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Depending on where your travels take you, you might need a new passport—a COVID-19 vaccine passport.
In an effort to kickstart travel and local economies, these so-called vaccine passports are more accurately a certificate. Such a “passport” can offer proof that the holder has been fully vaccinated against the virus, and there are several of these passports developing in the wings. With all of this in motion, I wanted to give families a look at what’s happening so that they can protect their privacy and identity online.
Broadly speaking, a vaccine passport works like this: information such as name, date of birth, date of vaccination, vaccination type, and vaccination lot number are used to create a digital certificate stored in a smartphone or a physical card. The holder can then offer up that proof of vaccination (or a recent negative test result) to businesses, travel authorities, and the like.
The notion of a vaccine passport has actually been around for a while now, such as the “Yellow Card” issued by the World Health Organization (WHO), which documents vaccination against diseases like cholera and yellow fever for travelers. Note that currently there’s no widely accepted standard for COVID-19 vaccine passports. What’s more, conversations continue around the concerns that come with documenting and sharing vaccine information securely. Understandably, it’s a complex topic.
As of this writing, the European Union has started issuing the “EU Digital Covid Certificate,” which allows its holders to travel throughout the EU freely without quarantine restrictions. The UK has its own version in the works, as do other nations in Asia, along with airline carriers too. In the U.S., “passports” appear to be in development on the state level, rather than on the federal level. For example, the state of New York has its Excelsior Pass program and California has its Digital COVID-19 Vaccine Record available to residents. Private airlines and air travel industry groups have launched their own efforts as well, such as the International Air Travel Association’s IATA Travel Pass.
How these passports are rolled out and how they get used will vary, yet vaccine passports may have an impact on the way people can travel as we recover globally from the pandemic. In some cases, they may even determine if people can attend large events that can help localities reboot their economies and public life in general (i.e., concerts, sporting events, and so on).
The development of vaccine passports and all the rules businesses and local authorities set around them may feel a bit out of our hands. However, in terms of your privacy and your family’s privacy, plenty is still very much in your hands. The common denominator across all these vaccine passports is the exchange of personal information—you and your family’s personal information. And where personal information is shared, hackers are sure to follow. This presents a perfect opportunity for you and your family to review your online privacy practices and close any gaps, whether you plan on traveling or not.
I put together a few things you can do to make sure that you and your family can navigate the future use of these passports with your privacy in mind:
What seems like an innocent celebration of your vaccination could put your personal information at risk. The information captured on these cards varies by nation, region, and locality, with some of the cards containing more information than others. However, even basic info such as birthday, vaccine manufacturer and lot number, location of immunization, or doctor’s name can provide the basis of a scam, such as a phishing email or phishing text message. Likewise, such information could get scooped up by a hacker and used to create phony vaccination credentials. Instead of posting that pic of you and your vaccine card, go with a happy selfie instead. And if you’ve already posted, go ahead and delete the image, better to remove it now and stay safe.
As mentioned above, the uncertainty around vaccine passports, and the general uncertainty around the latter days of the pandemic overall, creates opportunities for hackers and cybercrooks. Just as the early pandemic saw phony offers around miracle cures and today we’re seeing offers for phony vaccination cards, you can bet that scams revolving around vaccine passports will follow. The best advice here is to go to a trusted source for information, like the NHS in the UK or the American Medical Association in the U.S. Granted, cybercrooks will launch their phishing campaigns regardless. Here’s what to do if one heads your way:
In all, if someone is asking for any kind of personal or financial information via an email, text, instant message, or the like, chances are it’s a scam. For more, check out this article on how to spot the warning signs of a phishing attack.
In a time of data breaches large and small, checking your credit regularly is a wise move. Doing so will help you quickly spot issues and help you address them, as companies typically have a clear-cut process for dealing with fraud. You can get a free credit report in the U.S. via the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and other nations like the UK have similar free offerings as well.
Do the same for your children. They’re targets too. High-value targets at that. Their credit reports are clean, which gives cybercrooks a blank slate to work with. Even more attractive is that child identity theft often goes long unnoticed until years later when the child gets older and rents an apartment or applies for their first credit card.
It’s that simple. Given that these vaccine passports will likely involve a digital certificate stored on a smartphone, app, or possibly other devices, protect them so you can protect yourself. Select comprehensive security software that will protect multiple devices so that everyone in your home is covered.
You can bet that rumors will abound as to who is issuing what “passport”, under what restrictions, and with what implications for traveling, dining out, and visiting shops. All of that amounts to plenty of falsehoods and scams that attempt to rob you of your privacy, identity, and even your money. Turn to trusted news sources known for their even-handed reporting, such as Reuters or the Associated Press, and get your information from there. Knowing what the facts about vaccine passports are in your locality will arm you against fear-based attacks.
A few months back, the FTC posted its own blog about sharing vaccine card photos. It’s a great read, in part because they used a helpful analogy to discuss privacy and identity theft:
Think of it this way — identity theft works like a puzzle, made up of pieces of personal information. You don’t want to give identity thieves the pieces they need to finish the picture.
Likewise, any vaccine passport you acquire will become yet another puzzle piece that you have to protect.
In all, with post-pandemic recovery measures evolving before our eyes, keep an eye on your family’s security. Don’t give away any snippets of info that could be used against you and stay on the lookout for the scams hitting the internet that play on people’s uncertainty and fears. COVID-19 passports may be entirely new, yet they give cybercrooks one more way they can play their old tricks.
The post COVID-19 Vaccine Passports: 5 Security Tips for You and Your Family appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Small business owners are getting a special deal on their online protection through a partnership between McAfee and Visa. With new ways of working creating online opportunities and risks for small business owners, McAfee and Visa have come together to offer comprehensive protection for a changed business landscape.
Designed to help you minimize costs and unexpected interruptions to your business, McAfee® Security for Visa cardholders provides award-winning antivirus, ransomware, and malware protection for all your company devices including PCs, smartphones, and tablets on all major platforms. Visa Small Business cardholders automatically save up to 40% with a 24-month package and up to 60% with a 12-month offer.
Safety features include:
McAfee’s security savings bundle is also part of Visa’s commerce in a box initiative, which has launched in six U.S. cities (D.C., Detroit, Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles and Chicago). This program features a curated selection of offers, discounts, and bundles from Visa’s Authorize.net and Visa partners designed to help small businesses with what they need to move their business forward digitally — from accepting digital payments and building an eCommerce site to marketing to their audience in new ways and providing online marketing tools to run and protect their business.
The post Small Businesses Save Up to 60% in McAfee and Visa Partnership appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The latest guidance in the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (EO), Section 2, discusses removing the barriers to sharing threat information. It describes how security partners and service providers are often hesitant or contractually unable to share information about a compromise. The EO helps ensure that security partners and service providers can share intelligence with the government and requires them to share certain breach data with executive level departments and agencies responsible for investigating and remediating incidents, namely CISA, the FBI, and the IC. This approach will enable better comprehensive threat visibility across the Executive Branch departments and agencies to promote early detection and coordinated response actions. Indeed, the threat information sharing section will help enhance the public-private sector partnership that McAfee, and our colleagues in the cyber security industry are committed to supporting. To achieve this goal the EO requires:
The EO is a positive first step towards improving incident awareness at a macro level, though the EO would be even more impactful if it pushed government agencies to share more threat information with the private sector. The U.S. government represents an incredibly large attack surface and being able to identify threats early in one agency or department may very well serve to protect other agencies by enabling stronger predictive and more proactive defenses. While a government-built threat intelligence data lake is a critical first step, I think a logical next step should be opening the focus of threat intelligence sharing to be both real-time and bi-directional.
The EO focuses on the need for the private sector to improve its information sharing and collaboration with the government. However, the guidance is focused more on “post-breach” and unidirectional threat sharing. Real-time, not just “post-breach,” threat sharing improves the speed and effectiveness of countermeasures and early detection. Bi-directional data sharing opens possibilities for things like cross-sector environmental context, timely and prescriptive defensive actions, and enhanced remediation and automation capabilities. Harnessing real-time sector-based threat intelligence is not a unique concept; companies like McAfee have started to deliver on the promise of predictive security using historical threat intelligence to guide proactive security policy decision making.
Real-time threat sharing will make one of the EO’s additional goals, Zero Trust, ultimately more achievable. Zero Trust requires a dynamic analysis layer that will continuously evaluate user and device trust. As environmental variables change, so should the trust and ultimately access and authorization given. If the intent of threat intelligence sharing is to identify potentially compromised or risky assets specific to emerging campaigns, then it stands to reason that the faster that data is shared, the faster trust can be assessed and modified to protect high-value assets.
McAfee has identified the same benefits and challenges as the government for targeted threat intelligence and has developed a useful platform to enable robust threat sharing. We understand the value of sector specific data acting as an early indicator for organizations to ensure protection. Focusing on our own threat intelligence data lakes, we deliver on the promise of sector-specific intelligence by identifying targeted campaigns and threats and then correlating those campaigns to protective measures. As a result, government agencies now have the advantage of predicting, prioritizing, and prescribing appropriate defense changes to stay ahead of industry-focused emerging campaigns. We call that capability MVISION Insights.
This approach serves to drive home the need for collaborative shared threat intelligence. McAfee’s broad set of customers across every major business sector, combined with our threat research organization and ability to identify sector-specific targeted campaigns as they’re emerging, allows customers to benefit from threat intelligence collected from others in their same line of business. The federal government has a wide range of private sector business partners across healthcare, finance, critical infrastructure, and agriculture, to name a few. Each of these partners extends the government attack surface beyond the government-controlled boundary, and each represents an opportunity for compromise.
Imagine a scenario where an HHS healthcare partner is alerted, in real-time across a public/private sector threat intelligence sharing grid, to a threat affecting either the federal government directly or a healthcare partner for a different government agency. This approach allows them to assess their own environment for attack indicators, make quick informed decisions about defensive changes, and limit access where necessary. This type of real-time alerting not only allows the HHS partner to better prepare for a threat, but ultimately serves to reduce the attack surface of the federal government.
Allowing industry partners to develop and participate in building out cyber threat telemetry enables:
The U.S. government can begin to effectively shift focus from a reactive culture to one that is more proactive, enabling faster action against threats (or something like this). In the next EO, the Administration should bulk up its commitment to sharing cyber threat information with the private sector. The capability to exchange cyber threat intelligence data across the industry in standards-based formats in near real time exists today. The collective “we” just needs to make it a priority.
The post White House Executive Order – Removing Barriers to Sharing Threat Information appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Among the many major shifts in lifestyle during the COVID-19 pandemic, the way we used healthcare was one of the most significant. Providers limited in-person visits, elective procedures were delayed, and we avoided hospitals. In response, we went online and started using telehealth and other virtual solutions in ways we never had before.
Our latest consumer mindset survey confirms this was more than a passing trend, showing an almost 50% rise since the beginning of the pandemic in the use of PCs and Mobile devices to access health information, meet virtually with health care providers, and manage prescriptions. Survey respondents also showed they adapted by increasing their usage of smart fitness devices, like Fitbits, to track their personal health.
Navigating the healthcare system and accessing more of our services through the web means more of our personal information is now online. From patient intake forms to test results, a great deal of data about our health, including confidential information like vaccination records, is potentially available. Survey respondents confirmed that they shared and accessed their personal health information across the internet, despite 1/3 or more of respondents having concerns for their privacy and security of their personal information.
This trend hasn’t gone unnoticed by cybercriminals. In fact, the US Department of Health and Human Services is currently investigating nearly 800 health-related data breaches impacting nearly 60 million individuals. All of which is to say that telehealth advances may help us avoid sitting in a doctor’s office, but we need to be more mindful about our security when using these new online services.
Despite the adoption of many telehealth and online health services, security was still a concern for many of our survey respondents. A majority said the primary reason they do not use smart devices for their personal health was because of privacy and security concerns. Fortunately, just as there is preventive medicine, there are also preventive cybersecurity measures we can take to keep our personal data safer online. Here are a few we recommend:
The shift to managing our health online comes with a few safety considerations, but by following the steps above, we can enjoy convenience and access to a healthier life online and off.
The post How to Make Telehealth Safer for a More Convenient Life Online appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
We all like to think we’d know what to do if an emergency should occur. In split seconds, we try to recall the ratio of chest compressions to breaths of air learned in bygone health classes or that summer spent lifeguarding. We recognize the importance of a “to go” bag those final few days of pregnant pauses and false alarms before a baby arrives. We have seen enough television shows and cooking competitions to know Gordon Ramsey or Guy Fieri will be the first to scold us if we try to put out an erupted kitchen grease fire with anything other than salt and smothering.
We pick up a fair amount of knowledge and traits along the way to employ should disaster strike – and we absolutely take necessary precautions if we are knowingly in harm’s way. For example, those that live within a fault line’s reach are apt to prefer housing with stronger foundations and reinforced windowpanes. If you choose to live close to the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean’s “hurricane alley,” you most likely know the fastest route to a causeway. An underground storm shelter to escape a tornado’s wily path can certainly come in handy.
We are taught that “hindsight is 20/20,” and that harboring regret is top on the list of feelings to avoid most throughout life. We obey the mantra many scouts learn in youth – being prepared – to the best of our ability. While earth’s natural disasters may never be preventable, it is clear preparation and readiness to face the inevitable can be a key differentiator when it comes to damage that can be incurred.
So far in 2021, we have witnessed major infrastructure impairments, interrupted supply chains, and havoc wreaked on local and federal economies.
This did not happen due to volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, nor mudslides, but rather through security breaches and attacks. And despite headlines shouting and nearly every security vendor urging enterprises the world over that cyberattacks are posed to continue to increase both in frequency and sophistication, especially ransomware threats, organizations have more often than not found themselves on the receiving end of hindsight and regret when it comes to these man-made, modern-day disasters.
So, the question begs to be asked, if the damages mentioned above could have been lessened or avoided through preparation and readiness, why is it still so difficult for CISOs to convince the c-suite that it’s better to be prepared for cyber-disaster, than sorry?
Staying safe and secure is the main goal in any disaster or emergency, but another less-talked-about goal is obviously to avoid what could have been prevented. The phrase, “I told you so,” will never land softly or kindly, especially when you are left surveying the ravaged ruins of what is left in the aftermath.
Many CISOs and SOC workers have encountered this situation recently, mentally kicking themselves or expressing frustration analyzing and evaluating breaches or attacks after they have occurred. Of course, the vulnerabilities are crystal clear when security experts look back on what happened, but muddy and missed when they play out in real time.
Scientists will inform us when a volcanic eruption may be imminent; a tornado will be prefaced with a loud siren meant to be heard throughout the county or immediate area; we often see tropical storms gain momentum and destructive qualities far before they transition to hurricanes and make landfall. This is to say, when it comes to natural disasters, they’re going to happen regardless, but damage prevention is dependent on prediction and experience.
Carefully measured and monitored gaseous pressure under the earth’s surface will indicate when a volcano may be imminent. Because of this, volcanologists can attempt to forewarn residents to vacate an area before disaster hits. This outcome is expected, and systems and processes are in place to thwart damage as much as possible. I imagine along with scientists; we’d be quite surprised if a volcano suddenly started spewing mass quantities of water instead of magma and ash.
We rely on patterns from previous incidents when it comes to geological acts of nature, but in the cybersecurity industry, disasters are man-made, and progressively more dangerous – created with motive, intent, and intelligence.
With cybercriminals, attacks have been unpredictable and indiscriminate. They are infiltrating via multiple attack vectors; sitting unknowingly across networks and systems, leeching data from an organization; and altering entire courses of business as resources are used to bring systems back online, determine causes, and quickly implement solutions. In short, cybercriminals are serving up water when we expect magma nearly every single time and enterprises are struggling to keep up.
The rulebook of what can be planned for and prevented has narrowed. Enterprises need to adopt an updated mindset, knowing that like a natural disaster, damage prevention from a cyber-disaster is dependent on prediction and experience.
We are going to continue to get water when we expect magma, flames when we’re on the lookout for floods, and harsh winds when we anticipate rumbles. Powered by human intelligence, cybercriminals will continue to evolve threats, it will just be a matter of who can stay one step ahead – the good guys or the bad guys. The only constant isn’t a matter of if an attack will happen, but when.
A movement toward proactivity instead of reactivity when addressing a breach or attack after it occurs is crucial against today’s cybercriminals. Organizations must recognize that no industry is immune to cybercriminals and get a better handle on SOC functions and processes, and control over where data travels and lies.
This can mean a massive overhaul of a security stack to streamline solutions and expose manual or siloed processes that can lead to hidden vulnerabilities, evaluating security staff and talent to create better efficiencies, or embracing AI-guided tactics to automate activities and provide quick, actionable next steps should a breach occur.
Early adopters of extended detection and response (XDR) technology are already seeing the benefits this proactivity can hold. The simple, unified visualization XDR provides is a strong vantage point for enterprises seeking greater situational awareness, enhanced insights, and faster time to remediate threats across all vectors from endpoint, network, and the cloud.
Today, the warning siren that disaster is forthcoming has been sounding for a while. Enterprises need to take heed of the alarm to thwart as much damage as possible, as like natural disasters, a cyber-disaster can lead to massive destruction and upheaval.
Want to learn more about McAfee’s XDR technology? Check out McAfee MVISION XDR.
The post Time to Batten the Cyber-Hatches appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced many of us to quickly adjust to the new normal — case and point, admitted that they switched to digital activities like online banking, social networking, and online shopping in 2020 out of convenience. Research now shows that consumers’ reliance on this technology is here to stay. PwC found that 44% of global consumers now shop more using their smartphones compared to when COVID-19 began. While having the world at your fingertips is convenient, how does this digital lifestyle change expose users to cyber threats, especially attacks on mobile devices?
It’s no secret that cybercriminals tend to manipulate their attacks based on the current trends set by technology users. As you reflect on how increased connectivity affected your everyday life, it’s important to ask yourself what could be lurking in the shadows while using your mobile devices. With more of us relying on our devices there’s plenty of opportunities for hackers. This begs the question, what does mobile security look like in a post-pandemic world?
In addition to the increased adoption of digital devices, we had to figure out how to live our best lives online – from working from home to distance learning to digitally connecting with loved ones. And according to McAfee’s 2021 Consumer Security Mindset Report, these online activities will remain a key part of consumers’ post-pandemic routines. But more time spent online interacting with various apps and services simultaneously increases your chance of exposure to cybersecurity risks and threats. Unsurprisingly, cybercriminals were quick to take advantage of this increase in connectivity. McAfee Labs saw an average of 375 new threats per minute and a surge of cybercriminals exploiting the pandemic through COVID-19 themed phishing campaigns, malicious apps, malware, and more. New mobile malware also increased by 71%, with total malware growing nearly 12% from July 2019 to July 2020. As consumers continue to rely on their mobile devices to complete various tasks, they will also need to adapt their security habits to accommodate for more time spent online.
Here at McAfee, we recognize that the way you and your family live your digital lives has changed. We want to help empower you to protect your online security in your hyper-connected lifestyle. To help provide greater peace of mind while using your mobile devices, follow these tips to help safeguard your security.
When setting up a new device or online account, always change the default credentials to a password or passphrase that is strong and unique. Using different passwords or passphrases for each of your online accounts helps protect the majority of your data if one of your accounts becomes vulnerable. If you are worried about forgetting your passwords, subscribe to a password management tool that will remember them for you.
Remember to physically lock your mobile devices with a security code or using facial recognition as well. This prevents a criminal from unlocking your device and uncovering your personally identifiable information in the event that your phone or laptop is stolen.
Multi-factor authentication provides an extra layer of security, as it requires multiple forms of verification like texting or emailing a secure code to verify your identity. Most popular online sites like Gmail, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. offer multi-factor authentication, and it takes just a few minutes to set it up. This reduces the risk of successful impersonation by hackers who may have uncovered your credentials.
Hackers tend to lurk in the shadows on public Wi-Fi networks to catch unsuspecting users looking for free internet access on their mobile devices. If you have to conduct transactions on a public Wi-Fi network, use a virtual private network (VPN) like McAfee® Safe Connect to help keep you safe while you’re online.
Be skeptical of text messages claiming to be from companies with peculiar asks or information that seems too good to be true. Instead of clicking on a link within the text, it’s best to go straight to the organization’s website to check your account status or contact customer service.
Some cybercriminals send texts from internet services to hide their identities. Combat this by using the feature on your mobile device that blocks texts sent from the internet or unknown users. For example, you can disable all potential spam messages from the Messages app on an Android device by navigating to Settings, clicking on “Spam protection,” and turning on the “Enable spam protection” switch. Learn more about how you can block robotexts and spam messages on your device.
Prepare your mobile devices for any threat coming their way. To do just that, cover these devices with an extra layer of protection via a mobile security solution, such as McAfee Mobile Security.
COVID-19 changed our relationships with our digital devices, but that does not mean we have to compromise our online security for convenience. Incorporating these tips into your everyday life can help ward off mobile cyber threats and stay a step ahead of hackers.
The post The Future of Mobile in a Post-COVID World & How to Stay Secure appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
This blog was written by Vallabh Chole & Oliver Devane
Over the years, the cybersecurity industry has seen many threats get taken down, such as the Emotet takedown in January 2021. It doesn’t usually take long for another threat to attempt to fill the gap left by the takedown. Hancitor is one such threat.
Like Emotet, Hancitor can send Malspams to spread itself and infect as many users as possible. Hancitor’s main purpose is to distribute other malware such as FickerStealer, Pony, CobaltStrike, Cuba Ransomware and Zeppelin Ransomware. The dropped Cobalt Strike beacons can then be used to move laterally around the infected environment and also execute other malware such as ransomware.
This blog will focus on a new technique used by Hancitor created to prevent crawlers from accessing malicious documents used to download and execute the Hancitor payload.
The infection flow of Hancitor is shown below:
A victim will receive an email with a fake DocuSign template to entice them to click a link. This link leads him to feedproxy.google.com, a service that works similar to an RSS Feed and enables site owners to publish site updates to its users.
When accessing the link, the victim is redirected to the malicious site. The site will check the User-Agent of the browser and if it is a non-Windows User-Agent the victim will be redirected to google.com.
If the victim is on a windows machine, the malicious site will create a cookie using JavaScript and then reload the site.
The code to create the cookie is shown below:
The above code will write the Timezone to value ‘n’ and the time offset to UTC in value ‘d’ and set it into cookie header for an HTTP GET Request.
For example, if this code is executed on a machine with timezone set as BST the values would be:
d = 60
n = “Europe/London”
These values may be used to prevent further malicious activity or deploy a different payload depending on geo location.
Upon reloading, the site will check if the cookie is present and if it is, it will present them with the malicious document.
A WireShark capture of the malicious document which includes the cookie values is shown below:
The document will prompt them to enable macros and, when enabled, it will download the Hancitor DLL and then load it with Rundll32.
Hancitor will then communicate with its C&C and deploy further payloads. If running on a Windows domain, it will download and deploy a Cobalt Strike beacon.
Hancitor will also deploy SendSafe which is a spam module, and this will be used to send out malicious spam emails to infect more victims.
With its ability to send malicious spam emails and deploy Cobalt Strike beacons, we believe that Hancitor will be a threat closely linked to future ransomware attacks much like Emotet was. This threat also highlights the importance of constantly monitoring the threat landscape so that we can react quickly to evolving threats and protect our customers from them.
IOCs
| IOC | Type | IOC | Coverage | Content Version |
| Malicious Document | SHA256 | e389a71dc450ab4077f5a23a8f798b89e4be65373d2958b0b0b517de43d06e3b | W97M/Dropper.hx
|
4641 |
| Hancitor DLL | SHA256 | c703924acdb199914cb585f5ecc6b18426b1a730f67d0f2606afbd38f8132ad6
|
Trojan-Hancitor.a | 4644 |
| Domain hosting Malicious Document | URL | http[:]//onyx-food[.]com/coccus.php | RED | N/A |
| Domain hosting Malicious Document
|
URL | http[:]//feedproxy[.]google[.]com/~r/ugyxcjt/~3/4gu1Lcmj09U/coccus.php | RED | N/A |
Mitre
| Technique ID | Tactic | Technique details |
| T1566.002 | Initial Access | Spam mail with links |
| T1204.001 | Execution | User Execution by opening link. |
| T1204.002 | Execution | Executing downloaded doc |
| T1218 | Defence Evasion | Signed Binary Execution Rundll32 |
| T1055 | Defence Evasion | Downloaded binaries are injected into svchost for execution |
| T1482 | Discovery | Domain Trust Discovery |
| T1071 | C&C | HTTP protocol for communication |
| T1132 | C&C | Data is base64 encoded and xored |
The post Hancitor Making Use of Cookies to Prevent URL Scraping appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
This blog was written by Kiran Raj & Kishan N.
