dark
Who’s Behind the TDSS Botnet?
Millions of Americans receiving food assistance benefits just earned a new right that they can’t yet enforce: The right to be reimbursed if funds on their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards are stolen by card skimming devices secretly installed at cash machines and grocery store checkout lanes.
On December 29, 2022, President Biden signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, which — for the first time ever — includes provisions for the replacement of stolen EBT benefits. This is a big deal because in 2022, organized crime groups began massively targeting EBT accounts — often emptying affected accounts at ATMs immediately after the states disperse funds each month.
EBT cards can be used along with a personal identification number (PIN) to pay for goods at participating stores, and to withdraw cash from an ATM. However, EBT cards differ from debit cards issued to most Americans in two important ways. First, most states do not equip EBT cards with smart chip technology, which can make the cards more difficult and expensive for skimming thieves to clone.
More critically, EBT participants traditionally have had little hope of recovering food assistance funds when their cards were copied by card-skimming devices and used for fraud. That’s because while the EBT programs are operated by individually by the states, those programs are funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which until late last year was barred from reimbursing states for stolen EBT funds.
The protections passed in the 2023 Appropriations Act allow states to use federal funds to replace stolen EBT benefits, and they permit states to seek reimbursement for any skimmed EBT funds they may have replaced from their own coffers (dating back to Oct. 1, 2022).
But first, all 50 states must each submit a plan for how they are going to protect and replace food benefits stolen via card skimming. Guidance for the states in drafting those plans was issued by the USDA on Jan. 31 (PDF), and states that don’t get them done before Feb. 27, 2023 risk losing the ability to be reimbursed for EBT fraud losses.
Deborah Harris is a staff attorney at The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute (MLRI), a nonprofit legal assistance organization that has closely tracked the EBT skimming epidemic. In November 2022, the MLRI filed a class-action lawsuit against Massachusetts on behalf of thousands of low-income families who were collectively robbed of more than $1 million in food assistance benefits by card skimming devices secretly installed at cash machines and grocery store checkout lanes across the state.
Harris said she’s pleased that the USDA guidelines were issued so promptly, and that the guidance for states was not overly prescriptive. For example, some security experts have suggested that adding contactless capability to EBT cards could help participants avoid skimming devices altogether. But Harris said contactless cards do not require a PIN, which is the only thing that stops EBT cards from being drained at the ATM when a participant’s card is lost or stolen.
Then again, nothing in the guidance even mentions chip-based cards, or any other advice for improving the physical security of EBT cards. Rather, it suggests states should seek to develop the capability to perform basic fraud detection and alerting on suspicious transactions, such as when an EBT card that is normally used only in one geographic area suddenly is used to withdraw cash at an ATM halfway across the country.
“Besides having the states move fast to approve their plans, we’d also like to see a focused effort to move states from magstripe-only cards to chip, and also assisting states to develop the algorithms that will enable them to identify likely incidents of stolen benefits,” Harris said.
Harris said Massachusetts has begun using algorithms to look for these suspicious transaction patterns throughout its EBT network, and now has the ability to alert households and verify transactions. But she said most states do not have this capability.
“We have heard that other states aren’t currently able to do that,” Harris said. “But encouraging states to more affirmatively identify instances of likely theft and assisting with the claims and verification process is critical. Most households can’t do that on their own, and in Massachusetts it’s very hard for a person to get a copy of their transaction history. Some states can do that through third-party apps, but something so basic should not be on the burden of EBT households.”
Some states aren’t waiting for direction from the federal government to beef up EBT card security. Like Maryland, which identified more than 1,400 households hit by EBT skimming attacks last year — a tenfold increase over 2021.
Advocates for EBT beneficiaries in Maryland are backing Senate Bill 401 (PDF), which would require the use of chip technology and ongoing monitoring for suspicious activity (a hearing on SB401 is scheduled in the Maryland Senate Finance Commission for Thursday, Feb. 23, at 1 p.m.).
Michelle Salomon Madaio is a director at the Homeless Persons Representation Project, a legal assistance organization based in Silver Spring, Md. Madaio said the bill would require the state Department of Human Services to replace skimmed benefits, not only after the bill goes into effect but also retroactively from January 2020 to the present.
Madaio said the bill also would require the state to monitor for patterns of suspicious activity on EBT cards, and to develop a mechanism to contact potentially affected households.
“For most of the skimming victims we’ve worked with, the fraudulent transactions would be pretty easy to spot because they mostly happened in the middle of the night or out of state, or both,” Madaio said. “To make matters worse, a lot of families whose benefits were scammed then incurred late fees on many other things as a result.”
It is not difficult to see why organized crime groups have pounced on EBT cards as easy money. In most traditional payment card transactions, there are usually several parties that have a financial interest in minimizing fraud and fraud losses, including the bank that issued the card, the card network (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, etc.), and the merchant.
But that infrastructure simply does not exist within state EBT programs, and it certainly isn’t a thing at the inter-state level. What that means is that the vast majority of EBT cards have zero fraud controls, which is exactly what continues to make them so appealing to thieves.
For now, the only fraud controls available to most EBT cardholders include being especially paranoid about where they use their cards, and frequently changing their PINs.
According to USDA guidance issued prior to the passage of the appropriations act, EBT cardholders should consider changing their card PIN at least once a month.
“By changing PINs frequently, at least monthly, and doing so before benefit issuance dates, households can minimize their risk of stolen benefits from a previously skimmed EBT card,” the USDA advised.
Providing secure access and a frictionless user experience are typically competing initiatives, but they don’t have to be! Read on to learn why.
In our world today, context changes quickly. We work from home, coffee shops and the office. We use multiple devices to do work. And on the flip side, attackers are becoming increasingly savvy, getting around security controls, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), to gain unauthorized access.
To quote Wendy Nather, Cisco’s head of Advisory CISOs, “Trust is neither binary nor permanent.” Therefore, security controls must constantly evaluate for change in trust, but without adding unnecessary friction for end-users.
It’s no surprise that the recently published Cybersecurity Readiness Index, a survey of 6,700 cybersecurity leaders from across the globe, revealed that more progress is needed to protect identity, networks and applications.
To address these challenges and to make zero trust access for the workforce easy and frictionless, Cisco Duo announced the general availability of Risk-Based Authentication and enhancements to our enterprise ready Single Sign-On solution at Cisco Live EMEA 2023 earlier this week.
Risk-Based Authentication fulfills the zero trust philosophy of continuous trust verification by assessing the risk level for each access attempt in a manner that is frictionless to users. A higher level of authentication is required only when there is an increase in assessed risk. Duo dynamically detects risk and automatically steps up authentication with two key policies:
The Risk-Based Factor Selection policy detects and analyzes authentication requests and adaptively enforces the most secure factors. It highlights risk and adapts its understanding of normal user behavior. It does this by looking for known attack patterns and anomalies and then allowing only the more secure authentication methods to gain access.
For example, Duo can detect if an organization or employee is being targeted for a push bombing attack or if the authentication device and access device are in two different countries, and Duo responds by automatically elevating the authentication request to a more secure factor such as phishing resistant FIDO2 security keys or Verified Duo Push.
The Risk-Based Remembered Devices policy establishes a trusted device session (like “remember this computer” check box), automatically without asking the user the check a box, during a successful authentication. Once the session is established, Duo looks for anomalous IP addresses or changes to a device throughout the lifetime of the trusted session and requires re-authentication only if it observes a change from historical baselines.
The policy also incorporates a Wi-Fi Fingerprint provided by Duo Device Health app to ensure that IP address changes reflect actual changes in location and not normal usage scenarios such as a user establishing an organizational VPN (Virtual Private Network) session.
Duo uses anonymized Wi-Fi Fingerprint to reliably detect whether the access device is in the same location as it was for previous authentications by comparing the Wi-Fi networks that are “visible” to the access device. Further, Duo preserves user privacy and does not track user location or collect any private information. Wi-Fi Fingerprint only lets Duo know if a user has changed location.
A typical organization uses over 250 applications. Single sign-on (SSO) solutions help employees access multiple applications with a single set of credentials and allow administrators to enforce granular policies for application access from a single console. Integrated with MFA or passwordless authentication, SSO serves as a critical access management tool for organizations that want to implement zero trust access to corporate applications.
Duo SSO is already popular among Duo’s customers. Now, we are adding two new capabilities that cater to modern enterprises:
An increasing number of applications use OIDC for authentication. It is a modern authentication protocol that lets application and website developers authenticate users without storing and managing other people’s passwords, which is both difficult and risky. To date, Duo SSO has supported SAML web applications. Supporting OIDC allows us to protect more of the applications that our customers are adopting as we all move towards a mobile-first world and integrate stronger and modern authentication methods.
Password resets are expensive for organizations. It is estimated that 20-50% of IT helpdesk tickets are for password resets. And according to a report by Ponemon Institute, large enterprises experience an average loss of $5.2 million a year in user productivity due to password resets.
When logging into browser-based applications, Duo SSO already allows users to reset passwords when they have expired in the same login workflow. And we heard from our customers that users want the option to proactively reset passwords. Now, Duo SSO offers the convenience to reset their Active Directly passwords before they expire. This capability further increases user productivity and reduces IT helpdesk tickets.
Risk-Based Authentication and enhancements to Duo SSO are available now to all paying customers based on their Duo Edition. If you are not yet a Duo customer, sign up for a free 30-day trial and try out these new capabilities today!
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Cisco is honored to be this year’s winner of the Best Next Generation Firewall Award in the SE Labs 2023 Annual Report. This industry recognition validates Cisco’s continuous push towards harmonizing network, workload, and application security across hybrid and multicloud environments. I’m incredibly proud of the Cisco Secure Firewall team and am thankful for our amazing customers who continue to trust Cisco and develop their network security around our capabilities.
SE Labs, a cybersecurity testing and evaluation firm, provides impartial and independent assessments of various cybersecurity products and solutions. In their 2023 Annual Report, SE Labs states:
“Our Annual Security Awards recognizes security vendors that notonly do well in our tests, but perform well in the real world withreal customers. These awards are the only in the industry thatrecognize strong lab work combined with practical success.”
SE Labs performs tests on behalf of customers seeking independent proof-of-value assistance, as well as security vendors. At Cisco, we use third-party evaluations from multiple sources, including SE Labs, to augment our internal testing and to drive product improvement.
Winners were determined after months of in-depth testing, based on a combination of continual public testing, private assessments and feedback from corporate clients who use SE Labs to help choose security products and services. The award further validates that our customers can expect superior threat protection and performance with Cisco Secure Firewall.
SE Labs’ reports use the MITRE ATT&CK framework, employing both common “commodity” malware samples and sophisticated, targeted attacks. Their network security testing uses full attack chains to assess the detection and protection abilities of network devices and combinations of network and endpoint solutions. SE Labs publishes its testing methodologies and is BS EN ISO 9001: 2015 certified for The Provision of IT Security Product Testing.
As a worldwide leader in networking and security, Cisco is better positioned than any other security vendor to incorporate effective firewall controls into our customers’ infrastructure — anywhere data and applications reside. We offer a comprehensive threat defense with industry-leading Snort 3 IPS to protect users, applications, and data from continuously evolving threats. Our solutions also leverage machine learning and advanced threat intelligence from Cisco Talos, one of the world’s largest commercial threat intelligence teams.
In the constantly evolving world of cybersecurity, it is important to have access to the latest and most advanced technologies to stay ahead of threats. Whether you are an enterprise, government, healthcare, or a service provider organization, Cisco Secure Firewall provides top-ranked security.
When you invest in Cisco Secure Firewall, you are investing in award-winning threat defense with capabilities that are built for the real world. Learn more about SE Labs 2023 Annual Report, Cisco Secure Firewall and how you can refresh your firewall.