In the last few years, Microsoft Office macro malware using social engineering as a means for malware infection has been a dominant part of the threat landscape. Malware authors continue to evolve their techniques to evade detection. These techniques involve utilizing macro obfuscation, DDE, living off the land tools (LOLBAS), and even utilizing legacy supported XLS formats.
McAfee Labs has discovered a new technique that downloads and executes malicious DLLs (Zloader) without any malicious code present in the initial spammed attachment macro. The objective of this blog is to cover the technical aspect of the newly observed technique.
Infection map
The section below contains the detailed technical analysis of this technique.
The malware arrives through a phishing email containing a Microsoft Word document as an attachment. When the document is opened and macros are enabled, the Word document, in turn, downloads and opens another password-protected Microsoft Excel document.
After downloading the XLS file, the Word VBA reads the cell contents from XLS and creates a new macro for the same XLS file and writes the cell contents to XLS VBA macros as functions.
Once the macros are written and ready, the Word document sets the policy in the registry to Disable Excel Macro Warning and invokes the malicious macro function from the Excel file. The Excel file now downloads the Zloader payload. The Zloader payload is then executed using rundll32.exe.
Figure-1: flowchart of the Infection chain
Here is how the face of the document looks when we open the document (figure 2). Normally, the macros are disabled to run by default by Microsoft Office. The malware authors are aware of this and hence present a lure image to trick the victims guiding them into enabling the macros.
Figure-2: Image of Word Document Face
The userform combo-box components present in the Word document stores all the content required to connect to the remote Excel document including the Excel object, URL, and the password required to open the Excel document. The URL is stored in the Combobox in the form of broken strings which will be later concatenated to form a complete clear string.
Figure-3: URL components (right side) and the password to open downloaded Excel document (“i5x0wbqe81s”) present in user-form components.
Figure-4: Image of the VBA editor
In the above image of macros (figure 4), the code is attempting to download and open the Excel file stored in the malicious domain. Firstly, it creates an Excel application object by using CreateObject() function and reading the string from Combobox-1 (ref figure-2) of Userform-1 which has the string “excel. Application” stored in it. After creating the object, it uses the same object to open the Excel file directly from the malicious URL along with the password without saving the file on the disk by using Workbooks.Open() function.
Figure-5: Word Macro code that reads strings present in random cells in Excel sheet.
The above snippet (figure 5) shows part of the macro code that is reading the strings from the Excel cells.
For Example:
Ixbq = ifk.sheets(3).Cells(44,42).Value
The code is storing the string present in sheet number 3 and the cell location (44,42) into the variable “ixbq”. The Excel.Application object that is assigned to variable “ifk” is used to access sheets and cells from the Excel file that is opened from the malicious domain.
In the below snippet (figure 6), we can observe the strings stored in the variables after being read from the cells. We can observe that it has string related to the registry entry “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Security\AccessVBOM” that is used to disable trust access for VBA into Excel and the string “Auto_Open3” that is going to be the entry point of the Excel macro execution.
We can also see the strings “ThisWorkbook”, “REG_DWORD”, “Version”, “ActiveVBProject” and few random functions as well like “Function c4r40() c4r40=1 End Function”. These macro codes cannot be detected using static detection since the content is formed dynamically on run time.
Figure-6: Value of variables after reading Excel cells.
After extracting the contents from the Excel cells, the parent Word file creates a new VBA module in the downloaded Excel file by writing the retrieved contents. Basically, the parent Word document is retrieving the cell contents and writing them to XLS macros.
Once the macro is formed and ready, it modifies the below RegKey to disable trust access for VBA on the victim machine to execute the function seamlessly without any Microsoft Office Warnings.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Security\AccessVBOM
After writing macro contents to Excel file and disabling the trust access, function ’Auto_Open3()’ from newly written excel VBA will be called which downloads zloader dll from the ‘hxxp://heavenlygem.com/22.php?5PH8Z’ with extension .cpl
Figure-7: Image of ’Auto_Open3()’ function
The downloaded dll is saved in %temp% folder and executed by invoking rundll32.exe.
Figure-8: Image of zloader dll invoked by rundll32.exe
Rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL “<path downloaded dll>”
Windows Rundll32 commands loads and runs 32-bit DLLs that can be used for directly invoking specified functions or used to create shortcuts. In the above command line, the malware uses “Rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL” function to invoke control.exe (control panel) and passes the DLL path as a parameter, therefore the downloaded DLL is executed by control.exe.
The below image (figure 9) is the face of the password-protected Excel file that is hosted on the server. We can observe random cells storing chunks of strings like “RegDelete”, “ThisWorkbook”, “DeleteLines”, etc.
These strings present in worksheet cells are formed as VBA macro in the later stage.
Figure-9: Image of Remote Excel file.
McAfee’s Endpoint products detect this variant of malware and files dropped during the infection process.
The main malicious document with SHA256 (210f12d1282e90aadb532e7e891cbe4f089ef4f3ec0568dc459fb5d546c95eaf) is detected with V3 package version – 4328.0 as “W97M/Downloader.djx”. The final Zloader payload with SHA-256 (c55a25514c0d860980e5f13b138ae846b36a783a0fdb52041e3a8c6a22c6f5e2)which is a DLL is detected by signature “Zloader-FCVP” with V3 package version – 4327.0
Additionally, with the help of McAfee’s Expert rule feature, customers can strengthen the security by adding custom Expert rules based on the behavior patterns of the malware. The below EP rule is specific to this infection pattern.
McAfee advises all users to avoid opening any email attachments or clicking any links present in the mail without verifying the identity of the sender. Always disable the macro execution for Office files. We advise everyone to read our blog on this new variant of Zloader and its infection cycle to understand more about the threat.
Different techniques & tactics are used by the malware to propagate and we mapped these with the MITRE ATT&CK platform.
| Type | Value | Scanner | Detection Name | Detection Package Version (V3) |
| Main Word Document | 210f12d1282e90aadb532e7e891cbe4f089ef4f3ec0568dc459fb5d546c95eaf | ENS | W97M/Downloader.djx | 4328 |
| Downloaded dll | c55a25514c0d860980e5f13b138ae846b36a783a0fdb52041e3a8c6a22c6f5e2 | ENS | Zloader-FCVP | 4327 |
| URL to download XLS | hxxp://heavenlygem.com/11.php | WebAdvisor
|
Blocked | N/A |
| URL to download dll | hxxp://heavenlygem.com/22.php?5PH8Z | WebAdvisor
|
Blocked | N/A |
Malicious documents have been an entry point for most malware families and these attacks have been evolving their infection techniques and obfuscation, not just limiting to direct downloads of payload from VBA, but creating agents dynamically to download payload as we discussed in this blog. Usage of such agents in the infection chain is not only limited to Word or Excel, but further threats may use other living off the land tools to download its payloads.
Due to security concerns, macros are disabled by default in Microsoft Office applications. We suggest it is safe to enable them only when the document received is from a trusted source.
The post Zloader With a New Infection Technique appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Microsoft has shipped an emergency security update affecting most Windows users. This update partially addresses a security vulnerability known as PrintNightmare that could allow remote hackers to take over your system.
PrintNightmare could allow hackers to gain control of your computer. This means hackers could perform malicious activities like installing their own apps, stealing your data, and creating new user accounts.
Microsoft recommends Windows 10, 8.1, and 7 users update their computers through Windows Update as soon as possible. Note that an additional patch will likely be required to fully fix the issue, so expect another update prompt from Microsoft in the days to come.
For extra protection against malware that may result from a hack like this one, we recommend an all-in-one security solution, like McAfee Total Protection or McAfee LiveSafe. If a hacker takes advantage of the exploit and tries to install additional malware, McAfee Total Protection/LiveSafe can help protect against those attempts. Learn more about our online security products here.
PrintNightmare exploits a vulnerability in the Windows Print Spooler service. The step-by-step instructions below will guide you through turning off the service to ensure hackers can no longer exploit the security flaw. The Print Spooler will remain off until the PC is rebooted.
Step 1: Press the Windows key, and type Services, clicking on the Services App
Step 2: Scroll down to the Print Spooler Service
Step 3: Right-click on the Print Spooler Service and click Stop.
The post Microsoft Urges Customers to Update Windows as Soon as Possible appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The Smartsheet enterprise platform has become an essential part of most organizations, as it has done much to transform the way customers conduct business and collaborate, with numerous services available to increase productivity and innovation. Within the McAfee customer base, customers had expressed their commitment to Smartsheet, but wanted to inject the security pedigree of McAfee to make their Smartsheet environments even stronger.
In June 2021, McAfee MVISION Cloud released support for Smartsheet – providing cornerstone CASB services to Smartsheet through the CASB Connect framework, which makes it possible to provide API-based security controls to cloud services, such as:
Utilizing the CASB Connect framework, McAfee MVISION Cloud becomes an authorized third party to a customer’s Smartsheet Event Reporting service. This is an API-based method for McAfee to ingest event/audit logs from Smartsheet.
These logs contain information about what activities occur in Smartsheet. This information has value; McAfee will see user logon activity, sheet creation, user creation activity, sheet updates, deletions, etc. Overall, over 120 unique items are stored in the activity warehouse where intelligence is inferred from it. When an inference is made (example: Insider Threat), the platform can show all the forensics data that lead to that conclusion. This provides value to the Smartsheet customer since it shows potential threats that could lead to data loss, either unintended by a well-meaning end-user or not.
Policies for content detection are another important use-case. Most McAfee customers will utilize Data Loss Prevention (DLP) across their endpoint devices as well as in the cloud utilizing policies that are important to them. Examples of DLP policies could be uncovering credit card numbers, health records, customer lists, specific intellectual property, price lists, and more. Each customer will have some kind of data that is critical for their business, a DLP policy can be crafted to support finding it.
In Smartsheet, when an event from the Event Reporting service is captured that relates to DLP – a field is updated, a file is uploaded, or a sheet is shared, the DLP service in MVISION Cloud will perform an inspection of the event. Should the content or sharing violate a policy, an incident will be raised with forensic details describing what user performed the action and why the violation was flagged. This is important for customers because it operationalizes security in Smartsheet and other cloud applications that MVISION Cloud protects. The same DLP policies can be utilized across all of their critical cloud services, including Smartsheet.
Lastly, MVISION Cloud integrates with most popular Identity Providers (IDP). Through standards-based authentication, MVISION Cloud can enforce policies such as location and device policies that assure that only authorized users connect to Smartsheet; for regulated industries this can be important to ensure no compliance issues are violated as they conduct business.
Smartsheet enterprise customers benefit significantly from MVISION Cloud’s support. Visibility of user activity, threats and sensitive data give users a chance to further entrench their business processes in a cloud app they want to use. Adding security tools to an enterprise platform like Smartsheet reduces overall risk and gives organizations the confidence to more deeply depend on their critical cloud services.
Trying out Smartsheet and McAfee MVISION Cloud is easy. Contact McAfee directly at cloud@mcafee.com or visit resources related to this blog post:
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We live in a world that thrives on digital connectivity. According to We Are Social, Canadians are now spending half a day more a month online than they did a year ago. Also, 33 million Canadians logged on to the internet at least once a month in 2020. As more people every year are spending hours upon hours online, they are knowingly (and sometimes unknowingly) unsafely releasing their personal information into the digital ether, making them vulnerable to all sorts of cybercrimes. The ramifications range anywhere from malware infection to identity fraud. Better understanding the best practices for online sharing will ensure users can navigate online dangers and safely connect with others.
Here are three ways online users share too much information and how they are placing themselves at risk.
Think about how many websites you visit regularly. How many of these have access to your personal information, such as your email, credit card numbers, and shipping address? Before accepting the option to save your information on file for a “faster checkout experience,” consider the following: A Canadian Internet Registration Authority polled 500 IT security professionals, and a quarter of them experienced a breach of customer data in 2020. Online users cannot afford to take liberties with the information they hand over to online companies, especially if they subscribe to numerous sites.
On a similar note, it is equally inadvisable to hand over information about yourself. Although seemingly harmless, online quizzes may not be as safe as you think. Some quiz questions sound more like security questions such as, “What was the first car you owned?” or “Where did you grow up?” Hackers using spyware can access these answers and anything else you enter on quiz sites to formulate informed guesses at your passwords.
It may seem counterintuitive not to share information on social media, seeing as the purpose of these platforms is to share. However, the problem with social media is that too many people are leaving themselves exposed to hackers due to the specificity of the information they share. More than two-thirds of Canadians are on social media, according to Statista, meaning there are millions of user profiles and newsfeeds brimming with personal information. Specific information such as company details in a new job announcement or your birth date in a celebration post are details hackers can use to impersonate you or break into your accounts. Additionally, cybercriminals can impersonate people in your network or pose as average users and add you as a friend. Hackers will often use this tactic to get close to someone and gather intel to formulate a targeted phishing attempt or identity theft.
While you can take proper precautions to safeguard your personal information, you cannot guarantee that others will do so with the same vigilance. Many do not realize there is more at stake than a loss of privacy when intentionally sharing information, usually login credentials, with others. If your friend you shared your password with is hacked, then a cybercriminal can now access your information as well as theirs. Cybercriminals can then use this information to break into your accounts, hold your data for ransom, and even steal your identity.
Knowing what is safe to share online and how to protect the information that is not is the first step to safeguarding your online presence. Here are four tips to consider before sharing your personal details on websites, social media, and with others:
Always err on the side of caution whenever you visit unknown sites or download applications on your devices. Be aware of what you click on, the ramifications of clicking on a malicious link, or handing over information on an unsecured website. One way to ensure you are visiting a secure website is to look for the padlock icon in the top left corner of your browser. This icon indicates the site and your connection are secure.
Take your internet protection one step further and avoid saving your information on file. If possible, use an alternate payment gateway with verified encryption that does not require inputting your credit card information. This way, your data does not become a liability in the event of a company data breach.
There’s a fine line between sharing too much and sharing just enough on social media. Start taking control of your privacy on social media by adjusting your privacy settings. Unless you are an aspiring social media influencer, it is best to keep your account private and limit your followers to only people you know personally. Do not follow strangers and reject friend requests from strangers. They could turn out to be a hacker.
Take advantage of platform security controls that allow you to control your visible information. For example, you can disable your activity status or geolocations to block other people from tracking your every move or manage the personal data these platforms are allowed to share. Keep in mind that any third-party app with access to these platforms will have varied privacy policies. Read the fine print on their user agreements, as these policies differ depending on the app.
3. Use a VPN
Before hopping online, consider using a virtual private network (VPN) to secure your connection. A VPN allows you to browse the internet with the confidence that your Wi-Fi and any sensitive information you send through this connection is encrypted. In other words, if a hacker intercepts this data, they won’t be able to make any sense of it.
Enabling multi-factor authentication adds an extra layer of protection that makes it nearly impossible for hackers to bypass even if they do manage to steal your credentials.
Also, make sure you create strong passwords or passphrases by following password best practices and ensuring they are long, complex, and varied. Use a password manager with a generator to help you create strong passwords and store them, so you do not have to memorize them. This method also makes it easier and more secure than saving passwords on internet browsers. Further, password managers, like McAfee True Key, make it easy to securely share your credentials with others.
From social media to work to daily activities, peoples’ lives are centralized around their digital devices and online access. Users must learn to care for their information to the same degree one would manage their physical IDs or credit cards. Only then can they carry on their online activities, confident in the knowledge they are doing so securely.
The post The Ultimate Guide to Safe Sharing Online appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Ryuk is a ransomware that encrypts a victim’s files and requests payment in Bitcoin cryptocurrency to release the keys used for encryption. Ryuk is used exclusively in targeted ransomware attacks.
Ryuk was first observed in August 2018 during a campaign that targeted several enterprises. Analysis of the initial versions of the ransomware revealed similarities and shared source code with the Hermes ransomware. Hermes ransomware is a commodity malware for sale on underground forums and has been used by multiple threat actors.
To encrypt files Ryuk utilizes a combination of symmetric AES (256-bit) encryption and asymmetric RSA (2048-bit or 4096-bit) encryption. The symmetric key is used to encrypt the file contents, while the asymmetric public key is used to encrypt the symmetric key. Upon payment of the ransom the corresponding asymmetric private key is released, allowing the encrypted files to be decrypted.
Because of the targeted nature of Ryuk infections, the initial infection vectors are tailored to the victim. Often seen initial vectors are spear-phishing emails, exploitation of compromised credentials to remote access systems and the use of previous commodity malware infections. As an example of the latter, the combination of Emotet and TrickBot, have frequently been observed in Ryuk attacks.
Ryuk is detected as Ransom-Ryuk![partial-hash].
Defenders should be on the lookout for traces and behaviours that correlate to open source pen test tools such as winPEAS, Lazagne, Bloodhound and Sharp Hound, or hacking frameworks like Cobalt Strike, Metasploit, Empire or Covenant, as well as abnormal behavior of non-malicious tools that have a dual use. These seemingly legitimate tools (e.g., ADfind, PSExec, PowerShell, etc.) can be used for things like enumeration and execution. Subsequently, be on the lookout for abnormal usage of Windows Management Instrumentation WMIC (T1047). We advise everyone to check out the following blogs on evidence indicators for a targeted ransomware attack (Part1, Part2).
When it comes to the actual ransomware binary, we strongly advise updating and upgrading endpoint protection, as well as enabling options like tamper protection and Rollback. Please read our blog on how to best configure ENS 10.7 to protect against ransomware for more details.
Ryuk ransomware is used exclusively in targeted attacks
Latest sample now targets webservers
New ransom note prompts victims to install Tor browser to facilitate contact with the actors
After file encryption, the ransomware will print 50 copies of the ransom note on the default printer
Learn more about Ryuk ransomware, including Indicators of Compromise, Mitre ATT&CK techniques and Yara Rule, by reading our detailed technical analysis.
The post New Ryuk Ransomware Sample Targets Webservers appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Do you usually read what critics say before deciding to see a movie or read a book? We believe these McAfee MVISION XDR reviews were worth the wait. But rather than simply share a few top-tier analyst blurbs with you, we’d like to walk through what these insights mean to our growing set of customers and how their sec operations will evolve with greater efficiencies.
Extended Detection and Response products, better known as XDR, not only extended the capabilities of EDR platforms, but according to Gartner[1] “ XDR products may be able to reduce the complexity of security configuration and incident response to provide a better security outcome than isolated best-of-breed components.”
Our Enterprise Security Manager (ESM)/SecOps team briefed a top-tier analyst firm on ESM product execution and the MVISION XDR platform in particular. His reaction to our use cases? “These are great and it is useful to have examples that cut across different events, which is illustrative more so than anything. The response to the cuts across various tools, and the proactive configuration aspect with the security score type analysis, is also pretty rare in this market.”
The takeaway: Preventing an incident is much better than cleaning up after the fact. MVISION XDR powered by MVISION Insights offers a unified security posture score from endpoint to cloud, delivering a more robust and comprehensive assessment across your environment. It allows you to drill down on specifics to enhance your security.
“The vendor has stolen a march on some of its competitors, at least in the short term, with this offering. A lot of vendors are aiming to get to an offering comprising threat intel + prioritization + recommendations + automation, but few if any have actually reached that point today.” – Omdia
A top-tier analyst firm mentioned that many EDR vendors today call themselves “Open XDR” vendors, but they do not offer a fully effective XDR product. The analyst sees XDR as a significant opportunity for McAfee to expand the breadth of our product portfolio.
The takeaway: A fully effective XDR product unites security controls to detect and assess comprehensively and prevent erratic movement of advanced threats. A robust product portfolio with an integrated service offering from a platform vendor with a proven track record of integrating security (McAfee) is critical to achieve this.
Noted by a top-tier analyst firm, only McAfee and one other offers data-awareness in the XDR offering. This XDR capability alerts the analyst that the threat impact is targeted at sensitive data.
The takeaway: Many SOCs have siloed tools that hinders their ability to detect and respond quickly and appropriately. SOC’s must prioritize threat intelligence to rapidly make critical decisions.
A top-tier analyst firm believes the primary segments for XDR capabilities are in the three groups to solve problems: 1) Workspace 2) Network 3) Cloud workloads. Giving hardening guidance is good for customers, so any vulnerability exposure and threat scoring are good priorities for MVISION Insights.
The takeaway: McAfee MVISION XDR provides automation that eliminates many manual tasks but more importantly, it empowers SOC analysts to prioritize the threats that matter and stay ahead of adversaries.
A top-tier analyst firm likes our product direction. “Where you’re going with XDR, and with the cloud console — that’s the way to go. It feels like we have crossed the Rubicon of cloud-delivered.”
The takeaway: By going cloud-native, MVISION XDR enables more efficient, better, and faster decisions with automated investigations driven by correlation analysis across multiple vectors. We can provide unified visibility and control of threats across endpoints, networks and the cloud.
| To discover why McAfee MVISION XDR earns rave industry reviews, see our resources on XDR to evolve your security operations to be more efficient and effective. |
Resource: [1] Gartner Innovation Insight for Extended Detection and Response, Peter Firstbrook, Craig Lawson , 8 April 2021
The post The Industry Applauds MVISION XDR – Turning Raves into Benefits appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Families are hitting the road again. And it’s absolutely no surprise that they’re taking their smartphones with them. Perhaps what is surprising is that so many of them may be hitting the road without any digital or mobile protection.
Our recent research shows that 68% of people in the U.S. said that they’re planning to travel for leisure this year, slightly higher than the international average of 64%.1 However, our research also discovered that nearly half of them don’t use mobile security software to protect themselves or their smartphones.
That lack of protection is a concern, particularly as our April 2021 Threats Report detected a more than 100% increase in attacks aimed at mobile devices. It makes sense that such is the case, as the pandemic led to increased adoption of online activities like banking, shopping, and even doctor visits via telemedicine—often straight from our smartphones.
However, our smartphones can be as vulnerable as any other device (like our computers). Accordingly, with the volumes of valuable data that those activities create on our smartphones, cyber crooks were sure to follow.
The good news is that you can indeed enjoy all of that mobile convenience without worry, even on vacation. No doubt many travelers will do some online banking or even some online food ordering while they’re out and about. Likewise, their kids will be online for stretches of that time too, whether it’s on chat apps like Snapchat, social media like Instagram and TikTok, games like Fortnite and Among Us, or streaming videos. Go ahead, do it all. Just make sure you’re protected before you hit the road.
With that, add mobile protection to your packing list. I’ve put together a shortlist of straightforward things you can do that will help you and your kids stay safe online while on the road this summer.
While the tips above are great for the whole family, the following additional steps are what you can take to protect your children even further:
Tracking your child’s smartphone not only allows you to find it easily if it’s lost or stolen but can also put you at ease by knowing where your child is. Yet it’s important to use location tracking selectively. Not every app needs location tracking to work as intended, even though many apps ask for permission to enable it. Go into the phone’s settings and disable the location features on an app-by-app basis. For example, a weather app doesn’t need your child’s second-by-second location information to work properly, nor should a gaming app need it at all. Likewise, photos taken on a phone can embed location information that can be easily read when shared, revealing plenty about when and where it was taken. In all, enable the location services for only the most necessary of apps like maps.
Use travel as a time to reset
Recent research shows that tweens spend nearly five hours on their screens each day, while teenagers push that up to more than seven hours a day. Some staycation time is a good time to pare back those hours and enjoy the local scenery, even if for a short stretch. You can use your travel time as well to re-establish your phone rules. That way, vacation stays entertaining but doesn’t affect the habits you set into effect back home.
Above and beyond security settings and software, there’s you. Get in the habit of talking with your child for a sense of what they’re doing online. As a mom, I like to ask them about their favorite games, share some funny TikTok clips or cute photos with them, and generally make it a point to be a part of their digital lives. It’s great, because it gives you peace of mind knowing what types of things they are doing or interactions they are having online.
For those of you hitting the road in the coming weeks, enjoy your travels, wherever they take you!
The post Travel Smart: Protecting Your Family’s Smartphones While on Vacation appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
I’m about to tell you an extraordinary fact about cybercrime. Some of the most significant data breaches in internet history weren’t after bank account numbers, cryptocurrency, or even credit card numbers. They were, in fact, after YOU. That’s right, the most valuable data on the internet is the data that comprises your identity. Let’s take a look at what that data is, how it gets leveraged by cybercriminals, and how you can get the online identity monitoring you deserve.
1 billion is a big number. In the case of a recent CVS database leak, that’s how many user records were accidentally released online, including details like email addresses and even searches about Covid vaccines. This is just one of the dozens of breaches that have occurred recently and will continue to happen as personally, identifiable information becomes more valuable to cybercriminals. Just as remarkable as the huge volume of user data being exposed online is the speed with which compromised data is used by hackers online. Cybersecurity researchers recently discovered that cybercriminals access leaked or stolen credentials within 12 hours to exploit them as soon as possible. These circumstances beg the question, why has your personally identifiable information has become so valuable lately?
While the value of some information, like a credit card number, is obvious, you may think your name and date of birth aren’t that big of a deal. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that you could find all that information in a phone book. In fact, personally identifiable information (PII), also known as data used to identify a specific individual, is what many data breaches are after.
Armed with just a mailing address, a phone number, and a date of birth, a cybercriminal can begin constructing a fake identity to take out loans and disguise many kinds of criminal activities. With a social security number and a few personal details from a social media account, they could take over a bank account. When it comes to your PII, any information is as good as gold to cybercriminals.
If our PII were treated like actual gold and held in a safe location like Fort Knox, I wouldn’t be writing this post. But in fact, it’s the currency we use to obtain many services in our connected lives. Social media sites are massive repositories of PII, and their access to our most personal details and the ability to sell it to marketers is the reason the service remains free. Free email services are the same. Now consider all the other accounts we may have created to, say, try out a streaming service for free, or even old accounts we no longer use. From that perspective, you can see how much of your data is being used by companies, may not be very well protected, and is a tempting target for cybercriminals. Fortunately, there are many things you can do to keep your identity safer online.
When it comes to protecting your PII, knowledge is power. Let’s start by identifying if you’ve been the target of a data breach. Here are a few tell-tale signs:
Okay, now that you know the signs of a data breach, let’s look at how you can take action to protect yourself. The best way to avoid being the victim of identity theft is by limiting the amount of PII you provide. There are some easy ways to do this.
Only a few types of organizations legitimately need your social security number. These include employers or when contracting with a business, group health insurance, financial and real estate transactions, applying for credit cards, car loans, and so forth.
Quizzes, social media games, and other kinds of interactive clickbait are often grifting pieces of your PII in a seemingly playful way. While you’re not giving up your SSN, you may be giving up things like your birthday, your pet’s name, your first car … things that people often use to compose their passwords or use as answers to common security questions on banking and financial sites.
A phishing email poses as a real email from known or trusted brands and financial institutions. These emails attempt to trick you into sharing important information like your logins, account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on under the guise of providing customer service. Here are some more ways to spot a phishing email.
Clearly, we’re in a new era when it comes to securing our identities online. In response, McAfee has created a new kind of identity monitoring.
We knew from the outset Identity monitoring had to be proactive, holistic, and accessible. We also wanted it to follow the timeline for how cybercrime actually affects your identity. When it comes to PII, the breach is just the first step for cybercriminals. The 10 months following a breach is when cybercriminals will use your PII to commit fraudulent acts using your data.
To address this, your identity monitoring looks after more personally identifiable information than other leading competitors. It will also alert you of stolen personal info an average of 10 months ahead of other monitoring services. And it’s accessible anywhere via mobile app, browser, and the web.
In practice, McAfee’s identity monitoring protects all your online accounts by doing the following:
As we spend more of our lives online, we need an approach to security that reflects this new reality. Identity monitoring is part of it. VPN is part of it. Antivirus is part of it. They are all pieces of a puzzle that we solve with products like McAfee Total Protection. Our premier security service is comprehensive, affordable, and, with identity monitoring, an indispensable part of your life online.
The post Identity Protection Service: The Best Solution to a Growing Problem appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Today we wrap up Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2021. Whether you joined online or attended the hybrid conference in person, one thing is certain: today’s groundbreaking technology is paving the way for our future connectivity. Fittingly, the theme of this year’s event was Connected Impact, representing the role mobile connectivity plays in an ever-changing world, where flexibility and adaptability are critical. Here are four of the key consumer takeaways from this year’s conference:
COVID-19 truly put the power of online connectivity to the test. While 2020 was supposed to be the year of 5G connectivity, this was put on pause as the world faced social and financial uncertainty. Instead, the spotlight fell on legacy technologies to create a new normal for users. Consumers quickly had to figure out how to live their best lives online — from working from home to distance learning to digitally connecting with loved ones.
To help foster online connectivity for all, 5G must step back into the spotlight. Although publicly available 5G networks have been around for two years, it is unlikely that many users see much of a difference between 5G and LTE. For users to feel the impact of 5G, mobile carriers must expand the frequencies at the low and high ends of the spectrum, which is where 5G networks operate.
Qualcomm led the 5G announcements on Monday with the unveiling of its second-generation Qualcomm 5G RAN Platform for Small Cells (FSM200xx). This platform brings major enhancements to radio frequencies and is designed to take millimeter wave performance to more places: indoors, outdoors, and around the globe. According to Qualcomm, these advancements aim to facilitate greater mobile experiences and accelerate 5G performance and availability to users everywhere— thus reshaping opportunities for homes, hospitals, offices and more.
Technology and connectivity played a crucial role in our daily lives in 2020—and therefore, unsurprisingly, spending on health and wellness tech grew by 18.1%. But now, we must ask ourselves what role technology will play post-lockdown.
While they did not have a physical appearance at MWC this year, Samsung provided a sneak of their new wearables: they introduced the One UI Watch user experience, a new interface designed to make the Galaxy Watch and smartphone experience more deeply connected. Samsung also announced its expanded partnership with Google, promising to deliver better performance, longer battery life, and a larger ecosystem of apps to the Galaxy Watch. Although they did not unveil any hardware at MWC, Samsung did ensure that users can expect to see new devices like the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and the Galaxy Watch 4 at their Galaxy Unpacked event happening in July/August of 2021.
2020 also shone a bright light on the key role technology plays in the consumption and distribution of creative arts and entertainment. Lockdown put an even greater responsibility on streaming platforms — and the devices they are accessed on — to deliver content right to people’s homes.
To help meet entertainment consumption needs, Lenovo announced not one, not two, but five new Android tablets during MWC. Its largest tablet is the Yoga Tab 13, which features a built-in kickstand, 13-inch display with 2,160 x 1,350 resolution, up to 12 hours of battery life, and more. Lenovo is pitching this model as its “portable home cinema,” perfect for streaming on the go. It also unveiled the Yoga Tab 11 and the Tab P11 Plus, which are expected to be available in EMEA in July following the Yoga Tab 13’s June release date. For users hoping for a more compact, budget-friendly device, Lenovo also announced the Lenovo Tab M8 and the Lenovo Tab M7. Whichever model you select, one thing it certain — digital devices have and will continue to be instrumental in consumer entertainment.
These exciting announcements are a great representation of what the future holds for mobile technology and greater connectivity. The advancements in mobile connectivity have already made a positive impact on consumer lifestyles, but the rise in popularity of these devices has also caught the attention of cybercriminals looking to exploit consumers’ reliance on this technology.
More time spent online interacting with various apps and services simultaneously increases your chance of exposure to cybersecurity risks and threats. Unsurprisingly, cybercriminals were quick to take advantage of the increase in connectivity throughout 2020. McAfee Labs saw an average of 375 new threats per minute and a surge of hackers exploiting the pandemic through COVID-19 themed phishing campaigns, malicious apps, malware and more. For users to continue to live a connected life, they will need to take greater care of their online safety and ensure that security is top-of-mind in any given situation. Taking these precautions will provide greater peace of mind in the new mobile-driven world.
The post The Future of Mobile: Trends from Mobile World Congress 2021 appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
ImageMagick is a hugely popular open source software that is used in lot of systems around the world. It is available for the Windows, Linux, MacOS platforms as well as Android and iOS. It is used for editing, creating or converting various digital image formats and supports various formats like PNG, JPEG, WEBP, TIFF, HEIC and PDF, among others.
Google OSS Fuzz and other threat researchers have made ImageMagick the frequent focus of fuzzing, an extremely popular technique used by security researchers to discover potential zero-day vulnerabilities in open, as well as closed source software. This research has resulted in various vulnerability discoveries that must be addressed on a regular basis by its maintainers. Despite the efforts of many to expose such vulnerabilities, recent fuzzing research from McAfee has exposed new vulnerabilities involving processing of multiple image formats, in various open source and closed source software and libraries including ImageMagick and Windows GDI+.
Fuzzing open source libraries has been covered in a detailed blog “Vulnerability Discovery in Open Source Libraries Part 1: Tools of the Trade” last year. Fuzzing ImageMagick is very well documented, so we will be quickly covering the process in this blog post and will focus on the root cause analysis of the issue we have found.
ImageMagick has lot of configuration options which we can see by running following command:
| $./configure –help |
We can customize various parameters as per our needs. To compile and install ImageMagick with AFL for our case, we can use following commands:
|
$CC=afl-gcc CXX=afl=g++ CFLAGS=”-ggdb -O0 -fsanitize=address,undefined -fno-omit-frame-pointer” LDFLAGS=”-ggdb -fsanitize=address,undefined -fno-omit-frame-pointer” ./configure
$ make -j$(nproc) $sudo make install |
This will compile and install ImageMagick with AFL instrumentation. The binary we will be fuzzing is “magick”, also known as “magick tool”. It has various options, but we will be using its image conversion feature to convert our image from one format to another.
A simple command would be include the following:
| $ magick <input file> <output file> |
This command will convert an input file to an output file format. We will be fuzzing this with AFL.
Before we start fuzzing, we need to have a good input corpus. One way of collecting corpus is to search on Google or GitHub. We can also use existing test corpus from various software. A good test corpus is available on the AFL site here: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/demo/
Corpus collection is one thing, but we also need to minimize the corpus. The way AFL works is that it will instrument each basic block so that it can trace the program execution path. It maintains a shared memory as a bitmap and it uses an algorithm to check new block hits. If a new block hit has been found, it will save this information to bitmap.
Now it may be possible that more than one input file from the corpus can trigger the same path, as we have collected sample files from various sources, we don’t have any information on what paths they will trigger at the runtime. If we use this corpus without removing such files, then we end up wasting time and CPU cycles. We need to avoid that.
Interestingly AFL offers a utility called “afl-cmin” which we can use to minimize our test corpus. This is a recommended thing to do before you start any fuzzing campaign. We can run this as follows:
| $afl-cmin -i <input directory> -o <output directory> — magick @@ /dev/null |
This command will minimize the input corpus and will keep only those files which trigger unique paths.
After we have minimized corpus, we can start fuzzing. To fuzz we need to use following command:
| $afl-fuzz -i <mincorpus directory> -o <output directory> — magick @@ /dev/null |
This will only run a single instance of AFL utilizing a single core. In case we have multicore processors, we can run multiple instances of AFL, with one Master and n number of Slaves. Where n is the available CPU cores.
To check available CPU cores, we can use this command:
| $nproc |
This will give us the number of CPU cores (depending on the system) as follows:
In this case there are eight cores. So, we can run one Master and up to seven Slaves.
To run master instances, we can use following command:
| $afl-fuzz -M Master -i <mincorpus directory> -o <output directory> — magick @@ /dev/null |
We can run slave instances using following command:
|
$afl-fuzz -S Slave1 -i <mincorpus directory> -o <output directory> — magick @@ /dev/null
$afl-fuzz -S Slave2 -i <mincorpus directory> -o <output directory> — magick @@ /dev/null |
The same can be done for each slave. We just need to use an argument -S and can use any name like slave1, slave2, etc.
Within a few hours of beginning this Fuzzing campaign, we found one crash related to an out of bound read inside a heap memory. We have reported this issue to ImageMagick, and they were very prompt in fixing it with a patch the very next day. ImageMagick has release a new build with version: 7.0.46 to fix this issue. This issue was assigned CVE-2020-27829.
On checking the POC file, we found that it was a TIFF file.
When we open this file with ImageMagick with following command:
| $magick poc.tif /dev/null |
As a result, we see a crash like below:
As is clear from the above log, the program was trying to read 1 byte past allocated heap buffer and therefore ASAN caused this crash. This can atleast lead to a ImageMagick crash on the systems running vulnerable version of ImageMagick.
Before we start debugging this issue to find a root cause, it is necessary to understand the TIFF file format. Its specification is very well described here: http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/tiff/tiff_summary.pdf.
In short, a TIFF file has three parts:
We can tiffinfo utility from libtiff to gather various information about the POC file. This allows us to see the following information with tiffinfo like width, height, sample per pixel, row per strip etc.:
There are a few things to note here:
| TIFF Dir offset is: 0xa0
Image width is: 3 and length is: 32 Bits per sample is: 9 Sample per pixel is: 3 Rows per strip is: 1024 Planer configuration is: single image plane. We will be using this data moving forward in this post. |
As we can see in the crash log, program was crashing at function “PushQuantumPixel” in the following location in quantum-import.c line 256:
On checking “PushQuantumPixel” function in “MagickCore/quantum-import.c” we can see the following code at line #256 where program is crashing:
We can see following:
The program is crashing at this location while reading the value of “pixels” which means that value is out of bound from the allocated heap memory.
Now we need to figure out following:
To start with, we can check “ReadTIFFImage” function in coders/tiff.c file and see that it allocates memory using a “AcquireQuantumMemory” function call, which appears as per the documentation mentioned here:
https://imagemagick.org/api/memory.php:
“Returns a pointer to a block of memory at least count * quantum bytes suitably aligned for any use.
The format of the “AcquireQuantumMemory” method is:
void *AcquireQuantumMemory(const size_t count,const size_t quantum)
A description of each parameter follows:
count
the number of objects to allocate contiguously.
quantum
the size (in bytes) of each object. “
In this case two parameters passed to this function are “extent” and “sizeof(*strip_pixels)”
We can see that “extent” is calculated as following in the code below:
There is a function TIFFStripSize(tiff) which returns size for a strip of data as mentioned in libtiff documentation here:
http://www.libtiff.org/man/TIFFstrip.3t.html
In our case, it returns 224 and we can also see that in the code mentioned above, “image->columns * sizeof(uint64)” is also added to extent, which results in 24 added to extent, so extent value becomes 248.
So, this extent value of 248 and sizeof(*strip_pixels) which is 1 is passed to “AcquireQuantumMemory” function and total memory of 248 bytes get allocated.
This is how memory is allocated.
“Strip_pixel” is pointer to newly allocated memory.
Note that this is 248 bytes of newly allocated memory. Since we are using ASAN, each byte will contain “0xbe” which is default for newly allocated memory by ASAN:
https://github.com/llvm-mirror/compiler-rt/blob/master/lib/asan/asan_flags.inc
The memory start location is 0x6110000002c0 and the end location is 0x6110000003b7, which is 248 bytes total.
This memory is set to 0 by a “memset” call and this is assigned to a variable “p”, as mentioned in below image. Please also note that “p” will be used as a pointer to traverse this memory location going forward in the program:
Later on we see that there is a call to “TIFFReadEncodedPixels” which reads strip data from TIFF file and stores it into newly allocated buffer “strip_pixels” of 248 bytes (documentation here: http://www.libtiff.org/man/TIFFReadEncodedStrip.3t.html):
To understand what this TIFF file data is, we need to again refer to TIFF file structure. We can see that there is a tag called “StripOffsets” and its value is 8, which specifies the offset of strip data inside TIFF file:
We see the following when we check data at offset 8 in the TIFF file:
We see the following when we print the data in “strip_pixels” (note that it is in little endian format):
So “strip_pixels” is the actual data from the TIFF file from offset 8. This will be traversed through pointer “p”.
Inside “ReadTIFFImage” function there are two nested for loops.
Here “stride” is calculated by calling function “TIFFVStripSize()” function which as per documentation returns the number of bytes in a strip with nrows rows of data. In this case it is 14. So, every time pointer “p” is incremented by “14” or “0xE” inside the second for loop.
If we print the image structure which is passed to “ImportQuantumPixels” function as parameter, we can see following:
Here we can notice that the columns value is 3, the rows value is 32 and depth is 9. If we check in the POC TIFF file, this has been taken from ImageWidth and ImageLength and BitsPerSample value:
Ultimately, control reaches to “ImportRGBQuantum” and then to the “PushQuantumPixel” function and one of the arguments to this function is the pixels data which is pointed by “p”. Remember that this points to the memory address which was previously allocated using the “AcquireQuantumMemory” function, and that its length is 248 byte and every time value of “p” is increased by 14.
The “PushQuantumPixel” function is used to read pixel data from “p” into the internal pixel data storage of ImageMagick. There is a for loop which is responsible for reading data from the provided pixels array of 248 bytes into a structure “quantum_Info”. This loop reads data from pixels incrementally and saves it in the “quantum_info->state.pixels” field.
The root cause here is that there are no proper bounds checks and the program tries to read data beyond the allocated buffer size on the heap, while reading the strip data inside a for loop.
This causes a crash in ImageMagick as we can see below:
Therefore, to summarize, the program crashes because:
If we check at the patch diff, we can see that the following changes were made to fix this issue:
Here the 2nd argument to “AcquireQuantumMemory” is multiplied by 2 thus increasing the total amount of memory and preventing this Out of Bound read issue from heap memory. The total memory allocated is 496 bytes, 248*2=496 bytes, as we can see below:
A new version of ImageMagick 7.0.46 was released to fix this issue. While the patch fixes the memory allocation issue, if we check the code below, we can see that there was a call to memset which didn’t set the proper memory size to zero.
Memory was allocated extent*2*sizeof(*strip_pixels) but in this memset to 0 was only done for extent*sizeof(*strip_pixels). This means half of the memory was set to 0 and rest contained 0xbebebebe, which is by default for ASAN new memory allocation.
This has since been fixed in subsequent releases of ImageMagick by using extent=2*TIFFStripSize(tiff); in the following patch:
Processing various image files requires deep understanding of various file formats and thus it is possible that something may not be exactly implemented or missed. This can lead to various vulnerabilities in such image processing software. Some of this vulnerability can lead to DoS and some can lead to remote code execution affecting every installation of such popular software.
Fuzzing plays an important role in finding vulnerabilities often missed by developers and during testing. We at McAfee constantly fuzz various closed source as well as open source software to help secure them. We work very closely with various vendors and do responsible disclosure. This shows McAfee’s commitment towards securing the software and protecting our customers from various threats.
We will continue to fuzz various software and work with vendors to help mitigate risk arriving from such threats.
We would like to thank and appreciate ImageMagick team for quickly resolving this issue within 24 hours and releasing a new version to fix this issue.
The post Fuzzing ImageMagick and Digging Deeper into CVE-2020-27829 appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Here’s to the hashtags, the likes, the followers, the DMs, and the LOLs—June 30th marks Social Media Day, a time to celebrate and reflect on how social media has changed our lives over the years.
Started in 2010 by media and entertainment company Mashable, celebrations have taken on all kinds of forms. Meetups, contests, calls to increase your social circle by one meaningful connection have all marked the date in the past. Yet this year feels like an opportunity to consider just how heavily so many of us have leaned upon social media these past months, particularly in a world where nearly 50% of the global population are social media users to some degree or other.
What’s more, people worldwide spend an average of 145 minutes a day on social media. With users in the Philippines spending three hours and 53 minutes a day and users in the U.S. spending just over two hours a day, that figure can vary widely, yet it’s safe to say that a good portion of our day features time browsing around on social media.
With that, Social Media Day is also a good day to give your social media settings and habits a closer look, all so that you can get the most out of it with less fuss and worry. Whether you’re using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or whatnot, here are several things you can do that can help keep you safe and secure out there:
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and others give you the option of making your profile and posts visible to friends only. Choosing this setting keeps the broader internet from seeing what you’re doing, saying, and posting, which can help protect your privacy.
Be critical of the invitations you receive. Out-and-out strangers could be more than just a stranger, they could be a fake account designed to gather information on users for purposes of cybercrime, or they can be an account designed to spread false information. There are plenty of them too. In fact, in Q1 of 2021 alone, Facebook took action on 1.3 billion fake accounts. Reject such requests.
Nothing says “there’s nobody at home right now” like that post of you on vacation or sharing your location while you’re out on the town. In effect, such posts announce your whereabouts to a broad audience of followers (even a global audience, if you’re not posting privately, as called out above). Consider sharing photos and stories of your adventures once you’ve returned.
It’s a famous saying for a reason. Whether your profile is set to private or if you are using an app with “disappearing” messages and posts (like Snapchat), what you post can indeed be saved and shared again. It’s as simple as taking a screenshot. If you don’t want it out there, forever or otherwise, simply don’t post it.
We’re increasingly accustomed to the warnings about phishing emails, yet phishing attacks happen plenty on social media. The same rules apply. Don’t follow any links you get from strangers by way of instant or direct messengers. And keep your personal information close. Don’t pass out your email, address, or other info as well. Even those so-called “quiz” posts and websites can be ruses designed to steal bits and pieces of personal info that can be used as the basis of an attack.
Some platforms such as Facebook allow users to review posts that are tagged with their profile names. Check your account settings and give yourself the highest degree of control over how and where your tags are used by others. This will help keep you aware of how you’re being mentioned by others and in what way.
Security software can protect you from clicking on malicious links while on social media, strengthen your passwords so your social media account doesn’t get hacked, and boost your online privacy as well. With identity theft a sadly commonplace occurrence today, security software is really a must.
The post Protect Your Social Media Accounts from Hacks and Attacks appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Across the country, Canadians are moving out of cities in droves to stretch their legs and call a larger plot of land home. For those embracing the work-from-home lifestyle, they no longer need to live near metro-area offices in expensive shoebox apartments and condos. According to Statistics Canada, 50,000 people moved out of Toronto and nearly 25,000 people migrated from Montréal to suburban areas from July 2019 to July 2020.
The increased demand for suburban housing is making the Canadian real estate market a mad dash for limited supply. Additionally, some families who are out of work are struggling to keep their homes and are resorting to unsafe measures to keep a roof over their heads.
Leave it to scammers and identity thieves to pounce on a vulnerable situation. Scammers and identity thieves are increasingly taking advantage of unsuspecting homeowners, and in some cases, selling homes without the rightful owners even realizing it.
Be on the lookout for these three Canadian real estate scams.
Foreclosure occurs when a homeowner can no longer afford to pay their mortgage, so the lending institution takes over homeownership with the right to sell it. When homeowners are facing the prospect of having to move out, they may seek dubious loans to help them bridge the gap. Loan fraud is when a scammer pretends to extend a gracious loan. In exchange for the loan, the scammer may ask for the title of the home. With the title in hand, the thief may stop sending loan payments to the homeowner and instead resell or remortgage the property.
Not being able to make mortgage payments is a desperate situation, which causes struggling homeowners to make dramatic decisions. Before agreeing to any type of loan, homeowners must ask themselves if the terms of the loan are too good to be true. In cases of fake loans, they often advertise an incredibly low-interest rate. It is best to trust your financial matters to accredited institutions.
Title fraud is when someone steals the title of the home, usually by impersonating the homeowner. Once they have the title, the thief may attempt to sell the home or apply for a mortgage against it. In March 2021, the Times Colonist reported that a thief impersonated a British Columbian homeowner in order to transfer the home’s title to someone else’s name. Then, the thief tried to sell the home behind the rightful homeowner’s back. It was only when a neighbor alerted the real homeowner about the for-sale sign that they realized that their home could have been sold without their permission.
The best way to defend against title fraud is to keep your personal information as private as possible. Title fraud is closely related to identity theft, and fraudsters may gain access to your personal information through phishing methods. Phishing is a tactic where cybercriminals trick people into giving up personal details, including full names, birthdays, and financial information. Statistics Canada calculates that 34% of Canadians have experienced a phishing attempt since the beginning of the pandemic. This statistic emphasizes the importance of constant vigilance concerning your most sensitive personal information.
Mortgage fraud is a term that can apply to untruthful lenders who attempt to swindle cash from unsuspecting buyers or pitch mortgage terms that fall outside of the buyer’s means. The Financial Services Commission of Ontario lists several warning signs of mortgage fraud. For example, lenders who do not have your best interests in mind may ask for cash fees and upfront payments.
Again, it is best to only trust accredited financial institutions with your mortgages and loans. Research the institution before signing any contract. If the mortgage terms are too good to be true, it probably is. There are several online mortgage calculators that can give you an idea of the type of mortgage you can afford. Before entering any talks with a lender, conduct some research beforehand so you can spot unreasonable terms.