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Congratulations to security advocate Luigi Vassallo, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Sara Assicurazioni Insurance, an innovative Italian cloud-first insurance firm.
In the last two years, cybersecurity has advanced and can feel like a one-two punch to those who are not prepared. But what does that preparation look like? For Luigi Vassallo, it was more than just tackling cybersecurity defense on his own. Luigi reached out to the Cisco community, offering his knowledge and expertise to help others. This is what stood out to make him our Cybersecurity Defender of the Year in EMEA for the Cisco Global Advocate Awards 2023 EMEA event.
Cisco’s advocacy community, Cisco Insider Advocates, brings our customers together and provides a way for them to make powerful connections, expand their professional and personal networks, and learn from top experts in their field. Luigi personifies the spirit of Insider Advocates by sharing freely within the community.
One may wonder where Luigi finds the time or energy to participate in the community. Luigi finds immeasurable energy by training as a kickboxer and as an avid cyclist. This energy transforms into a philosophy of helping others. As Luigi says, it is about being “the best version of yourself.”
Luigi sums up his approach to cybersecurity this way: “Cybersecurity for me is like boxing: you never know when your opponent will attack, but you have to know in advance how to respond and what you can do.”
Luigi has been featured in a profile piece, as well as a video, where he speaks about his personal goals, as well as his goals for making Sara Assicurazioni as secure as possible with Cisco’s products. Part of his passion comes from being comfortable with the uncertainty of cybersecurity, coupled with the confidence that Cisco is there to help his organization. I’m honored that Sara Assicurazioni has joined forces with Cisco Secure to confidently define zero-trust and XDR strategies that increase security resilience and drive better customer outcomes for them.
When notified of the award, Luigi’s humility and dedication to the community was evident, as he shared, “I feel happy and surprised about this award, as I didn’t expect to win because there were so many good advocates who were nominated with me. I want to thank Cisco for awarding me the Cybersecurity Defender of the Year honor.”
Luigi also credits the Cisco Insider Advocacy program for its ability to connect and grow the cybersecurity community, adding:
“This is also what makes Cisco different from other security vendors; the capacity to recognize the innovation and resilience of its customers. I feel that we are part of the same movement, and we are together in the same fight against cybercriminals. To all other nominees, I want to say thank you for your hard work in cybersecurity and in sharing your good practices with me in the Cisco Insider Advocacy community and now at Cisco Live EMEA.”
We congratulate Luigi, not only for keeping his guard up, but for helping others to do the same by being part of the Cisco Insider Advocacy community.
The Cisco Global Advocate Awards celebrates Cisco’s passionate and innovative customer advocates who go above and beyond in demonstrating thought leadership and supporting Cisco through success stories, speaking engagements, product reviews, and so much more.
We’re planning three exclusive events that will coincide with Cisco Live conferences in Amsterdam, Las Vegas, and Melbourne in 2023. We hope you’ll join us as we recognize our customer advocates by region for actively supporting Cisco. You won’t want to miss it.
To learn more, and to become a member, please visit us here.
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Cisco Live is the premier destination for Cisco customers and partners to gain knowledge and build community. Our teams work hard to deliver education and inspiration, ignite creativity, deliver practical know-how, and accelerate the connections that fuel your digital future.
The Cisco Secure team is excited to share our expertise to help power the strategies – and safety – of your organization.
In 2023, the threat landscape will evolve to one that sees attacks on every surface, from criminals who are opportunistic, yet laser-focused on their goal. The attacks themselves could be email-borne, directly targeted, socially based, or a mix of all three.
Criminals will target vulnerabilities, operational deficiencies, suppliers, and business partners, as a means of accomplishing their goals. They will use the target’s own environment and take advantage of existing people and technology problems, including alert fatigue and staffing shortages.
To face this reality and address the needs of organizations both large and small, Cisco will continue to focus on education and innovation in the areas of preventing insider threats, providing consistent and informed alerts, enabling actionable intelligence, and delivering solutions to implement a zero-trust security framework.
As the organization that pioneered networking, we are driven to secure every connection, providing end-to-end protection for users and devices across multiple clouds and networks with a seamless experience.
As our vision for the integrated Cisco Security Cloud evolves, we’re continuing to challenge existing models and unify security and networking, with foundational elements that execute on this vision. From verified push – which protects organizations from MFA-focused phishing attacks – to Wi-Fi Fingerprint, and Remembered Devices, the performance enhancements with Enterprise Single Sign-on and Cisco+ Secure Connect, we continue to meet our customers where they are, offering true zero trust, with frictionless experiences for the hybrid workforce.
We’re excited to celebrate the following innovations and updates announced at Cisco Live EMEA:
Finding the balance between usability and security is now easier than ever. With Risk-Based Authentication, users have the access they need, secured by real-time contextual signals. Organizations can increase security efficacy by dynamically adjusting authentication requirements based on risk levels and by enabling safer end-user behavior. Risk-based authentication now includes wi-fi fingerprint, remembered device, and verified push features, which work together to reduce risk while preserving user experience by only requesting additional interaction for suspicious logins or a change in risk.
Our Enterprise Ready Single Sign-on expands Duo SSO with three new capabilities to easily connect single sign-on to modern apps and empower end users. By adding major protocol support, improved admin tooling, and SSO on demand password resets, organizations enable easier and more secure access from anywhere.
Cisco SD-WAN customers can now enjoy all the benefits of a turnkey, single-vendor SASE solution that brings together industry-leading networking with security: Cisco+ Secure Connect. This new integration gives Cisco SD-WAN (powered by Viptela) customers fast, secure private application and internet access, enabling them to deliver a secure experience, anywhere work happens.
We are also announcing the introduction of industry-first Business Risk Observability, an enhancement of our Full-Stack Observability application security solution. Available through Cisco Secure Application, which is integrated into Cisco AppDynamics, it provides a business risk scoring solution which brings together Kenna Risk Meter score distribution and Business Transactions from Cisco AppDynamics and integrates with Panoptica for API security and Talos for threat intelligence.