Also, an unscrupulous lender may try to hurry you along but also take a long time responding to your calls and emails. If you feel pressured or unsure at any point, remember that there are plenty of fish in the sea. Ask your friends or family for lender recommendations to make sure that you are not tricked into mortgage fraud, the consequences of which could follow you for years.
The post 3 Canadian Real Estate Scams You Should Know About appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
As Ransomware continues to spread and target organizations around the world, it is critical to leverage threat intelligence data. And not just any threat intelligence but actionable intelligence from MVISION Insights. Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to proactively increase your Endpoint Security to help minimize damage from the next Darkside, WannaCry, Ryuk, or REvil
MVISION Insights provides near real time statistics on the prevalence of Ransomware campaigns and threat profiles detections by country, by sector and in your environment.
Above you can see that although 5ss5c is the most detected ransomware worldwide, in France Darkside and Ryuk have been the most detected campaigns in the last 10 days. You can also sort top campaigns by industry sector.
As you can see above, MVISION Insights measures your overall Endpoint Security score and provides recommendations on which McAfee Endpoint Security features should be enabled for maximum protection.
Then, MVISION Insights assesses out-of-the-box the minimum version of your McAfee Endpoint Security AMcore content necessary to protect against each campaign. As you can see above, two devices have an insufficient coverage against the “CISA-FBI Cybersecurity Advisory on the Darkside Ransomware”. You can then use McAfee ePO to update these two devices.
Below, MVISION Insights provides a link to a KB article for the “Darkside Ransomware profile” with detailed suggestions on which McAfee Endpoint Security rules to enable in your McAfee ePO policies. First, the minimum set of rules to better protect against this ransomware campaign. Second, the aggressive set to fully block the campaign. The second one can create false positives and should only be used in major crisis situations.
MVISION Insights can show you whether you have unresolved detections for specific campaigns. Below you can see that you have an unresolved detection linked the “Operation Iron Ore” threat campaign.
MVISION Insights provides IOCs (Indicators of comprises) which your SOC can use with MVISION EDR to look for the presence of these malicious indicators.
If your SOC has experienced threat hunters MVISION Insights also provides information on the MITRE Tactics, Techniques and Tools linked to this threat campaign or threat profile. This data is also available via the MVISION APIs to integrate with your other SOC tools. In fact, several integrations are already available today with other vendors from the McAfee SIA partnership.
Finally, the ultimate benefit from MVISION Insights is that you can use it to show to your management whether your organization is correctly protected against the latest ransomware attacks.
In summary, you can easily leverage MVISION Insights to proactively increase your protection against ransomware by:
The post How to Proactively Increase Your Protection Against Ransomware with Threat Intelligence appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Every day you place your personal information in the hands of companies and trust that it will remain safe. However, what happens when external threats jeopardize your personal data security, especially while working remotely?
The transition to remote work environments and consumers’ online habits have made it more difficult for Canadian employees and consumers to protect their personal information. This challenge is primarily due to ransomware. To protect yourself, you need to first understand how cybercriminals take advantage of users’ online behaviors to launch strategic attacks against employees and consumers through the information they glean from stolen company data.
Ransomware has been on the rise this past year with attacks increasing 62% in 2020 according to Statista. In fact, 78% of Canadian cybersecurity professionals said that attacks increased due to employees working remotely in a recent VMware report. Cybercriminals target remote workers primarily through malicious links sent through phishing emails — in fact, over one third of Canadian respondents in a recent survey said they experienced at least one phishing attempt in the last year.
Hackers pose as legitimate organizations and prompt individuals to take action: say you decide to check your personal email on your work laptop during your lunch break. You open a message that claims to be from one of your favorite retailers claiming that you just won $500 in shopping credit – all you need to do is click on the link and fill out your banking information. This is an example of a phishing attack that could not only wreak havoc on your personal security, but your company’s as well. If the link in the message downloads a credential-stealing malware on your work laptop, there is a good chance that your organization’s private data or network could be compromised.
Knowing that many employees will be communicating virtually instead of face-to-face, hackers can take advantage of the remote work environment by posing as employees from finance departments and sending fake invoices for products or services. The goal of these fake invoices is for employees to call a support phone number to investigate, whereby hackers attain credit card numbers or other information they can leverage in spear-phishing scams. Hackers can also spoof phone calls to make it look like it is coming from a legitimate number within the organization. Revealing too much information to an unverified contact is a risk that remote workers must learn to identify and avoid.
Ransomware is always evolving, making it critical to understand the nature of these threats so you can better avoid them.
Cybercriminals are constantly finding new ways to automate their attacks and increase their profits. Here is a look at five active ransomware variants cybercriminals use today—and how they deploy them.
By the end of 2020, McAfee Labs observed a 69% increase in new ransomware, which Cryptodefense largely drove. This virus is similar to CryptoLocker, a trojan virus that spreads through email phishing to infiltrate hard drives and files. Both spread ransomware, use high levels of encryption to compromise users’ files, and claim that these files cannot be decrypted without a decryption key.
Maze ransomware has been active since November of 2019 and is operated by hackers notorious for leaking victim data upon non-payment. Maze operators first gain access to a network by using valid credentials. It will then scan the network for user devices, check these devices for additional credentials, and compromise user files.
In a Ransomware Task Force interview with an affiliate of the REvil/Sodinokibi syndicate, the interviewee revealed that companies with cyber insurance are prime targets since the chances of a payout are high. This ransomware spreads through software vulnerabilities, phishing scams, and exploit kits. Once it infiltrates a device, it spreads through escalated privilege to compromise user files and systems.
Ryuk has been around since August of 2018 and targets large companies, critical infrastructure, and hospitals. This ransomware is almost always spread through a banking trojan called Trickbot, used by hackers to steal financial and banking credentials. The operators behind this ransomware demand higher ransoms compared to other groups. They also use opensource tools and manual hacking techniques to bypass detection and infiltrate private networks.
The operators behind SamSam ransomware gain access through Windows servers using a Microsoft protocol that allows remote connections to other computers. Operators will then elevate their privilege to include admin rights once inside a network to infect servers with malware, requiring no action or authorization on the victim’s part.
Ransomware can affect anyone, regardless of whether you are an employee or a customer of a targeted company. Keep these tips in mind to reduce your risk of a ransomware attack and know what steps to take if you fall victim.
Phishing emails are one of the most common methods a hacker will use to infect devices and spread ransomware. They will send links through seemingly legitimate emails to trick users into clicking on them and downloading malicious files. Knowing how to spot one is the first step to prevent infection. If you receive an email you suspect is a phishing scam, start by analyzing its structure: common indicators of a phishing scam may include:
Once you identify a phishing email, don’t click on any links or download attachments. Simply delete it and carry on with your day.
Keep in mind that the cybercriminals behind Maze ransomware gained access to private networks through valid credentials. Hackers typically obtain these credentials through a “password spray” technique where they attempt to log in to accounts using a list of commonly used passwords. However, hackers have a higher chance of guessing valid passwords if they are too short or not complex enough. Additionally, a hacker is more likely to infiltrate multiple accounts if they share the same password.
Strong passwords help ensure that a hacker cannot access your private network, gain administrative rights to your device, or infect another device you are connected to. Create a password that is strong enough to withstand simple guess-and-check attempts by making them long, difficult, and unique. Multi-phrased passwords or passphrases also help to prevent hackers from breaking into your accounts, such as “P3anutbutter&J3lly.” Avoid reusing passwords across multiple accounts and change them periodically, especially after an account has been breached. Even if a hacker does steal your credentials, multi-factor authentication adds an extra validation layer to prohibit unauthorized sign-in attempts.
Your device is more susceptible to ransomware and viruses without the right security tools to help mitigate the chances of infection. Avoid the risk of a ransomware attack by employing a quality security solution like McAfee Total Protection. A holistic security solution can help you stay vigilant of cyber threats by monitoring for ransomware viruses in addition to malware and spyware. Security software can also monitor your internet connection and network traffic through regular scans to flag malicious activity and provide guidance on how to sidestep these threats. If a hacker attempts to launch an attack on your device, you can rest assured your security software will promptly alert you of the intrusion.
In addition to social engineering tactics, hackers will leverage vulnerabilities in software to create a back door through which they can infiltrate user devices. A way to keep cyber criminals out is to keep your software applications and devices up to date. This includes the apps on your mobile device as well as apps on your desktop. Regular updates ensure that the proper security patches are implemented, the right bugs are fixed and that hackers cannot exploit these vulnerabilities.
If worse comes to worst and your device is infected with ransomware, the first thing to do is isolate the device and disconnect from shared networks. Disconnecting the infected device ensures that ransomware cannot spread to other devices on that same network.
Immediately gather evidence on what type of malware you are dealing with so you can accurately report it to authorities and determine what your options are for remediation. You can then choose to remove it or wipe your system completely which is the most assured way to eliminate ransomware from your device. Afterwards you can reinstall your operating system and, provided you perform regular backups, restore your files to a previous version.
No one is truly out of the danger zone when hackers strike. Ransomware is on the rise, and online users must understand how to bypass these viruses to avoid the ramifications of a compromised device. By understanding online security best practices, users can safeguard their online presence and defend against ransomware threats.
To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, subscribe to our newsletter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.
The post 5 Ransomware Threats Canadians Need to Know appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
This post was written by Emmanuel
Making the most of opportunities and putting in the work with an employer who invests in you is a powerful combination. My journey at McAfee would not be complete had it not been for the chance to prove myself.
McAfee Rotation Program (MRP) program helps candidates find the right fit within the organization. MRP consists of five-month-long placements within Professional Services, Pre-Sales Engineering, Security Operations, and Sales Operations. To be accepted, candidates must complete and score well during three rigorous days of evaluation.
There is no promise you’ll be hired, only the promise that McAfee will give you every chance to prove your worth. And when you succeed, the benefits are far greater than just a paycheck.
In 2018, about a year after earning my Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics, I learned about the program while looking for work. Even though cybersecurity wasn’t my background, I decided to take a chance.
McAfee flew me from my home in New Jersey to Dallas to complete an intensive course consisting of 10- to 12-hour days of interviews, presentations, logic tests, and team-building exercises. One of the toughest parts was presenting on McAfee products, something I knew very little about, and having only a few hours overnight to prepare once given the assignment.
Those days were extremely challenging and tested me in ways that I didn’t think possible. Even though it wasn’t really tailored to my area of studies, the program was an opportunity to work for one of the largest global corporations. I was resolved to stay focused and make an impression.
And I was hungry. Failing wasn’t an option. I had done my research and wanted the opportunity to work for McAfee.
About two weeks after the course, McAfee informed me that I was one of six candidates to be accepted into the MRP. The journey to help me find the best position soon began.
For the next two years, I worked five rotations or positions within the program’s designated areas. It wasn’t long before I began charting my path to what interested me most.
Last year, I achieved my goal of becoming an Enterprise Security Engineer.
I could not have achieved success without God, the help of a lot of people, and a diverse culture that embraces personal and professional growth.
McAfee gives you the opportunity to not just find what you do best but fulfill your passions. Along the way, you are recognized and mentored – a great achievement was receiving the “Who’s Doing This” award based on performance within my first year at McAfee.
The company invests in you personally and professionally, not just through training opportunities, but by encouraging healthy lifestyles and work-life balance. When we’re not working remotely, every Friday employees can bring their dogs to work through the Pups at Work Program. Some people have actually become attached to their coworkers’ pets!
Building connections has helped launch my career, understand where I want to go and how to get there. Like any new hire, you have to develop into your role, and that is only made possible with the right direction and encouragement. Coworkers and leadership have continually helped me along my journey.
Even through a period of remote working, McAfee has developed an online culture which makes you feel as though everybody is collaborating in person.
And the learning never stops. My mentor spends time each month guiding me down my career path, which is a huge plus.
What I like about McAfee is you are given every chance to succeed, which instills a strong work ethic and the ability to give back. I was fortunate to help lead another MRP soon after completing my rotation. Leadership entrusted me to coordinate the program from start to finish, and it was rewarding to watch the development of those who succeeded.
My time here has been sweet, and I could not pick a better company to launch my career. I’ve gone from somebody with no background in information technology and security to being a subject matter expert.
Those three days in Dallas were tough, but sometimes you have to put in a little sweat equity to reach your goal. They are among the greatest days of my career and make working for McAfee that much sweeter.
Are you thinking about joining our team? McAfee takes great pride in providing candidates every opportunity to show their true value. Learn more about our jobs. Subscribe to job alerts.
The post How I Seized McAfee’s Opportunities to Realize My Potential appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Microsoft Windows Graphics Device Interface+, also known as GDI+, allows various applications to use different graphics functionality on video displays as well as printers. Windows applications don’t directly access graphics hardware such as device drivers, but they interact with GDI, which in turn then interacts with device drivers. In this way, there is an abstraction layer to Windows applications and a common set of APIs for everyone to use.
Because of its complex format, GDI+ has a known history of various vulnerabilities. We at McAfee continuously fuzz various open source and closed source software including windows GDI+. Over the last few years, we have reported various issues to Microsoft in various Windows components including GDI+ and have received CVEs for them.
In this post, we detail our root cause analysis of one such vulnerability which we found using WinAFL: CVE-2021-1665 – GDI+ Remote Code Execution Vulnerability. This issue was fixed in January 2021 as part of a Microsoft Patch.
WinAFL is a Windows port of a popular Linux AFL fuzzer and is maintained by Ivan Fratric of Google Project Zero. WinAFL uses dynamic binary instrumentation using DynamoRIO and it requires a program called as a harness. A harness is nothing but a simple program which calls the APIs we want to fuzz.
A simple harness for this was already provided with WinAFL, we can enable “Image->GetThumbnailImage” code which was commented by default in the code. Following is the harness code to fuzz GDI+ image and GetThumbnailImage API:
As you can see, this small piece of code simply creates a new image object from the provided input file and then calls another function to generate a thumbnail image. This makes for an excellent attack vector and can affect various Windows applications if they use thumbnail images. In addition, this requires little user interaction, thus software which uses GDI+ and calls GetThumbnailImage API, is vulnerable.
A good corpus provides a sound foundation for fuzzing. For that we can use Google or GitHub in addition to further test corpus available from various software and public EMF files which were released for other vulnerabilities. We have generated a few test files by making changes to a sample code provided on Microsoft’s site which generates an EMF file with EMFPlusDrawString and other records:
After we have collected an initial corpus file, we need to minimize it. For this we can use a utility called winafl-cmin.py as follows:
| winafl-cmin.py -D D:\\work\\winafl\\DynamoRIO\\bin32 -t 10000 -i inCorpus -o minCorpus -covtype edge -coverage_module gdiplus.dll -target_module gdiplus_hardik.exe -target_method fuzzMe -nargs 2 — gdiplus_hardik.exe @@ |
WinAFL uses the concept of in-memory fuzzing. We need to provide a function name to WinAFL. It will save the program state at the start of the function and take one input file from the corpus, mutate it, and feed it to the function.
It will monitor this for any new code paths or crashes. If it finds a new code path, it will consider the new file as an interesting test case and will add it to the queue for further mutation. If it finds any crashes, it will save the crashing file in crashes folder.
The following picture shows the fuzzing flow:
Once we have compiled our harness program, collected, and minimized the corpus, we can run this command to fuzz our program with WinAFL:
| afl-fuzz.exe -i minCorpus -o out -D D:\work\winafl\DynamoRIO\bin32 -t 20000 —coverage_module gdiplus.dll -fuzz_iterations 5000 -target_module gdiplus_hardik.exe -target_offset 0x16e0 -nargs 2 — gdiplus_hardik.exe @@ |
We found a few crashes and after triaging unique crashes, and we found a crash in “gdiplus!BuiltLine::GetBaselineOffset” which looks as follows in the call stack below:
As can be seen in the above image, the program is crashing while trying to read data from a memory address pointed by edx+8. We can see it registers ebx, ecx and edx contains c0c0c0c0 which means that page heap is enabled for the binary. We can also see that c0c0c0c0 is being passed as a parameter to “gdiplus!FullTextImager::RenderLine” function.
To figure out a root cause, we can use patch diffing—namely, we can use IDA BinDiff plugin to identify what changes have been made to patched file. If we are lucky, we can easily find the root cause by just looking at the code that was changed. So, we can generate an IDB file of patched and unpatched versions of gdiplus.dll and then run IDA BinDiff plugin to see the changes.
We can see that one new function was added in the patched file, and this seems to be a destructor for BuiltLine Object :
We can also see that there are a few functions where the similarity score is < 1 and one such function is FullTextImager::BuildAllLines as shown below:
Now, just to confirm if this function is really the one which was patched, we can run our test program and POC in windbg and set a break point on this function. We can see that the breakpoint is hit and the program doesn’t crash anymore:
Now, as a next step, we need to identify what has been changed in this function to fix this vulnerability. For that we can check flow graph of this function and we see something as follows. Unfortunately, there are too many changes to identify the vulnerability by simply looking at the diff:
The left side illustrates an unpatched dll while right side shows a patched dll:
If we zoom in on the yellow blocks we can see following:
We can note several changes. Few blocks are removed in the patched DLL, so patch diffing will alone will not be sufficient to identify the root cause of this issue. However, this presents valuable hints about where to look and what to look for when using other methods for debugging such as windbg. A few observations we can spot from the bindiff output above:
So we can assume that this is where the vulnerability is fixed. Now we need to figure out following:
EMF is also known as enhanced meta file format which is used to store graphical images device independently. An EMF file is consisting of various records which is of variable length. It can contain definition of various graphic object, commands for drawing and other graphics properties.
Credit: MS EMF documentation.
Generally, an EMF file consist of the following records:
Detailed specifications of EMF file format can be seen at Microsoft site at following URL:
Generally, most of the issues in EMF are because of malformed or corrupt records. We need to figure out which record type is causing this crash. For this if we look at the call stack we can see following:
We can notice a call to function “gdiplus!GdipPlayMetafileRecordCallback”
By setting a breakpoint on this function and checking parameter, we can see following:
We can see that EDX contains some memory address and we can see that parameter given to this function are: 00x00401c,0x00000000 and 0x00000044.
Also, on checking the location pointed by EDX we can see following:
If we check our POC EMF file, we can see that this data belongs to file from offset: 0x15c:
By going through EMF specification and manually parsing the records, we can easily figure out that this is a “EmfPlusDrawString” record, the format of which is shown below:
In our case:
Record Type = 0x401c EmfPlusDrawString record
Flags = 0x0000
Size = 0x50
Data size = 0x44
Brushid = 0x02
Format id = 0x01
Length = 0x14
Layoutrect = 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 FC FF C7 42 00 00 80 FF
String data =
Now that we have located the record that seems to be causing the crash, the next thing is to figure out why our program is crashing. If we debug and check the code, we can see that control reaches to a function “gdiplus!FullTextImager::BuildAllLines”. When we decompile this code, we can see something like this:
The following diagram shows the function call hierarchy:
1. Inside “Builtline::BuildAllLines” memory will be allocated for 0x60 or 96 bytes, and in the debugger it looks as follows:
2. Then it calls “BuiltLine::BuiltLine” function and moves the data to newly allocated memory:
3. This happens in side a while loop and there is a function call to “BuiltLine::GetUntrimmedCharacterCount”.
4. Return value of “BuiltLine::GetUntrimmedCharacterCount” is stored in a location 0x12ff2ec. This value will be 1 as can be seen below:
5. This value gets added to ECX:
6. Then there is a check that determines if ecx< eax. If true, it will continue loop, else it will jump to another location:
7. Now in the vulnerable version, loop doesn’t exist if the return value of “BuiltLine::GetUntrimmedCharacterCount” is 0, which means that this 0 will be added to ECX and which means ECX will not increase. So the loop will execute 1 more time with the “ECX” value of 0x13. Thus, this will lead to loop getting executed 21 times rather than 20 times. This is the root cause of the problem here.
Also after some debugging, we can figure out why EAX contains 14. It is read from the POC file at offset: 0x174:
If we recall, this is the EmfPlusDrawString record and 0x14 is the length we mentioned before.
Later on, the program reaches to “FullTextImager::Render” function corrupting the value of EAX because it reads the unused memory:
This will be passed as an argument to “FullTextImager::RenderLine” function:
Later, program will crash while trying to access this location.
Our program was crashing while processing EmfPlusDrawString record inside the EMF file while accessing an invalid memory location and processing string data field. Basically, the program was not verifying the return value of “gdiplus!BuiltLine::GetUntrimmedCharacterCount” function and this resulted in taking a different program path that corrupted the register and various memory values, ultimately causing the crash.
As we have figured out by looking at patch diff above, a check was added which determined the return value of “gdiplus!BuiltLine::GetUntrimmedCharacterCount” function.
If the retuned value is 0, then program xor’s EBX which contains counter and jump to a location which calls destructor for Builtline Object:
Here is the destructor that prevents the issue:
GDI+ is a very commonly used Windows component, and a vulnerability like this can affect billions of systems across the globe. We recommend our users to apply proper updates and keep their Windows deployment current.
We at McAfee are continuously fuzzing various open source and closed source library and work with vendors to fix such issues by responsibly disclosing such issues to them giving them proper time to fix the issue and release updates as needed.
We are thankful to Microsoft for working with us on fixing this issue and releasing an update.
The post Analyzing CVE-2021-1665 – Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Windows GDI+ appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
If you have a tween or teen, you’ve likely heard a lot of excited chatter about Roblox. With a reported 150 million users, there’s a good chance your child has the Roblox site on their phone, tablet, PC, or Xbox. In fact, in 2020, Roblox estimated that over half of kids in the U.S. under 16 had used the forum. However, as with all digital destinations, the fun of Roblox is not without some safety concerns.
Roblox is an online gaming forum (not an app or game as one might assume) where users can create and share games or just play games. Kids can play Roblox games with friends they know or join games with unknown players. Roblox hosts an infinite number of games (about 20 million), which makes it a fun place to build and share creations, chat, and make friends. Game creators can also make significant money if their games take off.
A huge component of Roblox is its social network element that allows users to chat and have meetups. During quarantine, Roblox added its own private space for users to host virtual private birthday parties and social gatherings.
Like any site or app, Roblox is safe if you take the time to optimize parental controls (both in-forum and personal software), monitor your child’s use, and taking basic precautions you’re your child starts using the forum. Especially with kids drawn to gaming communities, it’s important to monitor conversations they can be having with anyone, anywhere.
Roblox security tip: Adjust settings to prohibit strangers’ from friending an account. Consider watching your child play a few games and how he or she interacts or wanders through the app. Pay close attention to the chat feature. Keep the conversation open, so your child feels comfortable sharing online concerns with you.
If you have your child’s login information, you can easily view their activity history in a few vulnerable areas including private and group chats, friends list, games played, games created, and items purchased. It’s also a good idea to make sure their birthdate is correct since Roblox automatically filters chats and game content for users under 13. Roblox has a separate login for parents of younger kids that allows you to go in and view all activities.
As always, the best way to keep your child safe on Roblox or any other site or app is to take every opportunity for open, honest conversation about personal choices and potential risks online. Oh, and sitting down to play their favorite games with them — is always the best seat in the house.
The post What is Roblox and is It Safe for Kids? appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Over the last year, our relationship with digital technology has changed completely, and probably irrevocably. The pandemic has been bruising in many different ways, but it has been clear from the very start how important the internet has been as a tool to help us through it. Even just a few years ago, the behavioural shifts it enabled would not have been possible. From offices running on videoconferencing, to essential retail moving online, to digitally-delivered healthcare, many online tools that were once seen as promising growth areas or quality-of-life improving luxuries have come into their own as vital parts of everyday life.
Every big change in how we use technology, however, is followed sooner or later by a development in how we approach security and safety. This was true when the emergence of personal computers and ATMs led to education campaigns around the importance of PIN and password vigilance. It was true when the commoditisation of internet access created the need for consumer antivirus protection. It was even true when the automobile was first introduced, with cities rushing to introduce traffic signaling to manage that new high-speed flow.
Soon, then, we should expect to see another step in our collective attitude to security and privacy. What will that look like? For me, it should rest on a new sense of what is being protected, and new expectations about how that protection happens.
To explain why, it’s worth understanding what the process of finding and fixing cybersecurity issues looks like. The first line of defence against attacks always happens during product development, when coders and engineers try to ensure that what they are creating is not vulnerable. The nature of cybersecurity, however, is that some problems will inevitably occur in finished products. That’s why there are also teams of people who analyse these products, independently testing whether they are truly safe.
At McAfee, our enterprise Advanced Threat Research (ATR) team has a long history and a strong track record of doing this testing. Often, the ATR team’s work is very similar to what people might imagine when they think of a ‘cybersecurity researcher’: it’s unpicking highly complex systems and tracing international criminal organisations responsible for attacks.
A lot of this work is much closer to home, though, and increasingly it deals with finding vulnerabilities not just in apps and computers, but in devices that few would think of as being a potential risk. The rise of the smart home means that many household items, from luxuries like exercise machines to basics like wall clocks, can also be internet-connected computers, tapping into the network to make life easier and better in a myriad of ways.
The ‘internet of things’, or IoT, has been a tech catchphrase for a long time, but it’s now a daily consumer reality too, with thermostats and air conditioners, security cameras and door locks, fridges and coffee machines all offering enhanced experiences through online connectivity. The security challenge lies in the fact that most people would view items like these just as a thermostat or as a door lock – not as a computer which requires protection. How, after all, do you install an antivirus service on a fridge?
Combined with the increase of online activity we’ve all experienced over the last year, this requires more than widening consumers’ current thinking about security to include more devices. It requires a whole new approach. When the average household had one or two computers, it made sense to think of cybersecurity in terms of protecting the device. When any item in a home could also be an internet access point, we need to start thinking instead in terms of protecting people and families.
A big part of that will be expecting more of the companies who design and supply these devices. When the ATR team – or another threat research team – finds a flaw in a consumer device, step one is always to contact the manufacturer and work with them to fix it before malicious actors spot the opportunity. Many businesses behave responsibly, responding openly and collaboratively, developing a solution, and rolling it out as quickly as possible. Not all businesses are so conscientious. How businesses react to security problems should be a much bigger part of how we choose what to purchase.
Going back to the car, the traffic light was not the final safety innovation we saw. Over the last century, growing regulations and awareness led to a situation where, today, purchasers are likely to inspect a vehicle’s safety ratings before handing over their cash. In just the same way, attitudes to cybersecurity need to keep evolving – and soon, we may even be asking car manufacturers about how they respond to vulnerability disclosures.
The pandemic was a leap forward in how far digitalised our lives have become. Companies and customers alike now need to think carefully about what we need to talk about when we talk about making our online lives safe, secure, and private.
The post Homes, Not Just Devices: The New Consumer Cybersecurity appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team today published the McAfee Labs Threats Report: June 2021.
In this edition we introduce additional context into the biggest stories dominating the year thus far including recent ransomware attacks. While the topic itself is not new, there is no question that the threat is now truly mainstream.
This Threats Report provides a deep dive into ransomware, in particular DarkSide, which resulted in an agenda item in talks between U.S. President Biden and Russian President Putin. While we have no intention of detailing the political landscape, we certainly do have to acknowledge that this is a threat disrupting our critical services. Furthermore, adversaries are supported within an environment that make digital investigations challenging with legal barriers that make the gathering of digital evidence almost impossible from certain geographies.
That being said, we can assure the reader that all of the recent campaigns are incorporated into our products, and of course can be tracked within our MVISION Insights preview dashboard.
This dashboard shows that – beyond the headlines – many more countries have experienced such attacks. What it will not show is that victims are paying the ransoms, and criminals are introducing more Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) schemes as a result. With the five-year anniversary of the launch of the No More Ransom initiative now upon us it’s fair to say that we need more global initiatives to help combat this threat.
McAfee Labs threat research during the first quarter of 2021 include:
Additional Q1 2021 content includes:
We hope you enjoy this Threats Report. Don’t forget to keep track of the latest campaigns and continuing threat coverage by visiting our McAfee Threat Center. Please stay safe.
The post McAfee Labs Report Highlights Ransomware Threats appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
If you recently found yourself looking for a new job, you are far from alone. According to the Institute of Labor Economics, more Canadians were seeking new employment opportunities at the height of the pandemic than during the previous three recessions combined. Job hunters only used to have to worry about the clarity of their cover letters and impressing interviewers. Now, however, a new hurdle is in the mix in the race for a new job: online job scams.
Here are three online job scams that you may encounter, plus a few tips on how to avoid and report them.
Fake job ads trick employment seekers into giving up their financial information. Fake job ads are more likely to appear on free sites, such as Craigslist, but they could be listed anywhere. So, no matter where you are searching, be wary that not everyone is looking for a talented individual such as yourself. They are on the hunt for sensitive personal details.
When you are interviewing for jobs, legitimate employers are careful and intentioned about evaluating your fit for the job. For this reason, employers want to make sure they are not interviewing fake candidates, so they are likely going to want to meet you face-to-face or through a video chat. If an employer extends a job offer after a few email exchanges or an instant messenger job interview, request a more formal meeting. If they say that they would like to move fast and hire quickly, be concerned as no real employer would act that quickly.
Guard your personal and financial information until you are 100% sure of the legitimacy of a job offer. Be on high alert if the “human resources representative” asks for your credit card or banking information to pay for training. Fake employers may also ask for your Social Insurance Number before extending a job offer letter. A great rule of thumb is to never share your SIN with anyone over the phone or over email.
Between March and September 2020, 34% of Canadian respondents reported receiving a phishing message, according to a survey by Statistics Canada. Phishing emails often include malicious links that, when clicked, download malware to your device. Online job scams may not only attempt to steal your sensitive information, but they may also be phishing attempts to take over your personal devices.
Some scammers using job offers as a guise might email people who never applied for a new opportunity. Be careful around these types of messages, urges the University of Calgary. Recruiters will most likely reach out and offer unsolicited interviews through social networking channels rather than email. Also, when you receive emails from people looking to hire you, take note of their email domain name. Is the email domain customized to the company’s name or is it a generic @gmail or @yahoo? Check the spelling of the email domain carefully too. Phishers are notoriously bad spellers and sometimes they use incorrect spelling of domain names to trick people into thinking they are the real company.
Immigrating anywhere is a massive and stressful undertaking. Cybercriminals prey upon this stressful, major life event and target immigrants with enticing, but fake, job offers. The Government of Canada advises to never trust someone who says they can guarantee you a job in Canada. Also, keep an eye on the salary. Is it very high? Do your skills not completely align with the job description? Does the job seem very easy? Unfortunately, that may mean that the offer is too good to be true.
The best way to avoid falling for job scams is to know what you are looking for and to take your time when considering a new job. Check out these tips to outsmart scammers and keep your personal information and devices safe.
Most job applications are submitted online, but if an employer is impressed by your resume, they will likely offer a screening call. When a human resources representative calls, make sure to note their name and ask for the website address of the company. Afterwards, search for the company online and the human resources representative who called you. They should show up together on a professional-looking website or a professional networking site.
Inspect all correspondences you get from potential employers. Phishers often use language that inspires strong emotions and urges a speedy response. Strong emotions could include excitement or fear. If the email says you only have a few hours to respond or else the job will go to someone else, be skeptical. Accepting a job is a huge decision that you should be able to take at least a few days to think about. Read carefully, always hover over links to see where they redirect, and keep a level head when making decisions about your next career move.
When you come across fraudulent activity, it is important that you report it to the correct authorities to stop it from happening to someone else. For immigration and online job scams, contact the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
Phishers and job scammers may have gotten in contact with you with the aim of downloading malicious software on your computer. A comprehensive suite of security tools will protect you from viruses and malware that may have slipped past your eagle eye. McAfee Total Protection offers premium antivirus software, safe web browsing, and PC optimization.
The post Watch Out for These 3 Online Job Scams appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy are phrases that are used almost daily in EU policy circles, loosely framed around the EU’s ability to carve out its own future in the digital sphere, rather than having its terms dictated from abroad. To achieve digital sovereignty in practice, having access to as broad a range of suppliers is key, not unnecessarily restricting the market.
Our ability to self-determine Europe’s digital future is at risk when we become reliant on one source, that much is clear, and has been demonstrated recently in the global supply shortage of microchips. All measures that reduce this dependency will benefit digital sovereignty, which in practice means expanding competition in the market to as many players as possible.
The means to get there are varied, and Europe is rightly seeking to build infrastructure, expand the pool of skilled experts and facilitate market entry. The EU and member states are also putting in place measures to eliminate obvious security risks in supply chains that demand an extra layer of vigilance, such as critical infrastructure, which is in the interest of national security.
But the notion that homegrown European solutions are automatically better than non-European ones – sometimes backed by measures that give European vendors and suppliers undue advantage, or which place additional hurdles for companies that handle customer data outside the EU – is misguided.
In the cybersecurity domain, in particular, limiting interoperability and vendor choice will only reduce Europe’s resilience against cyberattacks, which is a crucial element to ensuring Europe’s digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy. This is as true now as it always has been, in a sector innovating at break neck speed to meet the challenges set by our adversaries.
In this competitive market, best-in-class providers at the cutting edge of security are the ones that will make Europe more cyber-secure, irrespective of where they happen to have their headquarters or data centers. Irrational decisions guided by protectionism should have no place in this debate. Indeed policies or practices requiring forced data localisation can often limit the benefits generated by scale and global reach, and negatively impact cyber security’s operational effectiveness.
A recent seminar organised by ECIS, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, set out some clear principles that should guide Europe’s quest for digital sovereignty. Ensuring that the market operates as effectively as possible, supplier choice is as broad as possible, and interoperability and ability to switch suppliers is safeguarded, on the basis of clear standards, will be paramount.
That is not to say that all measures being considered are misguided. An industrial policy that improves Europe’s digital infrastructures will boost Europe’s supply of home-grown digital services and products. Countries also have legitimate reasons to safeguard their national security and are well within their rights to set criteria to this end. The real danger lies in confusing protectionism with digital sovereignty.
The post Restricting Supplier Choice Isn’t an Option to Enhance Digital Sovereignty appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
What do Burger King and the popular “Doge” meme have in common? They both have cryptocurrencies named after their likeliness. WhopperCoin and Dogecoin are just two examples of the thousands of types of cryptocurrencies that have caught users’ attention over the past few years. Cryptocurrencies are digital tokens generated by a computer after solving complex mathematical functions. These functions are used to verify the authenticity of a ledger, or blockchain.
Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency today, increasing its value by almost 300% in 2020. Today, almost 46 million Americans own at least one share of Bitcoin, illustrating how these cryptocurrencies are the future of tomorrow’s digital payment system — or are they? The same benefits that make them a popular choice with online users have also made them popular amongst online thieves, sparking a wave of ransomware attacks and other cyberattacks more recently. This begs the question: do the benefits of Bitcoin outweigh the risks?
Every rose has its thorn, and several Bitcoin benefits seem to be hitched to online security risks. Here are some cryptocurrency characteristics that may seem appealing to users, but also provide cybercriminals with an opportunity to exploit:
As previously mentioned, cryptocurrency exchanges take place on an online public ledger, or blockchain, to secure online transactions. This means that anybody can observe the exchange online. However, the parties making the transactions are anonymous, disguised with a random number. Bitcoin users can make purchases that are never associated with their identity, similar to a cash transaction.
While the purchase discretion provided by Bitcoin may be appealing to users who want to remain private, this characteristic could also aid cybercriminals in malicious activity. Due to the anonymity of Bitcoin transactions, there is no way for someone to associate a person with a certain cryptocurrency wallet. Furthermore, a user could have multiple wallets, allowing them to spread their currency from one address to another.
For a cybercriminal looking to target an individual with ransomware, the purchase discretion and anonymity of Bitcoin provide a favorable solution. In fact, Bitcoin accounts for approximately 98% of ransomware payments today. Say a hacker carries out a ransomware attack and demands that the user pay a large sum in Bitcoin. If the user completes the payment, the hacker can keep moving the currency from one anonymous account to another. That makes it very difficult — though not impossible — to trace if the individual decides to investigate the case and tries to get their money back.
Another characteristic that Bitcoin users find appealing is the autonomy offered by digital currencies. In theory, they allow users more autonomy over their own money than government-regulated currencies do. With Bitcoin, users can control how they spend their money without dealing with an intermediary authority like a bank or government.
This lack of intermediary authority also opens a door for hackers to exploit. Say a user decides that they want to manage their finances using Bitcoin to bypass banking fees and send money to friends and family in different parts of the world. As previously mentioned, a Bitcoin user is assigned an anonymous private key that acts as their security credential. This key is generated and maintained by the user instead of a third-party agency. But what happens if the key isn’t random enough? An attacker could steal the user’s private key, and they will not be able to recover it since the Bitcoin blockchain is not dependent on any centralized third-party institutions. Therefore, it will be very difficult to track the attacker’s behaviors and recover lost funds.
It is safe to say that Bitcoin has caused a lot of buzz. But do the benefits outweigh the risks? Due to the nature of Bitcoin and most other public blockchains, anyone in the world can perform transactions or cryptographic computations — including cybercriminals. That’s why it is crucial for current cryptocurrency users and those considering cryptocurrency investment to do their research and know what vulnerabilities lie within the world of Bitcoin.
Follow these tips to help protect yourself from common threats that leverage cryptocurrency:
With blockchain, cryptocurrency, and any new and emerging technology, make sure you always remain a bit skeptical. Do your homework before you embrace the technology — research your options and make note of any known security issues and what you can do to mitigate known risks.
If a hacker does target you with ransomware demanding Bitcoin payment, it’s best not to pay the ransom. Although you may feel in the moment that this is the only way to get your encrypted files back, there is no guarantee that the ransomware developers will send a decryption tool once they receive the payment. Paying the ransom also contributes to the development of more ransomware families, so it is best to hold off on making any payments. Furthermore, a recent study found that 80% of businesses that choose to pay a ransom experience a subsequent ransomware attack. While it may feel like your only option in the moment, paying a ransom could show attackers that you’re willing to make the payment, therefore positioning you as an ideal target for yet another attack.
If you are targeted with ransomware, it’s crucial that you always have backup copies of your files, preferably in the cloud and on an external hard drive. This way, if you do get a ransomware infection, you can wipe your computer or device and reinstall your files from the backup. Backups protect your data, and you won’t be tempted to reward the hackers by paying a ransom. Backups won’t prevent ransomware, but they can mitigate the risks.
Large organizations often fall prey to ransomware attacks, so take necessary precautions if a company you’ve interacted with becomes compromised from a data leak or a ransomware attack. Immediately change your passwords for all your accounts, ensuring they are strong and unique. You can also employ a password manager to keep track of your credentials and generate secure login keys.
Add an extra layer of security with a solution such as McAfee® Total Protection, which includes Ransom Guard, to help protect your devices from these cyberthreats and ensure your digital wellness online.
The emergence of Bitcoin has indeed facilitated a wave of cybercrime that was previously difficult to perceive. In this new age of digital payments, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies, make sure that you do your research and stay vigilant when it comes to protecting your online safety. Remember: Bitcoin worth will continue to fluctuate, but your personal security will always remain invaluable.
To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, subscribe to our newsletter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.
The post Do the Benefits of Bitcoin Outweigh the Risks? appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
There’s little rest for your hard-working smartphone. If you’re like many professionals today, you use it for work, play, and a mix of personal business in between. Now, what if something went wrong with that phone, like loss or theft? Worse yet, what if your smartphone got hacked? Let’s try and keep that from happening to you.
Globally, plenty of people pull double duty with their smartphones. In Spain, one survey found that 55% of people use the same phone for a mix of personal and and work activity. The same survey showed that up to half of people interviewed in Japan, Australia, and the U.S. do so as well, while nations like the UK and Germany trailed at 31% and 23% respectively.
Whether these figures trend on the low or high end, the security implications remain constant. A smartphone loaded with business and personal data makes for a desirable target. Hackers target smartphones because they’re often unprotected, which gives hackers an easy “in” to your personal information and to any corporate networks you may use. It’s like two hacks with one stone.
Put simply, as a working professional with a smartphone, you’re a high-value target.
As both a parent and a professional, I put together a few things you can do to protect your smartphone from hacks so that you can keep your personal and work life safe:
First up, the basics. Locking your phone with facial ID, a fingerprint, pattern or a pin is your most basic form of protection, particularly in the event of loss or theft. (Your options will vary depending on the device, operating system, and manufacturer.) Take it a step further for even more protection. Secure the accounts on your phone with strong passwords and use two-factor authentication on the apps that offer it, which doubles your line of defense.
Or, put another way, don’t hop onto public Wi-Fi networks without protection. A VPN masks your connection from hackers allowing you to connect privately when you are on unsecure public networks at airports, cafes, hotels, and the like. With a VPN connection, you’ll know that your sensitive data, documents, and activities you do are protected from snooping, which is definitely a great feeling given the amount of personal and professional business we manage with our smartphones.
Both Google Play and Apple’s App Store have measures in place to help prevent potentially dangerous apps from making it into their stores. Malicious apps are often found outside of the app stores, which can run in the background and compromise your personal data like passwords, credit card numbers, and more—practically everything that you keep on your phone. Further, when you are in the app stores, look closely at the descriptions and reviews for apps before you download them. Malicious apps and counterfeits can still find their way into stores, and here are a few ways you can keep those bad apps from getting onto your phone.
Backing up your phone is always a good idea for two reasons:
Both iPhones and Android phones have straightforward ways of backing up your phone regularly.
Worst case scenario—your phone is gone. Really gone. Either it’s hopelessly lost or got stolen. What now? Lock it remotely or even wipe its data entirely. While that last bit about wiping the phone seems like a drastic move, if you maintain regular backups as mentioned above, your data is secure in the cloud—ready for you to restore. In all, this means that hackers won’t be able to access you, or your company’s, sensitive information—which can keep you out of trouble and your professional business safe. Apple provides iOS users with a step-by-step guide for remotely wiping devices, and Google offers up a guide for Android users as well.
We all download apps, use them once, and then forget they are on our phone. Take a few moments to swipe through your screen and see which ones you’re truly done with and delete them along with their data. Some apps have an account associated with them that may store data off your phone as well. Take the extra step and delete those accounts so any off-phone data is deleted.
The reason for this is that every extra app is another app that needs updating or that may have a security issue associated with it. In a time of data breaches and vulnerabilities, deleting old apps is a smart move. As for the ones you keep, update them regularly and turn on auto-updates if that’s an option. Updates not only introduce new features to apps, but they also often address security issues too.
With so much of your life on your phone, getting security software installed on it can protect you and the things you keep on your phone. Whether you’re an Android owner or iOS owner, mobile security software can keep your data, your shopping, and payments secure.
The post 7 Tips to Protect Your Smartphone from Getting Hacked appeared first on McAfee Blog.
How much of the global economy is managed from a home network these days? Or, more importantly, what percentage of your company’s most sensitive data passes through employee home networks right now?
If you’re like me, working from a home office, you can’t help but think about all of the cybersecurity tradeoffs that accompanied the widespread shift from on-premises to cloud-delivered services. Better productivity in exchange for deeper vulnerabilities—like man-in-the-middle attacks—wasn’t a choice many cybersecurity pros would make under normal circumstances.
Yet, for better—and worse—there’s no going back to how things were. When Gartner revealed its annual list of top cybersecurity trends last month, we learned that while 64% of employees now work from home, at least 30-40% will continue to do so once the pandemic is over.1 In the foreseeable future, the Wi-Fi streaming your kids’ favorite shows will transport an untold amount of business data, too. All of which must be protected from device to cloud.
In the same report, Gartner said that with so many employees continuing to work from home, “endpoint protection services will need to move to cloud-delivered services.” While the vast majority of our customers made the overnight switch—many still need to adopt a cloud-native architecture.
No doubt the best transformations are the ones you plan for and manage from end-to-end. But the cloud transformation that many didn’t plan for—and most cybersecurity defenses couldn’t handle—turned out to pack the biggest punch. Here are three ways to better prepare for what comes next.
Stopping unauthorized access to corporate assets—and protecting them—is, on the face of it, a never-ending battle. You can’t build a moat, a wall, or a bubble and say, hey, my work here is done. We’ve found our customers need to solve two primary issues:
So, we created the MVISION Device-to-Cloud Suites to protect all of this data coursing through home networks. Among the many types of threats we’ve tracked, one of the biggest threats is viruses infecting browsers and capturing keystrokes to steal sensitive information. We solve this by isolating a browser so that no one can see what information has been entered.
While paradigms may shift, going forward we believe it’s predictive defenses that will enable faster, smarter and more effective data loss prevention. We get there by enabling optimized endpoint threat protection, Extended Detection and Response (EDRs) that improve mean time to detect and respond to threats, and useful analytics that not only empower your SOC but also help inform and engage executives.
Gaining executive and board-level buy-in has long been a topic of concern in the cybersecurity field. Thanks in part to the harsh publicity and severe damage caused by state-sponsored hacks that day is finally in sight. In a recent blog, McAfee’s Steve Grobman indicated SolarWinds is the first major supply chain attack which represents a shift in tactics where a nation state has employed a new weapon for cyber-espionage.”2
Cybersecurity is perceived as the second highest source of risk for enterprises, losing out to regulatory concerns, notes Gartner.3 While today only one in 10 board of directors have a dedicated cybersecurity committee, Gartner projects that percentage will rise to 40% in four years.
One reason why cybersecurity hasn’t been elevated to an ongoing board concern previously is that many executives lack a window into the cybersecurity in their midst. And lacking a window, they have no keen understanding of their organization’s vulnerabilities. Which also makes it difficult to assess the operational value of various cybersecurity investments.
The ability to gain visual insights and predictive assessments of your security posture against dangerous threats is what generates actionable intelligence. A CISO or CSO should be able to look at a single screen and understand in minutes how well protected they are against potential threats. They also need a team that’s ready to take action on these insights and enact appropriate countermeasures to protect corporate assets from imminent attack.
You want to protect your palace from thieves, but when do you finally have too many latches, locks, and bars on your doors? At some point, less is more, particularly if you can’t remember where you put your keys. Consolidation is one of Gartner top five trends this year. Four out of five companies plan to trim their list of cybersecurity vendors in the next three years.4
In fact, Gartner’s 2020 CISO Effectiveness Survey found that 78% of CISOs have 16 or more tools in their cybersecurity vendor portfolio, while 12% have a whopping 46 or more.5 Mind you, we know there is no end-all, be-all Security vendor who does everything. But with our Device-to-Cloud Suites, your security technology resides in one umbrella platform. Without McAfee, you’d need one vendor on the desktop, another in the cloud, and one more on the web gateway.
Consolidation is intended to remove headaches rather than create them. With one SaaS-based suite that addresses your core security issues, you have lower maintenance, plus the ability to visualize where you’re vulnerable and learn what you need to do to protect it.
McAfee is here to help organizations manage the transformation to a predictive cybersecurity defense and we provide the footprint to secure the data, endpoints, web, and cloud. From my vantage point, securing distributed digital assets demands effective security controls from device to cloud.
MVISION Device-to-Cloud Suites provide a simplified way to help accelerate your cloud transformation and adoption, better defend against attacks, and lower your total cost of operations. The suites scale with your security needs to deliver a unified endpoint, web, and cloud solution.
Learn More About McAfee Device-to-Cloud Suites:
Source:
1. Gartner Identifies Top Security and Risk Management Trends for 2021 (Gartner)
2. Why SolarWinds-SUNBURST is a Wakeup Call (McAfee)
3. Gartner Identifies Top Security and Risk Management Trends for 2021 (Gartner)
4. Ibid.
5. Gartner Survey Reveals Only 12% of CISOs Are Considered “Highly Effective” (Gartner)
The post Transforming to a Predictive Cyber Defense appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
How well can you predict, prevent and respond to ever-changing cyberthreats? How do you know that your security efforts measure up? The stakes are high if this is difficult to answer and track. Imagine if you had one place where you found a comprehensive real time security posture that tells you exactly where the looming current cyber risks are and the impact? Let’s consider a recent and relevant cyber threat.
Take, for example, the May 7th DarkSide ransomware attack that shut down Colonial Pipeline’s distribution network. That well-publicized attack spurred considerable interest in cybersecurity assessments. Ransomware doesn’t just cost money—or embarrassment—it can derail careers. As news spread, we fielded numerous calls from executives wondering: Are my systems protected against DarkSide?
Until recently, discovering the answer to such questions has required exercises such as white hat penetration testing or the completion of lengthy or sometimes generic security posture questionnaires. And we know how that goes — your results may vary from the “norm,” sometimes quite a bit.
To empower you to ask and confidently answer the “am I protected” questions, we developed MVISION Insights Unified Posture Scoring to provide real-time assessments of your environment from device to cloud and threat campaigns targeting your industry.
With the score, you’ll know at a glance: Have you done enough to stave off the most likely risks? In general, the better controls you set for your endpoints, networks and clouds, the lower your risk of breaches and data loss—and the better your security posture score. A CISO from a large enterprise recently stated that the “most significant thing for a CISO to solve is to become confident in the security score.”