The initial findings from our first Cybersecurity Readiness Index reveal that while technology to devices is widely adopted, more progress is needed to protect identity, networks and applications. The report assessed the preparedness of companies around the world to safeguard against cyber threats in the current environment. See our key findings and security readiness trends, with the full report launching in the coming weeks.
As we navigate 2023, we will continue to face uncertainties and challenges. We are fully committed to our customers and partners in the journey to provide security resilience, supporting a frictionless user experience, and solutions threat intelligence that work to continually minimize risk.
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“Where do we start?”
This is the question every CISO asks about every new program. In fact, I ask and answer that question many times a month. There’s a reason for this, of course. A strong start to any project builds momentum, reassures stakeholders, and sets the stage for what’s to come. Security resilience initiatives are no different. Security resilience is the ability to anticipate and respond to unpredictable threats or changes, and then emerge stronger. It’s hard to imagine a more vital undertaking for CISOs. And as with all initiatives, CISOs always want to know where to begin.
They’re likely to find some valuable starting points in the Security Outcomes Report, Volume 3: Achieving Security Resilience, the latest in a series of reports released by Cisco and reflecting the viewpoints of 4,700 IT and security professionals from 26 countries. The report identifies seven success factors CISOs can pursue to improve outcomes within their own enterprise security resilience programs, placing a high priority on security resilience. The seven success factors range in nature from the architectural—simplifying your hybrid IT environment, maximizing zero trust adoption—to more relationship-focused factors.
It’s the latter that caught my eye.
Seven success factors for resilience:
It shouldn’t surprise any CISO that the first two success factors are built around relationships. These factors zero in on relationships with company leadership (as measured by establishing executive support) and relationships with people across the organization (as measured by cultivating a culture of security). Experienced CISOs know that these factors can make or break security initiatives.
Given the objective of security resilience is to withstand threats and come back even stronger, it’s clear that resilience must exist before, during, and after a cybersecurity incident. This has repercussions on the executive level and throughout the business. Lack of executive support can lead to detection, response, and recovery capabilities that are chronically underfunded. This leaves CISOs at a disadvantage when security incidents do inevitably happen and panic strikes the C-suite. What’s more, CISOs who lack strong executive relationships may also find themselves struggling to oversee incident management and coordinate communications. And afterward? Remediating and improving the security posture, which often impacts multiple parts of the organization beyond IT and often requires significant investment, stalls without a necessary lift from leadership.
The security report, which scores resilience levels across a series of criteria, finds that organizations reporting a strong backing from leadership have resilience scores that are 39% higher when compared to organizations reporting weak support. “Bridges to the C-suite are built upon a solid understanding of how the business works and how security initiatives can make it work even better,” notes the report. “Support goes both ways in any relationship, after all.”
In addition to keeping the program aligned, CISOs must keep in communication with their peers and superiors. Those who share only transactional relationships within the C-Suite find their interactions limited to status updates and budget requests. Transformational relationships, however, involve more frequent and deeper communication and interactions, which cover a broader set of topics than submitting the latest budget ask. They are, in other words, more valuable.
Of course, executive support is just one crucial factor for success. Resilience programs need broad support from throughout the organization, not just at the top. Every time an employee picks up a mouse or accesses an app from their mobile phone, they make a choice to either strengthen or lessen the organization’s security posture. Every time an improvement is necessary following a security event, cultural buy-in determines whether this new request from security is implemented or circumvented.
According to the report, organizations that successfully foster a culture of security can see a 46% increase in resilience compared to those who lack such a culture. Much like aligning a program with the business direction furthers leadership buy-in, CISOs need to align security policy with the functional direction of the business—but in a way that helps employees see security measures as protecting not just corporate data and IT assets but also their own future. When employees aren’t on board or see security measures as IT concerns with no relation to them, resilience suffers. “Frequent security policy violations and workarounds,” notes the report, “are evidence of poor security culture.” By viewing policy exceptions as feedback, and investigating these from the perspective of identifying and correcting misalignment, security leaders can enroll employees as the willing participants in the solution—rather than contributors to the problem.
Security leaders know, by and large, what we need to do to secure our organizations. We have frameworks with pages of controls. We have risk registers with lists of action items. Where we often struggle is translating this knowledge into action. To do that, we must see our efforts within the strategic context of executive leaders and the tactical reality of the line managers in our organization. We must personalize and prioritize our efforts around what matters to the people we collaborate with. It is through engaging people that our security programs become human-centric and, in turn, become more resilient.
Where do we start? With relationships. Good relationships lead to good security programs, and good security programs lead to great relationships. And all of these contribute to security resilience.
Download the Security Outcomes Report, Vol. 3: Achieving Security Resilience today.
Explore more original research and blogs like this:
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The use of unmanaged and IoT devices in enterprises is growing exponentially, and will account for 55.7 billion connected devices by the end of 2025. A critical concern is deploying IoT devices without requisite security controls.
While these numbers are numbing, their reality is undeniable. 90% of customers believe digitization has accelerated the importance placed upon security. The World Economic Forum now lists cybersecurity failure as a critical threat, and estimates a gap of more than 3 million security experts worldwide, hindering secure deployments at scale. Furthermore, 83% of IoT-based transactions happen over plaintext channels and not SSL, making them especially risky.
Securing an IoT device can be achieved either through securing the IoT device itself, or hardening the network it accesses. Securing devices can be cumbersome, requiring complex manufacturing partnerships and increasing unit prices, thereby reducing adoption. On the other hand, securing the network is always desirable as it helps secure access, encrypt traffic, and ease management.
Being a leader in both security and networking, Cisco continues to bring security closer to networking, providing the network with built-in security, and enabling the network to act both as sensor and as an enforcer. The convergence of security and networking leverages the network’s intelligence and visibility to enable more-informed decisions on policy and threats.