Assessing risk is about determining the likelihood of an event. A risk score considers where you’re vulnerable and based on those weaknesses how likely is it that a bad actor will exploit it? That scoring approach helps security teams determine whether to apply a specific tool or countermeasures.
However, a posture score goes a step further when it considers your current environment’s risk but also whether you’ve been able to withstand attacks. Where have you applied protections to suppress an attack? It enables you to ask: what’s the state of your defensive posture?
Security posture scoring may answer other critical questions such as:
Knowing these answers also makes security posture scoring useful for compliance risk assessment, producing a benchmark that enables your organization to compare its industry performance and also choose which concerns to prioritize. The score can also serve as an indicator of whether your organization would be approved for cyber insurance or even how much it may have to pay.
Some organizations use security posture scoring to help prepare for security audits. But it can also be used in lieu of third-party assessments—applying recommended assessments instead of expensive penetration testing.
No doubt, the pandemic and working from home have exacerbated security posture challenges. According to Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a “growing attack surface” from cloud computing and new digital devices are complicating security posture management. So is managing “inexperienced remote workers,” who may be preyed upon by various forms of malware. This can lead not only to management headaches, says ESG, but also to “vulnerabilities and potential system compromises.”
About one year ago we released the initial version of MVISION Insights posture scoring —focused on endpoint assessments. A security score was assigned based on your preparedness to thwart looming threats and the configuration of your McAfee endpoint security products. It enabled predictive assessments based on security posture aligned to campaign-specific threat intelligence.
Customers are tired of piecing together siloed security and demand a unified security approach reflected in our MVISION XDR powered by MVISION Insights. We expanded the scoring capability to also assess cloud defenses, including your countermeasures and controls. Derived from MVISION Cloud Security Advisor, the cloud security posture is weighted average of visibility and control for IaaS, SaaS,and shadow IT. There is an option to easily pivot to MVISION Cloud Security Advisor. The Unified Security posture score is weighted average of the endpoint and cloud security posture score delivering a more robust and comprehensive assessment with the ability to drill down on specifics to enhance your security from device to cloud. Many endpoint wanna-be XDR vendors cannot provide this critical aggregated security assessment across vectors.
Becoming more robust is what all of us must do. When organizations face the jeopardy of “Ransomware-as-a-Service” payments that may scale up to $2 million, understanding how best to manage your security posture is no longer simply a nice to have, it’s become an operational imperative.
Click here to learn more about Security Posture Scoring from a few practitioners in our LinkedIn Live session.
The post Testing to Ensure Your Security Posture Never Slouches appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
A new piece of tech often tops the list of Father’s Day gifts. And while things such as wearable fitness devices, smart speakers, smart outlets, or any number of other connected gadgets and do-dads are popular picks, one thing often gets overlooked—protecting those devices from hacks and attacks.
We live in a day and age when even connected lightbulbs can be hacked. The reality is that gift-worthy tech like home cameras, speakers, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices can fall prey to bad actors. The reason why is relatively straightforward. Each connected thing on your home network presents a possible entry point for an attacker.
By compromising even the most innocuous of devices, like the humble lightbulb, an attacker can inject malware into your network that can then compromise high-value items like your phones and computers—along with the data on them. So, if you’re wondering why on Earth anyone would want to hack a lightbulb, that’s one reason why.
Your network is only as safe as the least secure device that’s on it. And the sad fact is that many consumer IoT devices simply aren’t that secure. Their hardware can be limited, leaving little room for security measures onboard, and they can use transmission protocols that are less than robust. Further, they can use default usernames and passwords that people neglect to update, making them easy to access as doing a search online for those credentials. Secure data storage can be an issue as well, whether that’s a video from a security camera or health data from a fitness device that’s stored in the cloud.
The list of possible IoT device vulnerabilities goes on. Certainly, some manufacturers are more stringent about security than others. However, adding any IoT device to your network also adds risk. And with more and more of these devices entering our homes, dedicated hackers have more targets available to them than ever before.
In all, estimates project that the world will have nearly 40 billion IoT devices in the next four years across homes and businesses alike. And like our computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets, all of them will need protection. Including the connected devices that you give dad.
As you’re shopping for the best tech gift for dad, making sure his IoT devices are secure as possible may be the best gift of all. Right off the bat, the challenge with our IoT devices is that you don’t protect them the same way you can protect our computers, phones, and tablets, Namely, there isn’t always a way to install security software on them. What to do? In fact, we can show you several ways to tighten up the security of your new and existing IoT devices. What’s more, following these steps can also improve the overall security of your network too.
Just because that new smart device that you want to give to dad can connect to the internet doesn’t mean that it’s secure. Before you purchase, read up on reviews and comments from other customers. Look for news articles about the device manufacturer too. The fact of the matter is that some IoT device manufacturers are much better at baking security protocols into their devices than others, so check out their track record to see if you can uncover any issues with their products or security practices. Information such as this can help you make an even more informed choice.
As mentioned above, one issue with many IoT devices is that they often come with a default username and password. This could mean that your device, and thousands of others just like it, all share the same credentials, which makes it painfully easy for a hacker to gain access to them as those default usernames and passwords are often published online.
When you purchase an IoT device, set a fresh password using a strong method of password creation. And keep those passwords safe. Instead of keeping them on a notebook or on sticky notes, consider using a password manager. It acts as a database for all your passwords and stores new codes as you create them. As always, don’t store them in an unprotected file on your computer, which can be subject to a hack or data loss.
Our banks, and even some of the online gaming platforms we use, use two-factor authentication to make sure that we’re logging in we really are who we say we are. The two factors break down like this:
Thus, when you log in with your username and password and then get a prompt to enter a security code that was sent to your mobile phone, that’s two-factor authentication at work. If your IoT device supports two-factor authentication, put it to use and get that extra layer of security.
Your router acts as the internet’s gateway into your home. From there, it works as a hub that connects all your devices—computers, tablets, and phones, along with your IoT devices as well. With all that data and information flowing through it, it’s vital to keep your router secure.
As we mentioned above, the first thing to do is change the default password and name of your router if you haven’t done so already. Again, use a strong method of password creation. Also, change the name of your router. When you choose a new one, go with name that doesn’t give away your address or identity. Something unique and even fun like “Pizza Lovers” or “The Internet Warehouse” are options that mask your identity and are memorable for you too.
While you’re at it, make sure that your router’s network security is set to WPA2-PSK [AES]. As of today, that’s the strongest level of protection available for home wireless networks. If your router doesn’t offer it, you may want to consider purchasing or renting one from your provider that does.
Just as you can offer your guests secure access that’s separate from your own devices, creating an additional network on your router allows you to keep your computers and smartphones separate from IoT devices. This way, if an IoT device is compromised, a hacker will still face the task of accessing your primary network to get at your computers and smartphones, along with the data and info that you have stored on them. You may also want to consider investing in an advanced internet router that has built-in protection and can secure and monitor any device that connects to your network.
As with our computers, laptops, phones, tablets, and apps, make sure you have the latest software updates for your IoT devices. The reasons here are the same: one, they’ll make sure you’re getting the latest functionality from your device; and two, updates often contain security upgrades. If there’s a setting that lets you receive automatic updates, enable it so that you always have the latest.
You’ve probably seen that you can control a lot of your connected things with your smartphone. We’re using them to set the temperature, turn our lights on and off, and even see who’s at the front door. With that, it seems like we can add the label “universal remote control” our smartphones—so protecting our phones has become yet more important. Whether you’re an Android owner or iOS owner, get security software installed on your phone so you can protect all the things it accesses and controls—in addition to you and the phone as well.
And of course, let’s not forget our computers and laptops. While we’ve been primarily talking about IoT devices here, it’s a good reminder that computers and laptops need protection too. Using a strong suite of security software like McAfee® Total Protection, can help defend your entire family from the latest threats and malware, make it safer to browse, and look out for your privacy too.
The post Father’s Day Gift Ideas: Protecting the Tech You Give to Dad appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The gig economy has become more prevalent in today’s world with the appeal and necessity of flexible work opportunities. Many take advantage of short-term contracts, side jobs, and freelance work to retain more control over how they spend their day and earn their income. However, the proliferation of these flexible work opportunities has transcended into the dark web, allowing individuals to conduct nefarious activities. Rather than contracting handyman or moving services on the dark web, you can find hackers contracting their website hacking services or buyers placing ads looking for a hacker to hire. These acts pose significant risks to online users, given the amount of stolen personal information on dark websites. Take a look at the activities you can expect to find on the dark web and the steps you can take to safeguard your online privacy.
The dark web is part of the public internet that search engines do not index. In other words, what happens on the dark web, stays on the dark web with no traceable records. Most people don’t realize that the dark web is not illegal despite its association with criminal activities. However, the dark web has retained a criminal reputation since it is challenging to track what goes on. As a result, criminals will often frequent the dark web to conduct a variety of illegal transactions, including hacking services.
Researchers are discovering an uptick in activity on dark web forums that includes buying and selling black hat hacking services. 90% of the activity on these forums is from people looking to hire hackers to infiltrate websites and steal databases. Additionally, 4% of the people frequenting dark web forums requested hacking services related to website hacking and malicious code injection.
Another 7% of people on the dark web are hackers contracting out their services and tools. These services and tools include web shells, a file uploaded to a server that an attacker can use to execute operating system commands, as well as access to administrative website interfaces and ready-made exploits. Many of the services offered on these forums range in specialties such as site infiltration to data extraction. As a result, they often attract a variety of customers with numerous requests.
Further, many of the ads seeking hacking services are aimed at database hacking. Those targeting databases are often financially incentivized hackers and companies out to steal their competitor’s information. Databases remain a popular target for hackers since they contain a significant amount of personal information ranging from first and last names to credit card numbers. Cybercriminals can then use this information to commit numerous crimes such as monetary theft, unemployment and tax relief fraud, and identity theft.
For example, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) had to suspend approximately 800,000 accounts after discovering matching credentials for sale on the dark web. In a previous data breach, hackers used login credentials to access taxpayer accounts, apply for COVID-19 relief funds, and reroute the funds into their bank accounts. Taxpayers could not log in to their accounts without first taking the necessary steps to regain safe access.
Users must protect their online presence and information as these criminal activities continue to escalate in demand. Here are the five must-dos after discovering a data breach to retain your online security.
Be one of the first to know about a data breach by leveraging security software such as McAfee Total Protection. A comprehensive security solution that includes dark web monitoring actively monitors the dark web for data breaches and exposed information. This information includes but is not limited to your date of birth, email addresses, credit card numbers, and personal identification numbers. Robust security software also provides steps for remediation after a data breach to guide the user to regain control and integrity of their data and privacy.
Companies are required to notify their customers of a data breach under the PIPEDA legislature. Be on the lookout for breach notices from relevant companies since they are often the first to know about a data breach impacting their online customers.
Create news alerts for companies that have access to your information to stay notified of the latest events. Additionally, create notifications for your bank and other financial accounts to monitor for suspicious activity such as unauthorized transactions or a drop in credit score. You will be better prepared to mitigate any cybersecurity threats with the right security software and knowledge of the latest risks.
Looking back to the 800,00 taxpayers whose accounts were suspended, they could not regain access without first changing their login credentials. Changing your login credentials such as your usernames, passwords, and security questions is a critical first step to take after any data breach.
Changing your credentials prevents hackers from accessing your personal information and ensures that you regain control over your account security. The chances of a hacker accessing your data are exceptionally high if you use the same credentials across different accounts. Thus, it’s essential to change your usernames and passwords regularly to ensure your information remains secure.
Just as important as changing your password regularly is changing your password following best practices. Create stronger passwords by using a combination of the following:
Long passwords with a minimum of 12 characters are also more effective than shorter passwords since it makes it more difficult for a hacker to guess. In sum, ensure all passwords are long, complex, and only used once. Use a password manager with a built-in generator like the one included in McAfee’s Total Protection solution to make it easier to access and manage passwords.
If your credentials are exposed in a data breach, using multifactor authentication will ensure hackers cannot access your information using only your login credentials. So even if your username and password are exposed, there is still a layer of security that hackers will not be able to bypass. Block out unauthorized login attempts by enabling multifactor authentication wherever applicable.
The dark web continues to be a primary destination for cybercrime. Online users must remain cautious about the information they retain in their online accounts and the websites with access to their personal information. Your data security and privacy are not always a guarantee, but the more precautions you take with your online safety, the better protected you will be.
To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, subscribe to our newsletter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.
The post The Rise of the Dark Web Gig Economy appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
What does ‘good customer service’ mean to you in 2021? A friendly greeting when you enter a shop? Quickly fixing any issues with deliveries? Or, perhaps the company you entrust with your data maintaining strong security and privacy practices?
It’s been a long time since digital technology was a special interest topic. Product launches, business deals, and new innovations were once reported on only in industry magazines – now, you’d be hard pressed to find a mainstream newspaper that doesn’t have some kind of technology section. We’ve quickly become used to the fact that when the tech giants talk, everybody listens.
More recently, however, it’s become clear that the internet has taken another step towards the centre of the public conversation. While new devices and technological advancements are still (mostly) kept in separate sections of the media or tagged on to the end of the TV news, problems with technology often land straight on the front page.
Outside observers have spent decades treating hacks and attacks as something arcane, as a distant problem that only the technologists can understand and only they have to deal with. Consumers, meanwhile, were left to hope that any issue would soon be fixed – whether that’s waiting for access to their files to be restored or trying again the next day to get into a website.
A few recent stories have underlined that those days are, or should be, behind us. In just the last two months, ransomware attacks have interrupted the operations of pipelines, food producers and the health sector. For many, this has been followed as a story about the international nature of cybercrime and claims that cryptocurrencies are enabling new types of attack.
For those communities reliant on the targeted organisations, however, these cyber-attacks can mean higher costs when fueling their cars to get to work, or product shortages in their weekly shop. We know that there’s a lot of technical interest in analysing ransomware such as DarkSide, or the many other groups attacking sectors like manufacturing, oil and gas, and healthcare. We always need to remember, however, that the focus is not just how these attacks work, but how we can prevent the real-world impacts they have on people’s daily lives.
These are extreme examples: they are incredibly high-value targets, which criminal groups will go to extraordinary lengths in order to disrupt, and which have national consequences when they are affected. Services like online retail and customer support can be disrupted in just the same way. From the perspective of the people who use these services, however, the fact that these were ransomware attacks doesn’t matter. Whether it’s due to attacks, accidents, or mismanagement, what matters is the betrayal of trust and the knock-on effects of service loss.
Examples like this are why I believe that we should see cybersecurity as a much wider foundation than we do, underpinning not just a business’s IT infrastructure, but its reputation, its revenue and, yes, its customer experience.
In crowded markets, customer experience is often the key differentiator between competing businesses. A lot of the disruption that we’ve seen in many sectors thanks to the growth of digital and online approaches has come down to a better, more premium customer experience. Whole industries have arisen around easier ways to order taxis, listen to music, and buy food.
As consumers continue to seek better, simpler experiences, they will (and, I think, should) also start paying close attention to how businesses respond to such incidents and maximise service levels. Key things that shoppers might want to look for when weighing up their choices include:
Businesses, meanwhile, should be looking at how the efforts they take around cybersecurity can form part of the way they build customer confidence. By communicating clearly about the defensive measures we take – and, vitally, framing them in terms of the outcomes they have on people’s lives, not just the technical details – we can all help to make the public savvier about how they can make sure they truly rely on the services they rely on.
The post Why Security is Now the Foundation of Good Customer Experience appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team (ATR) is committed to uncovering security issues in both software and hardware to help developers provide safer products for businesses and consumers. As security researchers, something that we always try to establish before looking at a target is what our scope should be. More specifically, we often assume well-vetted technologies like network stacks or the OS layers are sound and instead focus our attention on the application layers or software that is specific to a target. Whether that approach is comprehensive sometimes doesn’t matter; and it’s what we decided to do for this project as well, bypassing the Android OS itself and with a focus on the Peloton code and implementations. During our research process, we uncovered a flaw (CVE-2021-33887) in the Android Verified Boot (AVB) process, which was initially out of scope, that left the Peloton vulnerable.
For those that are not familiar with Peloton, it is a brand that has combined high end exercise equipment with cutting-edge technology. Its products are equipped with a large tablet that interfaces with the components of the fitness machine, as well as provides a way to attend virtual workout classes over the internet. “Under the hood” of this glossy exterior, however, is a standard Android tablet, and this hi-tech approach to exercise equipment has not gone unnoticed. Viral marketing mishaps aside, Peloton has garnered attention recently regarding concerns surrounding the privacy and security of its products. So, we decided to take a look for ourselves and purchased a Pelton Bike+.
One of the first things that we usually try do when starting a new project, especially when said projects involve large expenses like the Peloton, is to try to find a way to take a backup or a system dump that could be used if a recovery is ever needed. Not all of our research techniques keep the device in a pristine state (we’d be poor hackers if they did), and having the ability to restore the device to its factory settings is a safety net that we try to implement on our targets.
Because we are working with a normal Android device with only the Peloton customizations running at the application layer, many of the processes used to back up an Android phone would also work with the Peloton. It is common in the Android custom ROM scene to use a custom recovery image that allows the user to take full flash dumps of each critical partition and provides a method to restore them later. In such communities, it often also goes without saying that the device must first be unlocked in order to perform any of these steps. While the Android OS allows users to flash these critical partitions, there are restrictions in place that typically prevent an attacker from gaining access to the “currently” running system. If an attacker was able to get their hands on an Android device with the goal of installing a rootkit, they would have to jump through some hoops. The first step that an attacker would need to take is to enable “Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Unlocking”, which is a user mode setting within the “developer options” menu. Even with physical access to the bootloader, an attacker would not be able to “unlock” the Android device unless this setting is checked. This option is usually secured behind the user’s password, PIN, or biometric phone lock, preventing an attacker from accessing it easily. The second security measure in place is that even with the “OEM Unlocking” setting on, issuing commands to the bootloader to perform the unlock first causes all data on the Android device, including applications, files, passwords, etc., to be wiped. This way, even if an attacker did gain access to the Android device of an unsuspecting victim, they wouldn’t be able to install a rootkit or modify the existing kernel without deleting all the data, which both prevents personal data from falling into the attacker’s hands and makes it obvious the device has been tampered with.
For this research effort, we resisted the urge to unlock the Peloton, as there are ways for apps to query the unlock status of a device within Android, and we wanted to ensure that any vulnerabilities we found weren’t the result of the device behaving differently due to it being unlocked. These discrepancies that arise from our research are usually identified by having two target devices: one to serve as the control and the other to serve as the test device. Unfortunately, we only had one Peloton to play with. Another issue was that the Peloton hardware is not very common and the developers of the aforementioned custom recovery images, like Team Win Recovery Project (TWRP), don’t create images for every device, just the most common ones. So, the easy method of taking a backup would not only require unlocking the device but also trying to create our own custom recovery image.
This left us as at a crossroads. We could unlock the bootloader and root the device, granting us access to the flash memory block devices (raw interfaces to the flash partitions) internally, which would allow us to create and restore backups as needed. However, as mentioned before, this would leave the bike in a recognizably “tampered” state. Alternatively, we could try to capture one of the bike’s Over-The-Air (OTA) updates to use as a backup, but we would still need to “unlock” the device to actually flash the OTA image manually. Both options were less than ideal so we kept looking for other solutions.
Just as Secure Boot provides a security mechanism for properly booting the OS on Windows PCs, Android has implemented measures to control the boot process, called Android Verified Boot (AVB). According to Android’s documentation, AVB “requires cryptographically verifying all executable code and data that is part of the Android version being booted before it is used. This includes the kernel (loaded from the boot partition), the device tree (loaded from the dtbo partition), system partition, vendor partition, and so on.”
The Peloton Bike+ ships with the default settings of “Verity Mode” set to true, as well as “Device Unlocked” and “Device Critical Unlocked” set to false, which is intended to prevent the loading of modified boot images and provide a way to determine if the device has been tampered with. This information was verified by running fastboot oem device-info on the Peloton, as demonstrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: OEM device info showing verity mode and unlocked status.
To clarify, a simplified Android boot process can be visualized as follows:
Figure 2: Simplified Android Boot Process
If modified code is found at any of the stages in Figure 2, the boot process should abort or, if the device is unlocked, warn the user that the images are not verified and give the option to the user to abort the boot.
Given that we defined our scope of this project to not include the Android boot process as a part of our research and verifying that Peloton has attempted to use the security measures provided by Android, we again found ourselves debating if a backup would be possible.
In newer Android releases, including the Peloton, the update method uses Android’s Seamless System Updates (A/B). This update method no longer needs the “recovery” partition, forcing users who wish to use a custom recovery to use the fastboot boot command which will download and boot the supplied image. This is a temporary boot that doesn’t “flash“ or alter any of the flash partitions of the device and will revert to the previous boot image on restart. Since this option allows for modified code to be executed, it is only available when the device is in an unlocked state and will error out with a message stating “Please unlock device to enable this command,” if attempted on a locked device.
This is a good security implementation because if this command was always allowed, it would be very similar to the process of booting from a live USB on your PC, where you can login as a root user and have full control over the underlying system and components.
This is where our luck or maybe naïveté worked to our advantage. Driven by our reluctance to unlock the device and our desire to make a backup, we tried to boot a generic TWRP recovery image just to see what would happen. The image ended up leaving us at a black screen, and since each recovery image needs to contain a small kernel with the correct drivers for the display, touch digitizer, and other device–specific hardware, this was to be expected. What we didn’t expect, however, was for it to get past the fastboot boot command. While we didn’t get a custom recovery running, it did tell us one thing; the system was not verifying that the device was unlocked before attempting to boot a custom image. Normally this command would be denied on a “locked” device and would have just errored out on the fastboot command, as mentioned previously.
It is also important to point out that despite having booted a modified image, the internal fuse had not been burned. These fuses are usually burned during the OEM unlocking process to identify if a device has allowed for a different “root of trust” to be installed. The burning of such a fuse is a permanent operation and a burnt fuse often indicates that the device has been tampered with. As shown in Figure 3, the “Secure Boot” fuse was still present, and the device was reporting a locked bootloader.
Figure 3: Secure boot enabled with fused protection
This discovery was unexpected and we felt like we had stumbled upon a flaw that gave us the ability to finally take a backup of the device and leave the Peloton in an “untampered” state. Knowing that a custom image could be booted even with a “locked” bootloader, we began looking at ways to gather a valid boot image, which would contain the correct kernel drivers to facilitate a successful boot. If we could piece together the OTA update URL and just download an update package directly from Peloton, it would likely contain a boot image that we could modify. Having the ability to modify a boot image would give us root and access to the blocked devices.
Even with just ADB debugging enabled we were able to pull the Peloton–specific applications from the device. We listed all the Peloton APKs and sought out the ones that could help us get the OTA path, shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Listing Peloton Specific Applications and Highlighting the one related to OTA Updates.
Finding the name OTAService promising, we pulled down the APK and began to reverse-engineer it using JADX. After some digging, we discovered how the app was building the download URL string for OTA updates, which would then be passed to beginDownload(), as seen in Figure 5.
Figure 5: OTA image path being constructed as “key”
We also noticed quite a few Android log calls that could help us, such as the one right before the call to beginDownload(), so we used Android’s built–in logcat command and grepped the output for “OTA” as seen in Figure 6. Doing so, we were able to find which S3 bucket was used for the OTA updates and even a file manifest titled OTAConfig.json.
Figure 6: Relevant OTA logs in red
Combining the information obtained from OTAService.apk and the logs, we were able to piece together the full path to the OTA images manifest file and names for each OTA zip file, as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Contents of OTAConfig.json
Our next step was to extract the contents of the OTA update to get a valid boot.img file that would contain all the specific kernel drivers for the Peloton hardware. Since the Peloton is using Android’s A/B partitions, which facilitate seamless updates, the update packages were stored in a “payload.bin” format. Using the Android payload dumper tool, we were able to extract all of the images contained in the bin file.