Cisco uniquely integrates security and networking, for instance we recently integrated Cisco Secure Firewall to operate on Cisco Catalyst 9000 Series switches. Additionally, Secure Firewall can be deployed in a containerized form, on-premises and in clouds. Cisco Secure Firewall classifies traffic and protects applications while stopping exploitation of vulnerable systems. Additionally, we offer Identity Services Engine with AI Endpoint Analytics to passively identify IoT devices and apply segmentation policies. Furthermore, Cisco offers management flexibility by integrating with Cisco Defense Orchestrator and DNA Center and with existing customer tools like SIEMs and XDRs.
Let’s look at three use cases where the addition of Secure Firewall capability on Catalyst 9000 Series switches solves real world problems:
Use case 1: Securing the Smart Building: This solution is ideal to secure smart buildings, converging various IoT systems into a single IT-managed network infrastructure. Smart buildings lower the operational and energy costs. Smarter building systems, however, pose serious security risks as these include so many unmanaged devices such as window shades, lighting, tailored HVAC, and more. One of the methods to secure smart buildings is to control access to avoid manipulation of sensors. Such control is attained with a networking switch with enhanced firewall capability. The firewall ensures granular segmentation, directing policies for traffic generated out of IoT devices, providing access to the right users. This integration also brings security closer to endpoints, making policy orchestration simpler.
Use Case 2: Centrally manage isolated IoT network clusters: IoT devices which communicate with each other in the same subnet typically cannot be routed, which is a challenge. By default, most IoT networks are configured in the same subnet, making it difficult to manage them centrally. Administrators are forced to physically connect to the IoT network to manage and collect telemetry. Furthermore, IoT vendors often charge hefty amounts to update IP addresses of devices. Cisco Secure Firewall, hosted on the Catalyst switch, solves this problem and not only inspects traffic from the IoT network but also translates duplicate IoT IP addresses to unique global IP addresses using NAT for centralized management of isolated IoT networks.
Use Case 3: Securely encrypt IoT traffic passing through a shared IT network: At airports, for example, multiple vendors manage unique systems such as baggage, air quality, biometric access control, etc, which share a common network. IoT traffic is usually in plain text, making it susceptible to packet sniffing, eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, and other such exploits. The IPSec capability on Cisco Secure Firewall encrypts IoT traffic, securing data transfer and reducing risk.
Cisco’s IoT initiatives join the once disconnected worlds of IT and IoT, unifying networking and security. For further details refer to the At-A Glance and see how and an Australian oil company, Ampol, fortified its retail IoT with Cisco Secure!
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In today’s security climate, NetOps and SecOps teams are witnessing increased attack surface area as applications and workloads move far beyond the boundaries of their data center. These applications/workloads move to, and reside in multi-cloud architecture, adding complexity to connectivity, visibility, and control. In the multi-cloud world, the SecOps teams use a distributed security model that is expensive, difficult to deploy, and complex to manage.
Cisco has partnered with Alkira to help secure your multi-cloud environment. Combining Alkira’s simplified cloud connection through their cloud network-as-a-service platform (SaaS-like model) with Cisco’s industry-leading security controls, we can deliver a centralized security model for multi-cloud architecture that is easy to deploy, manage, and increases visibility and control.
Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual provides unmatched security controls such as stateful firewalling, Snort3 IPS, URL filtering, malware defense, application visibility and control, and more. Additionally, with the purchase of Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual, you will receive license entitlement to Cisco SecureX, our open XDR and orchestration platform, helping you accelerate threat detection, investigation, and remediation.
Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) is required for managing Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual, helping administrators enforce consistent access policies, rapidly troubleshoot security events, and view summarized reports across the deployment.
Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual is available on Alkira’s service marketplace through Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) and Pay-As-You-Go licensing options. Customers can seamlessly deploy and insert Secure Firewall in their Alkira Cloud Exchange Points (CXP).
Benefits of this integrated architecture include:
The Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense brings the following capabilities to the environment:
Figure 1 shows a multi-cloud environment inter-connected using Alkira Cloud Exhange Platform (CXP). In the above architecture, Cisco provides seamless insertion of security controls and enables the following use cases for firewall insertion:
Using Alkira’s customer portal, Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual can be easily inserted in the traffic path within minutes. Figure 2 shows how automation & orchestration eliminates additional configuration required in the legacy insertion model.
Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual is managed using Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC). Customers can use on-premises FMC or build a virtual FMC instance in the cloud. Cisco and Alkira support both models of deployment.
Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual protects the following traffic flows in Alkira CXP:
Alkira and Cisco’s partnership simplifies the deployment of enterprise-grade security in the cloud while enabling multi-cloud visibility and end-to-end threat defense for customers.
Additional Resources:
Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense
Cisco Secure Firewall Data Sheet
Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center
Alkira blog on Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense
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For Cisco engineers working on Duo, having a remote-first workplace has helped them reach life goals, connect with colleagues around the world, and be intentional communicators. We understand that working remotely can be an adjustment — that’s why we’ve compiled the 10 parts of remote work that surprised our team members most and their advice for navigating the nuances. If you’re interested in being part of a remote-first workplace, check out our open positions.
Senior Engineering Leader David Rines has worked remotely for the past seven years. He’s found that Cisco’s approach to distributed teams has “enabled us to pick up the right talent, and not necessarily local talent. We are moving towards a global, follow the sun environment,” he said.
One of the aspects Rines appreciates most of this structure is getting “a widely varied set of perspectives and experiences that help build a more reliable, more robust product, which is why we’re here.”
Another benefit to having colleagues across the globe is the sharing of recipes, a perk Senior Site Reliability Engineer Bernard Ting particularly enjoys. Proactively communicating with colleagues virtually “helps you to form bonds with people from other teams. You can always learn something new about cultures elsewhere. I talk to people about food and so I’m always gathering recipes from people from all over the world,” Ting shared.
While some may fear that working remotely could lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness, a different camaraderie can flourish in the structure of our distributed teams. With colleagues across time zones, “there’s always someone there who you can reach out to help solve your problem,” Rines said.