Once the boot.img was extracted, we needed a way to modify the initial kernel to allow us to gain root access on the device. Although there are a variety of ways to accomplish this, we decided to keep things simple and just use the Magisk installer to patch the boot.img file to include the “su” binary. With the boot.img patched, we were able to use the fastboot boot command again but this time passing it our patched boot.img file. Since the Verified Boot process on the Peloton failed to identify the modified boot image as tampered, the OS booted normally with the patched boot.img file. After this process was complete, the Peloton Bike+ was indistinguishable from its “normal” state under visual inspection and the process left no artifacts that would tip off the user that the Pelton had been compromised. But appearances can be deceiving, and in reality the Android OS had now been rooted, allowing us to use the “su” command to become root and perform actions with UID=0, as seen in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Booting modified boot.img and executing whoami as Root
As we just demonstrated, the ability to bypass the Android Verified Boot process can lead to the Android OS being compromised by an attacker with physical access. A worst-case scenario for such an attack vector might involve a malicious agent booting the Peloton with a modified image to gain elevated privileges and then leveraging those privileges to establish a reverse shell, granting the attacker unfettered root access on the bike remotely. Since the attacker never has to unlock the device to boot a modified image, there would be no trace of any access they achieved on the device. This sort of attack could be effectively delivered via the supply chain process. A malicious actor could tamper with the product at any point from construction to warehouse to delivery, installing a backdoor into the Android tablet without any way the end user could know. Another scenario could be that an attacker could simply walk up to one of these devices that is installed in a gym or a fitness room and perform the same attack, gaining root access on these devices for later use. The Pelobuddy interactive map in figure 9 below could help an attacker find public bikes to attack.
Figure 9: pelobuddy.com’s interactive map to help locate public Peloton exercise equipment.
Once an attacker has root, they could make their presence permanent by modifying the OS in a rootkit fashion, removing any need for the attacker to repeat this step. Another risk is that an attacker could modify the system to put themselves in a man-in-the-middle position and sniff all network traffic, even SSL encrypted traffic, using a technique called SSL unpinning, which requires root privileges to hook calls to internal encryption functionality. Intercepting and decrypting network traffic in this fashion could lead to users’ personal data being compromised. Lastly, the Peloton Bike+ also has a camera and a microphone installed. Having remote access with root permissions on the Android tablet would allow an attacker to monitor these devices and is demoed in the impact video below.
Given the simplicity and criticality of the flaw, we decided to disclose to Peloton even as we continue to audit the device for remote vulnerabilities. We sent our vendor disclosure with full details on March 2, 2021 – shortly after, Peloton confirmed the issue and subsequently released a fix for it in software version “PTX14A-290”. The patched image no longer allows for the “boot” command to work on a user build, mitigating this vulnerability entirely. The Peloton vulnerability disclosure process was smooth, and the team were receptive and responsive with all communications. Further conversations with Peloton confirmed that this vulnerability is also present on Peloton Tread exercise equipment; however, the scope of our research was confined to the Bike+.
Peloton’s Head of Global Information Security, Adrian Stone, shared the following “this vulnerability reported by McAfee would require direct, physical access to a Peloton Bike+ or Tread. Like with any connected device in the home, if an attacker is able to gain physical access to it, additional physical controls and safeguards become increasingly important. To keep our Members safe, we acted quickly and in coordination with McAfee. We pushed a mandatory update in early June and every device with the update installed is protected from this issue.”
We are continuing to investigate the Peloton Bike+, so make sure you stay up to date on McAfee’s ATR blogs for any future discoveries.
The post A New Program for Your Peloton – Whether You Like It or Not appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
[Disclaimer: The McAfee ATR team disclosed this vulnerability to Peloton and promptly started working together to responsibly develop and issue a patch within the disclosure window. The patch was tested and confirmed effective on June 4, 2021.]
Picture this: A hacker enters a gym or fitness center with a Peloton Bike+. They insert a tiny USB key with a boot image file containing malicious code that grants them remote root access. Since the attacker doesn’t need to factory unlock the bike to load the modified image, there is no sign that it was tampered with. With their newfound access, the hacker interferes with the Peloton’s operating system and now has the ability to install and run any programs, modify files, or set up remote backdoor access over the internet. They add malicious apps disguised as Netflix and Spotify to the bike in the hopes that unsuspecting users will enter their login credentials for them to harvest for other cyberattacks. They can enable the bike’s camera and microphone to spy on the device and whoever is using it. To make matters worse, they can also decrypt the bike’s encrypted communications with the various cloud services and databases it accesses, potentially intercepting all kinds of sensitive information. As a result, an unsuspecting gym-goer taking the Peloton Bike+ for a spin could be in danger of having their personal data compromised and their workout unknowingly watched.
That’s a potential risk that you no longer have to worry about thanks to McAfee’s Advanced Threat Research (ATR) team. The ATR team recently disclosed a vulnerability (CVE-2021-3387) in the Peloton Bike+, which would allow a hacker with either physical access to the Bike+ or access during any point in the supply chain (from construction to delivery), to gain remote root access to the Peloton’s tablet. The hacker could install malicious software, intercept traffic and user’s personal data, and even gain control of the Bike’s camera and microphone over the internet. Further conversations with Peloton confirmed that this vulnerability is also present on Peloton Tread exercise equipment; however, the scope of our research was confined to the Bike+.
As a result of COVID-19, many consumers have looked for in-home exercise solutions, sending the demand for Peloton products soaring. The number of Peloton users grew 22% between September and the end of December 2020, with over 4.4 million members on the platform at year’s end. By combining luxury exercise equipment with high-end technology, Peloton presents an appealing solution to those looking to stay in shape with a variety of classes, all from a few taps of a tablet. Even though in-home fitness products such as Peloton promise unprecedented convenience, many consumers do not realize the risks that IoT fitness devices pose to their online security.
IoT fitness devices such as the Peloton Bike+ are just like any other laptop or mobile phone that can connect to the internet. They have embedded systems complete with firmware, software, and operating systems. As a result, they are susceptible to the same kind of vulnerabilities, and their security should be approached with a similar level of scrutiny.
Following the consumer trend in increasing IoT fitness devices, McAfee ATR began poring over the Peloton’s various systems with a critical eye, looking for potential risks consumers might not be thinking about. It was during this exploratory process that the team discovered that the Bike’s system was not verifying that the device’s bootloader was unlocked before attempting to boot a custom image. This means that the bike allowed researchers to load a file that wasn’t meant for the Peloton hardware — a command that should normally be denied on a locked device such as this one. Their first attempt only loaded a blank screen, so the team continued to search for ways to install a valid, but customized boot image, which would start the bike successfully with increased privileges.
After some digging, researchers were able to download an update package directly from Peloton, containing a boot image that they could modify. With the ability to modify a boot image from Peloton, the researchers were granted root access. Root access means that the ATR team had the highest level of permissions on the device, allowing them to perform functions as an end-user that were not intended by Peloton developers. The Verified Boot process on the Bike failed to identify that the researchers tampered with the boot image, allowing the operating system to start up normally with the modified file. To an unsuspecting user, the Peloton Bike+ appeared completely normal, showing no signs of external modifications or clues that the device had been compromised. In reality, ATR had gained complete control of the Bike’s Android operating system.
The McAfee ATR team disclosed this vulnerability to Peloton and promptly started working together to responsibly develop and issue a patch within the disclosure window. The patch was tested and confirmed effective on June 4, 2021. The discovery serves as an important reminder to practice caution when using fitness IoT devices, and it is important that consumers keep these tips in mind to stay secure while staying fit:
Stay on top of software updates from your device manufacturer, especially since they will not always advertise their availability. Visit their website regularly to ensure you do not miss news that may affect you. Additionally, make sure to update mobile apps that pair with your IoT device. Adjust your settings to turn on automatic software updates, so you do not have to update manually and always have the latest security patches.
Do your research before making a significant investment in an IoT device. Ask yourself if these devices are from a reputable vendor. Have they had previous data breaches in the past, or do they have an excellent reputation for providing secure products? Also, take note of the information your IoT device collects, how vendors use this information and what they release to other users or third parties.
Above all, understand what control you have over your privacy and information usage. It is a good sign if an IoT device allows you to opt-out of having your information collected or lets you access and delete the data it does collect.
Protect your data from being compromised by stealthy cybercriminals by using an identity theft solution such as the one included in McAfee Total Protection. This software allows users to take a proactive approach to protecting their identities with personal and financial monitoring, as well as recovery tools.
If you are one of the 4.4 million Peloton members or use other IoT fitness devices, it is important to keep in mind that these gadgets could pose a potential security risk just like any other connected device. To elevate your fitness game while protecting your privacy and data, incorporate cybersecurity best practices into your everyday life so you can confidently enjoy your IoT devices.
As stated, McAfee and Peloton worked together closely to address this issue. Adrian Stone, Peloton’s Head of Global Information Security, shared that “this vulnerability reported by McAfee would require direct, physical access to a Peloton Bike+ or Tread. Like with any connected device in the home, if an attacker is able to gain physical access to it, additional physical controls and safeguards become increasingly important. To keep our Members safe, we acted quickly and in coordination with McAfee. We pushed a mandatory update in early June and every device with the update installed is protected from this issue.”
Peloton is always looking for ways to improve products and features, including making new features available to Members through software updates that are pushed to Peloton devices. For a step-by-step guide on how to check for updated software, Peloton Members can visit the Peloton support site.
The post Is Your Peloton Spinning Up Malware? appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The McAfee team is very proud to announce that, for the third year in a row, McAfee was named a 2021 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Secure Web Gateways for its Web Solution.
In its announcement, Gartner explains, “The Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice is a recognition of vendors in this market by verified end-user professionals, taking into account both the number of reviews and the overall user ratings.” To ensure fair evaluation, Gartner applies rigorous methodology for recognizing vendors with a high customer satisfaction rate.
For the distinction, a vendor needs at least 20+ Reviews from Customers with over $50M Annual Review in 18-month timeframe, above Market Average Overall Rating, and above Market Average User Interest and Adoption.
Gartner Peer Insights is a peer review and ratings platform designed for enterprise software and services decision makers. Reviews are organized by products in markets that are defined by Gartner Research in Magic Quadrant and Market Guide documents.
The “Voice of the Customer” is a document that applies a methodology to aggregated Gartner Peer Insights’ reviews in a market to provide an overall perspective for IT decision makers. This aggregated peer perspective, along with the individual detailed reviews, is complementary to expert-generated research such as Magic Quadrants and Market Guides. It can play a key role in your buying process, as it focuses on direct peer experiences of buying, implementing and operating a solution. A complimentary copy of the Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’ report is available on the McAfee Web site.
“We were using an on-prem web gateway and we have been migrated to UCE recently due to the pandemic situations. It gives us the flexibility to manage our Web GW as a SaaS solution. The solution also provides us bunch of rulesets for our daily usage needs.” CIO in the Manufacturing Industry [Link here]
“McAfee Secure web gateway provides the optimum security required for the employees of the Bank surfing the Internet. It also provides the Hybrid capabilities which allows to deploy same policies regardless of the physical location of the endpoint.” [Link here]
MVISION Unified Cloud Edge was specifically designed to enable our customers to make a secure cloud transformation by bringing the capabilities of our highly successful Secure Web Gateway appliance solution to the cloud as part of a unified cloud offering. This way, users from any location or device can access the web and the cloud in a fast and secure manner.
“The McAfee Web Gateway integrated well with existing CASB and DLP solutions. It has been very effective at preventing users from going to malware sites. The professional services we purchased for implementation was the best we’ve ever had from any vendor of any IT security product.” Senior Cybersecurity Professional in the Healthcare Industry [Link here]
McAfee’s Next-Gen Secure Web Gateway technology features tight integration with our CASB and DLP solutions through a converged management interface, which provides unified policies that deliver unprecedented cloud control while reducing cost and complexity. By integrating our SWG, CASB, DLP, and RBI solutions, MVISION Unified Cloud Edge provides a complete SASE security platform that delivers unparalleled data and threat protection.
“We benchmarked against another very well known gateway and there was no comparison. The other gateway only caught a small fraction of what MWG caught when filtering for potentially harmful sites.” Information Security Officer in the Finance Industry [Link here]
As the threat landscape continues to evolve, it’s important for organizations to have a platform that is integrated and seamless. That’s why McAfee provides integrated multi-layer security including global threat intelligence, machine learning, sandboxing, UEBA, and Remote Browser Isolation to block known threats and detect the most elusive attacks.
To learn more about this distinction, or to read the reviews written about our products by the IT professionals who use them, please visit Gartner Peer Insights’ Customers’ Choice announcement for Web. To all of our customers who submitted reviews, thank you! These reviews mold our products and our customer journey, and we look forward to building on the experience that earned us this distinction!
McAfee is named a Customers’ Choice in the June 2021 Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer”: Secure Web Gateways.
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If only more things in life came with training wheels; a child’s first smartphone could certainly use some.
Like taking off the training wheels and riding out into the neighborhood for the first time, a smartphone opens an entirely new world for children. There are apps, social media, group chats with friends, TikTok stars, and the joy of simply being “in” with their classmates and friends through the shared experience of the internet.
For parents, the similarities between first bike rides and first phones continue. You love the growing independence that this moment brings, yet you also wonder what your child will encounter out there when you’re not around. The good and the bad. How have you prepared them for this? Are they really ready?
That’s the question, isn’t it—when is my child ready for that first smartphone?
For years, your child has dabbled on the internet, whether that was playing on your phone while they were little, letting them spend time on a tablet, or using a computer for school. Along the way, there have been teaching moments, little lessons you’ve imparted about staying safe, how to treat others online, and so forth. In other words, you’ve introduced the internet to your child in steps. Giving them their own phone is yet another step, but a big one.
Yet those teaching moments and little lessons are things that they’ll lean on when they’re on their own phone—whether those were about “stranger dangers” online, proper online etiquette, and the difference between safe and unsafe websites. Understanding if your child has a firm foundation for navigating all the highs and lows of the internet is a strong indication of their readiness. After all, safely entering the always-online world of having a smartphone demands a level of intellectual and emotional maturity.
Good question. We do know that smartphone usage by children is on the rise. For example, research from Common Sense Media indicates that 53% of 11-year-olds have a smartphone, a number that jumps to 69% at age 12. That’s quite a bit of smartphone use by tweens, use which may be lightly monitored or not monitored at all. Note the percentage of ownership by age and the volume of screen time that follows in the infographic below:
Source: Common Sense Media
Why the rise, particularly in very young owners? However, does that mean 26% of nine-year-olds should have unfettered and all-day access to the internet in the palm of their hands? That’s a topic for you to decide for yourself and for the good of your family. However, if the notion of a third grader with a smartphone seems a little on the young side to you, there are alternatives to smartphones.
If keeping in touch is the primary reason for considering a smartphone, you have internet-free options that you can consider:
In all, for a younger child, one of these options may be your best bet. They’ll help you and your child keep in touch, develop good habits, and simply learn the basic responsibilities and behaviors that come with using a device to communicate with others.
Now’s a perfect time to prepare yourself for the day when your child indeed gets that first proper smartphone. That entails a little research and a little conversation on your part. Topics such as cyberbullying, digital literacy, social media etiquette, and so on will be important to get an understanding on. And those are just the first few.
A good place to start is your circle of family and friends. There, you can find out how they handled smartphone ownership with their children. You’ll likely hear a range of strategies and approaches, along with a few stories too, all of which can prepare you and your child.
I also suggest carving out a few minutes a week to read up on our McAfee blog safety topics so that you can have all the knowledge and tools you need. We blog on topics related to parenting and children quite regularly, and you can get a quick view of them here:
Having a smartphone will change not only their life, but yours as well. Relationships will evolve as your child navigates their new online life with their middle school and high school peers. (Remember those days? They weren’t always easy. Now throw smartphones into the mix.)
With that, give you and your child one last checkpoint. The following family talking points for owning a smartphone offer a solid framework for conversation and a way to assess if your child, and you, are truly ready for what’s ahead.
Once smartphone day arrives, it’s time to put two things in place—mobile security and parental controls:
Plenty. And as a mom myself, I rely heavily on those parental controls I put into place, but I also stay close to what they are doing online. It’s a bit of a mix. I simply ask them what’s going on and do a little, monitoring too. That could be asking them what their favorite games and apps are right now or talking about what playlists they’re listening to. This keeps communication open and normalizes talking about the phone/ their internet usage and what’s happening on it. Communication like this can come in handy later on should they need your help with something that’s occurred online. By talking now, the both of you will have an established place to start.
In all, take children’s smartphone ownership in steps and prepare them for the day those training wheels come off so the both of you can fully enjoy that newfound independence of life with a smartphone.
The post How to Prepare for Your Child’s First Smartphone appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The mass migration of employees working from home in the last 14 months has accelerated the digital transformation of businesses. Cloud applications are no longer a “nice to have,” they are now essential to ensure that businesses survive. This introduces new security challenges in being able to locate and control sensitive data across all the potential exfiltration vectors regardless of whether they are in the cloud; on premise via managed or unmanaged machines. Attempting to control these vectors through multiple products results in unnecessary cost and complexity.
McAfee anticipated and responded to this trend, solving all these challenges through the launch of our MVISION Unified Cloud Edge solution in 2020. Unified Cloud Edge doesn’t simply offer data protections controls for endpoints, networks, web and the cloud; rather, Multi-Vector Data Protection provides customers with unified data classification and incident management that enables them to define data workflows once and have policies enforced consistently across each vector. Because of the unified approach and our extensive data protection heritage, we are delighted to be named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Unstructured Data Security Platforms, Q2 2021. In our opinion, we were the top ranked dedicated cyber security vendor within the report.
We received the highest possible score in nine criteria with Forrester Research commenting on our “cloud-first data security approach” and customer recognition of our “breadth of capabilities (in particular for supporting remote work and cloud use)”.
We continue to innovate within our Unified Cloud Edge solution through the introduction of remote browser isolation to protect against risky web sites (our “heavy focus in supporting security and data protection in the cloud”), which uniquely to the market allows us to continue applying DLP controls even during isolated sessions. Delivering on increased customer value through innovation isn’t just limited to new features, for instance we continue to drive down costs through an unlimited SaaS application bundle.
Click below to read the full report.
: Unstructured Data Security Platforms, Q2 2021McAfee is delighted to be named a Leader in The Forrester Wave Unstructured Data Security Platforms, Q2 2021 report. We received the highest possible score in nine criteria with Forrester Research
The Forrester Wave: Unstructured Data Security Platforms, Q2 2021, 17 May 2021, Heidi Shey with Amy DeMartine, Shannon Fish, Peggy Dostie
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Every week it seems there’s another enormous breach in the media spotlight. The attackers may be state-sponsored groups with extensive resources launching novel forms of ransomware. Where does your organization stand on its readiness and engagement versus this type of advanced persistent threat? More importantly, where does it want to go?
We believe that the way your organization uses threat intelligence is a significant difference maker in the success of your cybersecurity program. Just as organizations take the journey toward cyber defense excellence at their own rate of speed, some prioritize other investments ahead of threat intelligence, which may impede their progress. Actionable insights aren’t solely about speed, though fast-emerging threats require prompt intervention, they’re also about gaining quality and thoroughness. And that’s table stakes for advancing in your threat intelligence journey.
A Threat Intelligence program typically spans five organizational needs:
When you disseminate a threat insight, it triggers different responses from various members of your security team. An endpoint administrator will want to automatically invoke counter-measures and security controls to block a threat immediately. A SOC analyst may take actions including looking for signs of a breach and also recommend ways to stiffen your defense posture.
Better threat intelligence provides you with more contextual information — that’s the key. How will this information help your company, in your particular industry, in your region of the world?
The Threat Intelligence journey comes in stages. Where is your program now?
Within this stage most companies want to prevent the latest threats at their endpoint, network and cloud controls. They mostly depend on their security vendors to research and keep products up to date with the latest threat intelligence. However, in this stage companies also receive intelligence from other sources, including government, commercial and their own cyber defense investigations, and can use the extra intelligence to further update controls.
At this stage, organizations advance beyond vendor-provided intelligence and adapt their protection by adding indicators from third-party threat feeds or from other organizational SOC processes such as malware analysis.
Within this stage, companies want to do more than prevent known threats with their tools. They want to understand the adversaries who might target them, improve detection and respond faster by prioritizing investigations.
Organizations with this goal know that their industry faces targeted threats every day and they have already invested significantly in their threat intelligence capability. At this stage they most likely have a team utilizing commercial and open-source tools as well as threat data feeds. They’re looking for specialized analysis services and access to raw data.
These organizations can proactively assess their exposure and determine how to reduce the attack surface. They apply threat intelligence to empower their threat hunting, either on a proactive or reactive basis.
Until recently it was difficult for security managers to know not just whether their organization has been exposed to a particular threat but whether they have a good level of protection against specific campaigns.
McAfee MVISION Insights is helpful at each stage of your threat intelligence journey because it proactively assesses your organization’s exposure to global threats, integrating with your telemetry, and prescribes how to reduce attack services before the attack occurs. For stage one, organizations can proactively assess their exposure and determine how to reduce the attack surface. For stage two and three, organizations can apply threat intelligence to empower their threat hunting and analysis, either on a proactive or reactive basis.
MVISION Insights Dashboard
One way we help is by integrating data from both McAfee Threat Intelligence feeds such as our Global Threat Intelligence and Advanced Threat Defense, and also third-party services via MVISION APIs. While McAfee Global Threat Intelligence is one of the world’s largest sources of this information, with more than 1 billion global threat sensors in 120+ countries, and 54 billion queries each day, the key thing to know is that we have 500 plus McAfee researchers providing this form of threat intelligence as a service. The idea is to help you elevate your threat intelligence at each step of your organization’s journey.
Check out the latest threats from a Preview of MVISION Insights.
The post Finding Success at Each Stage of Your Threat Intelligence Journey appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
On May 12, the President signed the executive order (EO) on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity. As with every executive order, it establishes timelines for compliance and specific requirements of executive branch agencies to provide specific plans to meet the stated objectives.
It is clear from the EO that the Executive Office of the President is putting significant emphasis on cyber threat intelligence and how it will help government agencies make better decisions about responding to cyber threats and incidents. The EO also focuses on how federal agencies will govern resource access through Zero Trust and how to comprehensively define and protect hybrid service architectures. These are critical aspects as government agencies are moving more and more mission-critical applications and services to the cloud.
The call to action in this executive order is long overdue, as modernizing the nation’s cybersecurity approach and creating coordinated intelligence and incident response capabilities should have occurred years ago. Requiring that agencies recognize the shift in the perimeter and start tearing down silos between cloud services and physical data center services is going serve to improve visibility and understanding of how departments and sub-agencies are being targeted by adversaries.
I am sure government leaders have started to review their current capability along with their strategic initiatives to ensure they map to the new EO requirements. Where gaps are identified, agencies will need to update their plans and rethink their approach to align with the new framework and defined capabilities such as endpoint detection and response (EDR) and Zero Trust.
While the objectives outlined are critical, I do believe that agencies need to take appropriate cautions when deciding their paths to compliance. The goal of this executive order is not to add additional complexity to an already complex security organization. Rather, the goal should be to simplify and automate wherever possible. If the right approach is not decided on early, the risk is very real of adding too much complexity in pursuit of compliance, thus eroding the desired outcomes.
On the surface, it would seem that the areas of improvement outlined in the EO can be taken individually – applied threat intelligence, EDR, Zero Trust, data protection, and cloud services adoption. In reality, they should be viewed collectively. When considering solutions and architectures, agency leaders should be asking themselves some critical questions:
The executive order presents a great opportunity for government to evolve their cybersecurity approach to defend against modern threats and enable a more aggressive transition to the cloud and cloud services. There is also significant risk, as the urgency expressed in the EO could lead to hasty decisions that create more challenges than they solve. To capitalize on the opportunity presented in this executive order, federal leaders must embrace a holistic approach to cybersecurity that integrates all the solutions into a platform approach including robust threat intelligence. A standalone Zero Trust or EDR product will not accomplish an improved or modernized cybersecurity approach and could lead to more complexity. A well-thought-out platform, not individual products, will best serve public sector organizations, giving them a clear architecture that will protect and enable our government’s future.
The post The Executive Order – Improving the Nation’s Cyber Security appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Virtualization technology has been an IT cornerstone for organization for years now. It revolutionized the way organizations can scale up IT systems in a heartbeat, allowing then to be more agile as opposed to investing into dedicated “bare-metal” hardware. To the outside untrained eye, it might seem that there are different machines on the network, while in fact all the “separate” machines are controlled by a hypervisor server. Virtualization plays such a big role nowadays that it isn’t only used to spin up servers but also anything from virtual applications to virtual user desktops.
This is something cyber criminals have been noticing too and we have seen an increased interest in hypervisors. After all, why attack the single virtual machine when you can go after the hypervisor and control all the machines at once?
In recent months several high impact CVEs regarding virtualization software have been released which allowed for Remote Code Execution (RCE); initial access brokers are offering compromised VMware vCenter servers online, as well as ransomware groups developing specific ransomware binaries for encrypting ESXi servers.