Collaboration hours are another way Site Reliability Engineering Manager Jaya Sistla has cultivated virtual community and problem-solving. These hours are blocked off for team members to talk about what they’re working on. “The main thing is being able to ask for help so you don’t go into the rabbit hole debugging things,” Sistla said.
Ting points out that working in a distributed model allows you to really engage in virtual events and conversations. Given that the team mainly communicates through online chat, Ting has found that “forces you to see everyone as equally approachable, which has made me more comfortable reaching out to people from anywhere in the world.”
For folks sharing an office, collaboration can happen through casual chats over coffee. When facing a challenge, you can ask your neighbor for support. While ideally virtual communication could have a similar cadence and spontaneity, the logistics of remote and distributed work require intentionality and being proactive in connecting with colleagues as people and as co-workers.
When Ting first started working remotely, he felt that every meeting needed to be formal and have a business objective. By sharing his feelings with his manager, he was reassured that “socializing is a very important part of teamwork, because if you don’t have a good relationship with your colleagues you’re not going to be able to have healthy discussions, healthy conflict or be able to critique each other when the situation arises.”
Since that conversation, Ting has been more proactive about catching up with colleagues, which can include sharing a coffee over video chat. Duo’s “coffee roulette” formalizes the process as every month, employees who opt in can be randomly paired up for a quick half-hour chat focused exclusively on socializing. Ting has found being proactive about socializing virtually helpful. “It’s made me more intentional with my time and really treasure the social experience you can get,” he said.
Some folks may be concerned that without a manager observing their efforts and work ethic day in and day out, it may be harder to recognize accomplishments and challenges. Ting found that within his team “when you work on projects and in your one-on-ones with your managers, they’re always very intentional about learning what you’ve been doing and seeing what your progress is like on certain projects. I’ve been asked, ‘How do you think you can improve? What are some of the things you’ve been doing outside of the team work?’”
To cultivate cross-team collaboration and education, there are thoughtfully planned virtual lunch and learns. “We schedule training sessions and common meetings at times that are flexible for everyone. If it has to be repeated, we do it so people can comfortably attend rather than stretching themselves and attending at odd hours,” Sistla said.
For Software Engineer Nick Aspinall, an important and fun part of working remotely is keeping in touch with virtual messaging. One unique perk has been getting to create and customize emojis with team members including a few of himself in “various ridiculous states,” he said.
Connecting with colleagues on themed channels focused on personal and professional interests from coffee to pets “makes it really cool because you can meet people across different teams and still get some of the feeling of rubbing elbows that you get when you’re in the office,” Aspinall said. Participating in these virtual conversations boosts morale while also providing an endless supply of cute animal pics.
Given the multi-faceted nature of our work and the importance of consistent information sharing, having different communication channels and formats to communicate data with varying degrees of complexity is vital. Having information readily accessible, accurate and updated is particularly necessary in a field like cybersecurity.
Senior Software Engineer Mario Lopez finds that the variety of information sources contributes to an easeful remote working experience. For instance, for complex architecture decisions or detailing, Duo’s Wiki is the best source.
Software Engineer Hanna Fernandez has benefited from chat channels dedicated to design and engineering topics to “see what everyone’s up to and what thoughts people have,” she said. Sista pointed out these are great places to ask questions and open up dialogue to solve problems.
Our culture is “video-on,” meaning that it is preferred that during video meetings, as much as possible, attendees have their cameras on. Lopez loves this because “you get a bit of that personal human element.”
“We’re all people behind these screens. You definitely get some of people’s personality through text, but you get it more when you actually see them. It’s infectious when you see someone smiling. You’ve got to smile back,” he shared (while we both smiled).
When Fernandez started at Cisco, she was advised to schedule individual meetings with everyone she would be working with on every team that she joined. That suggestion is one she’s applied even virtually.
“It’s a great strategy because I already know that my team is super talented and very smart, but this way I also get to know them as humans beyond their roles,” Fernandez said. Fernandez also finds it important to check in with co-workers and ask how they’re feeling and how their time off was. “I know a lot of people hate small talk, but it’s not just small talk. I’m genuinely interested in how my co-workers are doing.”
One of Ting’s biggest goals was buying his first house in the countryside outside of London. By working remotely, Ting has flexibility in his location which allowed him to achieve his goal of buying a house and settling down with his partner, while giving their dogs the space they need to be dogs.
When transitioning from fully remote to hybrid, it’s important to recognize that there will be some shifts to get accustomed to. As the structures of remote, distributed and hybrid work evolve, it’s important to stay flexible and notice what’s possible through multiple modalities of team building. Many teams have enjoyed in-person gatherings and connecting through virtual lunches and team games when remote.
Fernandez has had multiple roles with multiple structures at Cisco. As an intern, she was fully in person and shared desk space with other interns who collaborated on full stack engineering. While working in finance IT, Fernandez was hybrid and many of her colleagues were distributed among multiple offices. The pandemic began while she was in a DevOps role, forcing her to maintain boundaries around her work time while working fully remotely. In her current role working on Duo, Fernandez is completely remote but advocates for in-person events if possible, because “humans are social creatures who want to see each other’s faces in real life once in a while.”
For Aspinall, “when we did come back to the office, there was a bit of an adjustment period where you were overstimulated from the office.” He also wanted to ensure team members who were 100% remote were fully included. Now he sees that while half his team is fully remote and the other half is hybrid, “that doesn’t stop anyone from doing anything. All of our meetings feel the same. They’re all seamless.”
If you’re interested in joining our team from wherever you are in the world, check out our open roles.
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Cisco Secure Social Channels
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Imagine this: Your CEO sends you an email asking for your help transferring $5,000 to a new vendor for an urgent project. You make the transfer, only to find out later that the email was actually from an imposter, and that money is now in the hands of cybercriminals. Oops, right? crickets
Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a type of cybercrime that involves compromising or imitating legitimate business email accounts to carry out fraudulent transactions or steal sensitive information. The goal of a BEC attack is typically to trick the victim into transferring money, clicking on a malicious link, or disclosing sensitive information such as login credentials. BEC attacks can have a devastating impact on organizations of all sizes and in all industries, making it essential for businesses to be aware of the threat, understand the business risk, and take the necessary steps to protect themselves.
According to the latest FBI IC3 report, BEC is “one of the most financially damaging online crimes” and in 2021 was accountable for $2.4 Billion in adjusted losses for businesses and consumers.
One of the most common types of BEC attacks is called impersonating or email spoofing. By pretending to be a trusted colleague or business partner to gain the victim’s trust, the attacker uses social engineering techniques to trick the victim into clicking on a link or attachment in an email that contains malware, takes the victim to a malicious website, and has them transfer funds or change payment information.
BEC attacks can be very sophisticated and are difficult to detect. Many times, what the end-user sees on their email client does not represent the true email address of that sender, or it shows one that has been spoofed.
Typically, the attacker tries to impersonate someone in the organization with enough authority to not be questioned about what he/she is asking to be done.
As with everything in security, to be able to succeed in stopping BEC attacks, additional security layers & techniques should be implemented. There are several options to mitigate or reduce the number of successful BEC attacks. Creating a list of the people who will be likely to be impersonated will provide the best results. Usually, with names from the CxO level, this is known as a High Impact Personnel list. It will be used along with other security analysis engines to make sure any impersonated/spoof emails, along with other threats, get stopped and will not reach the end user.
The Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense solution leverages hundreds of detection engines that utilize state-of-the-art artificial intelligence/machine learning and natural language processing to convict messages from the most creative attackers! On top of this, our customers can define their High Impact Personnel list, and together with the other detection engines, will be able to not only block malicious messages but also understand the reasons and categories of why a message is being convicted as malicious.
In summary, Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a serious threat to organizations of all sizes and in all industries. To protect against BEC attacks, businesses should implement multiple techniques including identifying their High Impact Personnel for their organization, educating employees about the threat, and relying on reporting to understand who is being targeted most frequently so their security policies can be adjusted.
See how Secure Email Threat Defense identifies specific business risk factors to protect your organization.
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Cisco Secure Social Channels
Cybersecurity professionals are often perceived as sole practitioners, plying their craft in dimly lit rooms. Nothing could be further from the truth, as one of the keys to being a successful cybersecurity professional is the ability to collaborate and, more importantly, to share knowledge as far and wide as possible.
At Cisco, we have formed the Cisco Insider Advocacy program, which consists of a global community of professionals passionate about working and spreading their knowledge with others. We celebrate these individuals’ efforts with annual awards in various disciplines and locales. In 2023, Cisco will recognize top advocates by region for the Global Advocate Awards. Our first event – highlighting Cisco customers from across the EMEA region – is around the corner. It all happens at Cisco Live in Amsterdam, in a live ceremony on February 8!
I am joined on the Advocate Awards judges’ panel by my colleagues, Cindy Valladares, Director of Brand Strategy and Customer Advocacy at Cisco Secure, Caroline Surujpaul, EMEA and European Marketing Director at Cisco Secure and Sarah Stephens, Senior Security Marketing Leader for EMEA at Cisco Secure. We are pleased to introduce the nominees for the Cybersecurity Defender of the Year Award in EMEA.
We have five distinguished nominees, and while we have yet to select a winner, you will see how each of their contributions to Cisco’s cybersecurity community raised our attention.
Alessandro was featured in a recent successful case study about the Future of Work with Umbrella, as well as an earlier piece about simplified security using Cisco Meraki in Talent Garden.
Alessandro also authored a book about digital transformation long before it was a common buzzword. That is typical of Alessandro’s foresight, the ability to be proactive to changes before they are commonplace. He is indeed on the cutting edge.
Alessandro considers his involvement in the Advocacy community as “a very easy goal for me. First, because I’m very passionate about cybersecurity, and second because here I can find very valuable peers and professionals to share information with.” Alessandro’s abilities are borne from passion, drive, and adherence to a personal code of excellence; he learned security in a strictly hands-on style. He is also a member of Cisco’s “League of Cybersecurity Heroes.”
Christoffer, the newest Cisco Insider Advocacy community member, has gotten off to a brisk involvement with the group. He was recently featured in the case study “NTNU Supports a Diverse Academic and Research Community with Proactive Security,” which detailed how the Norwegian University of Science and Technology tackled the management of a dizzying 110,000 endpoints connecting to the university’s VPN.
Christoffer fully embraces the ideology of collaboration, mentioning that when he was seeking a security solution, “We didn’t want a vendor. We didn’t want a product. We wanted a partner to help us attack this large problem of cybersecurity.” He also demonstrates a fervent dedication to sharing by authoring half a dozen works in the cybersecurity realm, ranging from scientific to academic articles. His involvement in the Insider Advocacy community has earned him a spot in Cisco’s “League of Cybersecurity Heroes.”
Mark is one of the most erudite cybersecurity professionals one could meet. He has extensive educational credentials and enjoys sharing his knowledge, making him one of the Top 10 most engaged advocates of the Cybersecurity Channel within the Cisco Insider Advocates community.
Mark’s professional involvement extends beyond his local precinct, offering his knowledge of security best practices across the UK Policing community. In completing his most recent university degree, he authored a dissertation that “has led to an initiative to improve the security posture of my workplace.” Mark’s support to other Cisco customers has also led to his election as Vice-Chair of the Internet Society Cybersecurity Special Interest Group. He is also a member of Cisco’s “League of Cybersecurity Heroes.”
Luigi is a valuable member of the Insider Advocacy group and was recently featured in a video and written success story about Zero Trust and XDR.
Luigi is an agent of change who embraces the collaborative spirit of a true cybersecurity expert, as exemplified in his entire professional approach: “Since the infrastructure is now cloud-based, we had to change our mindset regarding cybersecurity as well. It was important to have the people, the process, the organisation, and the technology under the same security umbrella.”
When not working to ensure the security of the Sara Assicurazioni environment, Luigi has dedicated time to speaking at events, such as the “Experts Learning from Experts” global virtual session, a special virtual roundtable dedicated to Zero Trust and, last but not least, his presentation at Cisco Live Emea in Amsterdam about XDR and Zero Trust. His contributions to the Insider Advocacy platform reflect a tireless commitment to the cybersecurity community. Luigi is also a member of Cisco’s “League of Cybersecurity Heroes.”
Last year, Diego participated as speaker at the Tech Forum: Convergencia entre redes y seguridad. He will also be featured in a future ThreatWise TV – Cisco episode
Diego recognised early on that remote work would place his organisation outside the scope of their security and took proactive measures to meet the challenge. Part of his proactive approach is to freely communicate his ideas, leading to his involvement in the Insider Advocacy community. This has also earned him a place within Cisco’s “League of Cybersecurity Heroes.”
Diego’s view of working with Cisco’s products is summed up in a catchy phrase: “If it’s connected, it’s protected.” His involvement within the Insider Advocacy community makes us echo that sentiment by stating that he is connected, helping to keep everyone protected.
One point of note is the absence of women from the list of nominees. This was not the result of bias, as Cisco has a history of substantial diversity, equity, and inclusion. As you can see from the activities of the current nominees, the selection was based strictly on contributions to the community. We would love to see more engagement and membership in the Insider Advocacy program, not only from women but from a broader geographic area. This would increase the choices of possible nominees and add an even wider palette of inclusion to the entire nomination process.
We know that there is an entire population of cybersecurity professionals who seek more connection with like-minded individuals, and we welcome you to join this cohesive community.
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T-Mobile today disclosed a data breach affecting tens of millions of customer accounts, its second major data exposure in as many years. In a filing with federal regulators, T-Mobile said an investigation determined that someone abused its systems to harvest subscriber data tied to approximately 37 million current customer accounts.
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In a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, T-Mobile said a “bad actor” abused an application programming interface (API) to hoover up data on roughly 37 million current postpaid and prepaid customer accounts. The data stolen included customer name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number, as well as information on the number of customer lines and plan features.
APIs are essentially instructions that allow applications to access data and interact with web databases. But left improperly secured, these APIs can be leveraged by malicious actors to mass-harvest information stored in those databases. In October, mobile provider Optus disclosed that hackers abused a poorly secured API to steal data on 10 million customers in Australia.
T-Mobile said it first learned of the incident on Jan. 5, 2023, and that an investigation determined the bad actor started abusing the API beginning around Nov. 25, 2022. The company says it is in the process of notifying affected customers, and that no customer payment card data, passwords, Social Security numbers, driver’s license or other government ID numbers were exposed.
In August 2021, T-Mobile acknowledged that hackers made off with the names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and driver’s license/ID information on more than 40 million current, former or prospective customers who applied for credit with the company. That breach came to light after a hacker began selling the records on a cybercrime forum.
Last year, T-Mobile agreed to pay $500 million to settle all class action lawsuits stemming from the 2021 breach. The company pledged to spend $150 million of that money toward beefing up its own cybersecurity.
In its filing with the SEC, T-Mobile suggested it was going to take years to fully realize the benefits of those cybersecurity improvements, even as it claimed that protecting customer data remains a top priority.
“As we have previously disclosed, in 2021, we commenced a substantial multi-year investment working with leading external cybersecurity experts to enhance our cybersecurity capabilities and transform our approach to cybersecurity,” the filing reads. “We have made substantial progress to date, and protecting our customers’ data remains a top priority.”
Despite this being the second major customer data spill in as many years, T-Mobile told the SEC the company does not expect this latest breach to have a material impact on its operations.
While that may seem like a daring thing to say in a data breach disclosure affecting a significant portion of your active customer base, consider that T-Mobile reported revenues of nearly $20 billion in the third quarter of 2022 alone. In that context, a few hundred million dollars every couple of years to make the class action lawyers go away is a drop in the bucket.
The settlement related to the 2021 breach says T-Mobile will make $350 million available to customers who file a claim. But here’s the catch: If you were affected by that 2021 breach and you haven’t filed a claim yet, please know that you have only three more days to do that.
If you were a T-Mobile customer affected by the 2021 incident, it is likely that T-Mobile has already made several efforts to notify you of your eligibility to file a claim, which includes a payout of at least $25, with the possibility of more for those who can document direct costs associated with the breach. OpenClassActions.com says the filing deadline is Jan. 23, 2023.
“If you opt for a cash payment you will receive an estimated $25.00,” the site explains. “If you reside in California, you will receive an estimated $100.00. Out of pocket losses can be reimbursed for up to $25,000.00. The amount that you claim from T-Mobile will be determined by the class action administrator based on how many people file a legitimate and timely claim form.”
There are currently no signs that hackers are selling this latest data haul from T-Mobile, but if the past is any teacher much of it will wind up posted online soon. It is a safe bet that scammers will use some of this information to target T-Mobile users with phishing messages, account takeovers and harassment.
T-Mobile customers should fully expect to see phishers taking advantage of public concern over the breach to impersonate the company — and possibly even send messages that include the recipient’s compromised account details to make the communications look more legitimate.
Data stolen and exposed in this breach may also be used for identity theft. Credit monitoring and ID theft protection services can help you recover from having your identity stolen, but most will do nothing to stop the ID theft from happening. If you want the maximum control over who should be able to view your credit or grant new lines of credit in your name, then a security freeze is your best option.
Regardless of which mobile provider you patronize, please consider removing your phone number from as many online accounts as you can. Many online services require you to provide a phone number upon registering an account, but in many cases that number can be removed from your profile afterwards.
Why do I suggest this? Many online services allow users to reset their passwords just by clicking a link sent via SMS, and this unfortunately widespread practice has turned mobile phone numbers into de facto identity documents. Which means losing control over your phone number thanks to an unauthorized SIM swap or mobile number port-out, divorce, job termination or financial crisis can be devastating.
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.
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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.
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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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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!
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