On the 25th of May VMware disclosed a vulnerability impacting VMware vCenter servers allowing for Remote Code Execution on internet accessible vCenter servers, version 6.5,6.7 and 7.0. VMware vCenter is a management tool, used to manage virtual machines and ESXi servers.
CVE-2021-21985 is a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the vSphere Client via the Virtual SAN (vSAN) Health Check plugin. This plugin is enabled by default. The combination of RCE and default enablement of the plugin resulted in this being scored as a critical flaw with a CVSSv3 score of 9.8.
An attacker needs to be able to access vCenter over TCP port 443 to exploit this vulnerability. It doesn’t matter if the vCenter is remotely exposed or when the attacker has internal access.
The same exploit vector is applicable for CVE-2021-21986, which is an authentication mechanism issue in several vCenter Server Plug-ins. It would allow an attacker to run plugin functions without authentication. This leads to the CVE being scored as a ‘moderate severity’, with a CVSSv3 score of 6.5.
While writing this blog, a Proof-of-Concept was discovered that will test if the vulnerability exists; it will not execute the remote-code. The Nmap plugin can be downloaded from this location: https://github.com/alt3kx/CVE-2021-21985_PoC.
Searching with the Shodan search engine, narrowing it down to the TCP 443 port, we observe that close to 82,000 internet accessible ESXi servers are exposed. Zooming in further on the versions that are affected by these vulnerabilities, almost 55,000 publicly accessible ESXi servers are potentially vulnerable to CVE-2021-21985 and CVE-2021-21986, providing remote access to them and making them potential candidates for ransomware attacks, as we will read about in the next paragraphs.
Ransomware groups are always trying to find ways to hit their victims where it hurts. So, it is only logical that they are adapting to attacking virtualization environments and the native Unix/Linux machines running the hypervisors. In the past, ransomware groups were quick to abuse earlier CVEs affecting VMware. But aside from the disclosed CVEs, ransomware groups have also adapted their binaries specifically to encrypt virtual machines and their management environment. Below are some of the ransomware groups we have observed.
Figure 1. Screenshot from the DarkSide ransomware group, explicitly mentioning its Linux-based encryptor and support for ESXi and NAS systems
McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) analyzed the DarkSide Linux binary in our recent blog and we can confirm that a specific routine aimed at virtual machines is present in it.
Figure 2. DarkSide VMware Code routine
From the configuration file of the DarkSide Linux variant, it becomes clear that this variant is solely designed to encrypt virtual machines hosted on an ESXi server. It searches for the disk-files of the VMs, the memory files of the VMs (vmem), swap, logs, etc. – all files that are needed to start a VMware virtual machine.
Demo of Darkside encrypting an ESXi server: https://youtu.be/SMWIckvLMoE
Babuk announced on an underground forum that it was developing a cross-platform binary aimed at Linux/UNIX and ESXi or VMware systems:
Figure 3. Babuk ransomware claiming to have built a Linux-based ransomware binary capable of encrypting ESXi servers
The malware is written in the open-source programming language Golang, most likely because it allows developers to have a single codebase to be compiled into all major operating systems. This means that, thanks to static linking, code written in Golang on a Linux system can run on a Windows or Mac system. That presents a large advantage to ransomware gangs looking to encrypt a whole infrastructure comprised of different systems architecture.
After being dropped on the ESXi server, the malware encrypts all the files on the system:
The malware was designed to target ESXi environments as we guessed, and it was confirmed when the Babuk team returned the decryptor named d_esxi.out. Unfortunately, the decryptor has been developed with some errors, which cause corruption in victim’s files:
Overall, the decryptor is poor as it only checks for the extension “.babyk” which will miss any files the victim has renamed to recover them. Also, the decryptor checks if the file is more than 32 bytes in length as the last 32 bytes are the key that will be calculated later with other hardcoded values to get the final key. This is bad design as those 32 bytes could be trash, instead of the key, as the customer could make things, etc. It does not operate efficiently by checking the paths that are checked in the malware, instead it analyzes everything. Another error we noticed was that the decryptor tries to remove a ransom note name that is NOT the same that the malware creates in each folder. This does not make any sense unless, perhaps, the Babuk developers/operators are delivering a decryptor that works for a different version and/or sample.
The problems with the Babuk decryptor left victims in horrible situations with permanently damaged data. The probability of getting a faulty decryptor isn’t persuading victims to pay up and this might be one of the main reasons that Babuk announced that it will stop encrypting data and only exfiltrate and extort from now on.
It is not only ransomware groups that show an interest in virtual systems; several initial access brokers are also trading access to compromised vCenter/ESXi servers on underground cybercriminal forums. The date and time of the specific offering below overlaps with the disclosure of CVE-2021-21985, but McAfee ATR hasn’t determined if this specific CVE was used to gain access to ESXi servers.
Figure 4. Threat Actor selling access to thousands of vCenter/ESXi servers
Figure 5. Threat actor offering compromised VMware ESXi servers
VMware urges users running VMware vCenter and VMware Cloud Foundation affected by CVE-2021-21985 and CVE-2021-21986 to apply its patch immediately. According to VMware, a malicious actor with network access to port 443 may exploit this issue to execute commands with unrestricted privileges on the underlying operating system that hosts vCenter Server. The disclosed vulnerabilities have a critical CVSS base score of 9.8.
However, we do understand that VMware infrastructure is often installed on business-critical systems, so any type of patching activity usually has a high degree of impact on IT operations. Hence, the gap between vulnerability disclosure and patching is typically high. With the operating systems on VMware being a closed system they lack the ability to natively install workload protection/detection solutions. Therefore, the defenses should be based on standard cyber hygiene/risk mitigation practices and should be applied in the following order where possible.
Virtualization and its underlying technologies are key in today’s infrastructures. With the release of recently discovered vulnerabilities and an understanding of their criticality, threat actors are shifting focus. Proof can be seen in underground forums where affiliates recruit pentesters with knowledge of specific virtual technologies to develop custom ransomware that is designed to cripple these technologies. Remote Desktop access is the number one access vector in many ransomware cases, followed by edge-devices lacking the latest security updates, making them vulnerable to exploitation. With the latest VMware CVEs mentioned in this blog, we urge you to take the right steps to secure not only internet exposed systems, but also internal systems, to minimize the risk of your organization losing its precious VMs, or gold, to cyber criminals.
Special thanks to Thibault Seret, Mo Cashman, Roy Arnab and Christiaan Beek for their contributions.
The post Are Virtual Machines the New Gold for Cyber Criminals? appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Kids are online now more than ever, not just during free time, but also during school time. It is impossible to always peek over their shoulder, and depending on their age, they may grow tired of a POS (aka parent over shoulder). The internet can be a dangerous place, but with the right education, kids can navigate hazards and remain safe and calm while online.
Check out this online safety guide on how to keep your children engaged while learning about cybersecurity and imparting lessons that stick. This guide will work for children ages 6 through 18 with variations.
The first tip to teaching kids about online safety is making sure that your lessons are relatable. For example, if the day’s lesson is about phishing, do not illustrate it with an example of a major corporation’s folly. Instead, liken it to stranger danger. Just like kids know not to talk to strangers on the sidewalk and to distrust strangers who say they have candy, tell them that the same rule applies to online strangers: Walk right by and do not accept anything you are offered. That means not clicking on any links the online stranger sends you, especially when they say you have won a prize. Thirty-four percent of Canadians have encountered a phishing attack since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Statistics Canada. This prevalence means that it is likely someone in your family will receive a phishing message. Warn children that phishing and other social engineering attempts are likely to play with their emotions to make them feel happy, excited, mad, or scared. Encourage your children to always stay calm online and let an adult know when they are approached by strangers.
Along the lines of keeping cybersecurity lessons relatable, make sure that children also know what is at stake if they are irresponsible online. In the case of clicking on suspicious links, tell children that this could make their device ill. When computers are infected with a virus, or are sick, they work slowly and could shut off when they are in the middle of a school assignment. Also, make note of the prevalence of viruses, and how children should stay on guard for them constantly. Over 800,000 Canadian devices had encounters with malware in the last 30 days, at the time this article was written.
In extreme cases, children can have their identities stolen due to irresponsible online behavior. A stolen identity could affect their credit card eligibility and set them off on the wrong foot in adulthood. Stress the severity of identity theft and the specific consequences. Teenagers who have their sights set on financial freedom, buying a car, or setting up their own bank account could be severely affected. The best way to keep your identity safe is by keeping your Social Insurance Number completely private, never sharing your banking information, and not oversharing online. Canada’s Centre for Digital and Media Literacy explains that preteens especially have a hard time judging the accuracy of online information and are vulnerable to filling out forms that ask for their personal information. When possible, try to keep all internet-connected devices in communal areas of your home so you can periodically check in on your kids.
When teaching children about online safety, make sure you don’t use fear tactics. Be firm about the potential consequences, but emphasize that kids have your support, the right online literacy skills, and the support of antivirus software and identity theft protection to catch any threats that fall through the cracks.
Passwords are a thing of the past. The hippest new way to protect your accounts is with complex, yet memorable, passphrases. The Government of Canada defines a passphrase as “a memorized phrase consisting of mixed words with or without spaces.” When kids are old enough to be responsible for their own accounts, such as a school login, email address, or social media profile, impart the lesson of passphrases. Thinking up passphrases can turn into a fun exercise.
When it is time to create a passphrase, have your kids brainstorm some of their favorite things that loosely relate to the account the passphrase is for. For example, a social media site’s passphrase could be about friends, like “A$hleyIsMy#1Fr13nd!” and a school login could be along the lines of “$0cial$tud!esR0ck$!” A loose association may make the passphrase easier to remember.
If they are gamers, kids may already be familiar with leet, or using symbols in place of letters. Encourage children to practice their leet fluency and substitute as many letters for symbols as they would like. The Government of Canada recommends that passphrases be at least 15 characters long.
As hard as it might be, never write down passphrases on paper, do not share your password with other people, and do not reuse passphrases. Instead, leverage a password manager, like McAfee True Key, to keep them safe for you. If your child is old enough, encourage them to set up their own account and protect it with two-factor authentication.
Encourage kids to ask questions! Part of your cybersecurity lessons should be to alert an adult when they are not sure if something is quite right. For example, they received an email from grandma, but there is a weird link hidden inside it. Children should know that they can come to you for questions and caution is better than rolling the dice. Questions can then lead to advanced lessons, like how to hover over links to see where they redirect and if the links look fishy.
The cybersecurity lessons you impart on children now will set a solid foundation for sound cyber literacy for a lifetime. No one is ever too old or too young to learn the basics and then put them into practice. Who knows? Maybe you will learn something along the way.
To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, subscribe to our newsletter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.
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There used to be a time when one roommate split the cost of rent with another by writing a check. Who still owns a checkbook these days? Of course, those days are nearly long gone, in large part thanks to “peer to peer” (P2P) mobile payment apps, like Venmo, Zelle, or Cash App. Now with a simple click on an app, you can transfer your friend money for brunch before you even leave the table. Yet for all their convenience, P2P mobile payment apps could cost you a couple of bucks or more if you’re not on the lookout for things like fraud. The good news is that there are some straightforward ways to protect yourself.
You likely have one of these apps on your phone already. If so, you’re among the many. It’s estimated that 70% of adults in the U.S. use mobile payment apps like these. And chances are that you have more than just the one. Only 25% of adults in the U.S. use just a single payment app.
Yet with all those different apps come different policies and protections associated with them. So, if you ever get stuck with a bum charge, it may not always be so easy to get your money back.
With that, here are seven quick tips for using your P2P mobile payment apps safely.
In addition to securing your account with a strong password, go into your settings and set up your app to use a PIN code, facial ID, or fingerprint ID. (And make sure you’re locking your phone the same way too.) This provides an additional layer of protection in the event your phone is stolen or lost and someone, other than you, tries to make a payment with it.
What’s worse than sending money to the wrong person? When paying a friend for the first time, have them make a payment request for you. This way, you can be sure that you’re sending money to the right person. With the freedom to create account names however one likes, a small typo can end up as a donation to a complete stranger. To top it off, that money could be gone for good!
Another option is to make a test payment. Sending a small amount to that new account lets both of you know that the routing is right and that a full payment can be made with confidence.
Bye, bye, bye! Unlike some other payment methods, new mobile payment apps don’t have a way to dispute a charge, cancel a payment, or otherwise use some sort of recall or retrieval feature. If anything, this reinforces the thought above—be sure that you’re absolutely making the payment to the right person.
Credit cards offer a couple of clear advantages over debit cards when using them in association with mobile payment apps (and online shopping for that matter too). Essentially, they can protect you better from fraud:
Report any activity like this immediately to your financial institution. Timing can be of the essence in terms of limiting your liabilities and losses. For additional info, check out this article from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that outlines what to do if your debit or credit card is stolen and what your liabilities are.
Also, note the following guidance from the FTC on payment apps:
“New mobile apps and forms of payment may not provide these same protections. That means it might not always be easy to get your money back if something goes wrong. Make sure you understand the protections and assurances your payment services provider offers with their service.”
It’s sad but true. Crooks are setting up all kinds of scams that use mobile payment apps. A popular one involves creating fake charities or posing as legitimate ones and then asking for funds by mobile payment. To avoid getting scammed, check and see if the charity is legit. The FTC suggests researching resources like Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, Charity Navigator, Charity Watch or, GuideStar.
Overall, the FTC further recommends the following to keep yourself from getting scammed:
With so much of your life on your phone, getting security software installed on your it can protect you and the things you keep on your phone. Whether you’re an Android owner or iOS owner, mobile security software can keep your data, shopping, and payments secure.
The post Avoid Making Costly Mistakes with Your Mobile Payment Apps appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
In 2018, Macs accounted for 10% of all active personal computers. Since then, popularity has skyrocketed. In the first quarter of 2021, Macs experienced 115% growth when compared to Q1 2020, putting Apple in fourth place in the global PC market share. It is safe to say that Macs are well-loved and trusted devices by a significant portion of the population — but just how safe are they from a security perspective?
Many users have historically believed that Macs are untouchable by hackers, giving Apple devices a reputation for being more “secure” than other PCs. However, recent attacks show that this is not the case. According to TechCrunch, a new malware called XCSSET was recently found exploiting a vulnerability that allowed it to access parts of macOS, including the microphone, webcam, and screen recorder — all without consent from the user.
Let’s dive deeper into how XCSSET works.
Researchers first discovered XCSSET in 2020. The malware targeted Apple developers and the projects they use to build and code apps. By targeting app development projects, hackers infiltrated apps early in their production, causing developers to unknowingly distribute the malware to their users.
Once the malware is running on a user’s device, it uses multiple zero-day attacks to alter the machine and spy on the user. These attacks allow the hacker to:
While macOS is supposed to ask users for permission before allowing any app to record the screen, access the microphone or webcam, or open the user’s storage, XCSSET can bypass all of these permissions. This allows the malware to sneak in under the radar and inject malicious code into legitimate apps that commonly ask for screen-sharing permissions such as Zoom, WhatsApp, and Slack. By disguising itself among these legitimate apps, XCSSET inherits their permissions across the computer and avoids getting flagged by macOS’s built-in security defenses. As a result, the bug could allow hackers to access the victim’s microphone, webcam, or capture their keystrokes for login credentials or credit card information.
It is unclear how many devices were affected by XCSSET. Regardless, it is crucial for consumers to understand that Mac’s historical security reputation does not replace the need for users to take online safety precautions. The following tips can help macOS users protect themselves from malware:
Software developers are continuously working to identify and address security issues. Frequently updating your devices’ operating systems, browsers, and apps is the easiest way to have the latest fixes and security protections. For example, Apple confirmed that it addressed the bug exploited by XCSSET in macOS 11.4, which was made available on May 24th, 2021.
Hackers often use phishing emails or text messages as a means to distribute malware by disguising their malicious code in links and attachments. Do not open suspicious or irrelevant messages, as this can result in malware infection. If the message claims to be from a business or someone you know, reach out to the source directly instead of responding to the message. This will allow you to confirm the sender’s legitimacy.
Use a solution like McAfee Total Protection, which can help protect devices against malware, phishing attacks, and other threats. It also includes McAfee WebAdvisor — a tool to help identify malicious websites.
Regardless of whether you are Team PC or Team Mac, it is important to realize that both platforms are susceptible to cyberthreats that are constantly changing. Doing your research on prevalent threats and software bugs puts you in a better position to protect your online safety.
To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, subscribe to our newsletter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.
The post Apple Users: This macOS Malware Could Be Spying on You appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Over the past year, you may have seen the term ransomware popping up frequently. There’s good reason for that as ransomware is responsible for 21% of all cyberattacks, according to a new report. For enterprising hackers, this tactic has become standard operating procedure because it’s effective and organizations are willing to pay. But what does that mean for you and living a confident life online? Fortunately, there are a number of things individuals can do to avoid ransomware. But first, let’s start with the basics.
Ransomware is malware that employs encryption to hold a victim’s information at ransom. The hacker uses it to encrypt a user or organization’s critical data so that they cannot access files, databases, or applications. A ransom is then demanded to provide access. It is a growing threat, generating billions of dollars in payments to cybercriminals and inflicting significant damage and expenses for businesses and governmental organizations.
McAfee Labs counted a 60% increase in attacks from Q4 2019 to Q1 2020 in the United States alone. Unfortunately, the attacks targeting organizations also impact the consumers who buy from them, as the company’s data consists of its customers’ personal and financial information. That means your data if you’ve done business with the affected company. Fortunately, there are many ways you can protect yourself from ransomware attacks.
When a company is hit with a ransomware attack, they typically are quick to report the incident, even though a full analysis of what was affected and how extensive the breach may have been may take much longer. Once they have the necessary details they may reach out to their customers via email, through updates on their site, social media, or even the press to report what customer data may be at risk. Paying attention to official communications through these various channels is the best way to know if you’ve been affected by a ransomware attack.
The top ransomware infection vectors – a fancy term for the way you get ransomware on your device – are phishing and vulnerability exploits. Of these two, phishing is responsible for a full 41% of ransomware infections. Ironically, this is good news, because phishing is something we can learn to spot and avoid by educating ourselves about how scammers work. Before we get into specific tips, know that phishing can take the form of many types of communications including emails, texts, and voicemails. Also know that scammers are convincingly imitating some of the biggest brands in the world to get you to surrender your credentials or install malware on your device. With that in mind, here are several tips to avoid getting phished.
If you receive an email, call, or text asking you to download software or pay a certain amount of money, don’t click on anything or take any direct action from the message. Instead, go straight to the organization’s website. This will prevent you from downloading malicious content from phishing links or forking over money unnecessarily.
If someone sends you a message with a link, hover over the link without clicking on it. This will allow you to see a link preview. If the URL looks suspicious, don’t interact with it and delete the message altogether.
Instead of clicking on a link in an email or text message, it’s always best to check directly with the source to verify an offer, request, or link.
McAfee offers the free McAfee WebAdvisor, which can help identify malicious websites and suspect links that may be associated with phishing schemes.
If you do get ransomware, the story isn’t over. Below are 8 remediation tips that can help get your data back, along with your peace of mind.
If you get ransomware, you’ll want to immediately disconnect any infected devices from your networks to prevent the spread of it. This means you’ll be locked out of your files by ransomware and be unable to move the infected files. Therefore, it’s crucial that you always have backup copies of them, preferably in the cloud and on an external hard drive. This way, if you do get a ransomware infection, you can wipe your computer or device free and reinstall your files from backup. Backups protect your data, and you won’t be tempted to reward the malware authors by paying a ransom. Backups won’t prevent ransomware, but they can mitigate the risks.
If you discover that a data leak or a ransomware attack has compromised a company you’ve interacted with, act immediately and change your passwords for all your accounts. And while you’re at it, go the extra mile and create passwords that are seriously hard to crack with this next tip.
When updating your credentials, you should always ensure that your password is strong and unique. Many users utilize the same password or variations of it across all their accounts. Therefore, be sure to diversify your passcodes to ensure hackers cannot obtain access to all your accounts at once, should one password be compromised. You can also employ a password manager to keep track of your credentials and generate secure login keys.
Two or multi-factor authentication provides an extra layer of security, as it requires multiple forms of verification. For instance, you’ll be asked to verify your identity through another device, such as a phone. This reduces the risk of successful impersonation by hackers.
Be careful where you click. Don’t respond to emails and text messages from people you don’t know, and only download applications from trusted sources. This is important since malware authors often use social engineering to get you to install dangerous files. Using a security extension on your web browser is one way to browse more safely.
Avoid using public Wi-Fi networks, since many of them are not secure, and cybercriminals can snoop on your internet usage. Instead, consider installing a VPN, which provides you with a secure connection to the internet no matter where you go.
While it is often large organizations that fall prey to ransomware attacks, you can also be targeted by a ransomware campaign. If this happens, don’t pay the ransom. Although you may feel that this is the only way to get your encrypted files back, there is no guarantee that the ransomware developers will send a decryption tool once they receive the payment. Paying the ransom also contributes to the development of more ransomware families, so it’s best to hold off on making any payments. Thankfully there are free resources devoted to helping you like McAfee’s No More Ransomware initiative McAfee, along with other organizations, created www.nomoreransom.org/ to educate the public about ransomware and, more importantly, to provide decryption tools to help people recover files that have been locked by ransomware. On the site you’ll find decryption tools for many types of ransomware, including the Shade ransomware.
Adding an extra layer of security with a solution such as McAfee® Total Protection, which includes Ransom Guard, can help protect your devices from these cyber threats. In addition, make sure you update your devices’ software (including security software!) early and often, as patches for flaws are typically included in each update. Comprehensive security solutions also include many of the tools we mentioned above and are simply the easiest way to ensure digital wellness online.
The post 8 Tips for Staying Safe from Ransomware Attacks appeared first on McAfee Blog.
There are more online users now than ever before, thanks to the availability of network-capable devices and online services. The internet population in Canada is the highest it has been, topping the charts at 33 million. That number is only expected to increase through the upcoming years. However, this growing number and continued adoption of online services pose increasing cybersecurity risks as cybercriminals take advantage of more online users and exploit vulnerabilities in online infrastructure. This is why we need AI-backed software to provide advanced protection for online users.
The nature of these online threats is ever-changing, making it difficult for legacy threat detection systems to monitor threat behavior and detect new malicious code. Fortunately, threat detection systems such as McAfee’s Antivirus and Threat Detection Defense adapt to incorporate the latest threat intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) driven behavioral analysis. Here’s how AI impacts cybersecurity to go beyond traditional methods to protect online users.
Most of today’s antivirus and threat detection software leverages behavioral heuristic-based detection based on machine learning models to detect known malicious behavior. Traditional methods rely on data analytics to detect known threat signatures or footprints with incredible accuracy. However, these conventional methods do not account for new malicious code, otherwise known as zero-day malware, for which there is no known information available. AI is mission-critical to cybersecurity since it enables security software and providers to take a more intelligent approach to virus and malware detection. Unlike AI–backed software, traditional methods rely solely on signature-based software and data analytics.
Similar to human-like reasoning, machine learning models follow a three-stage process to gather input, process it, and generate an output in the form of threat leads. Threat detection software can gather information from threat intelligence to understand known malware using these models. It then processes this data, stores it, and uses it to draw inferences and make decisions and predictions. Behavioral heuristic-based detection leverages multiple facets of machine learning, one of which is deep learning.
Deep learning employs neural networks to emulate the function of neurons in the human brain. This architecture uses validation algorithms for crosschecking data and complex mathematical equations, which applies an “if this, then that” approach to reasoning. It looks at what occurred in the past and analyzes current and predictive data to reach a conclusion. As the numerous layers in this framework process more data, the more accurate the prediction becomes.
Many antivirus and detection systems also use ensemble learning. This process takes a layered approach by applying multiple learning models to create one that is more robust and comprehensive. Ensemble learning can boost detection performance with fewer errors for a more accurate conclusion.
Additionally, today’s detection software leverages supervised learning techniques by taking a “learn by example” approach. This process strives to develop an algorithm by understanding the relationship between a given input and the desired output.
Machine learning is only a piece of an effective antivirus and threat detection framework. A proper framework combines new data types with machine learning and cognitive reasoning to develop a highly advanced analytical framework. This framework will allow for advanced threat detection, prevention, and remediation.
Online threats are increasing at a staggering pace. McAfee Labs observed an average of 588 malware threats per minute. These risks exist and are often exacerbated for several reasons, one of which is the complexity and connectivity of today’s world. Threat detection analysts are unable to detect new malware manually due to their high volume. However, AI can identify and categorize new malware based on malicious behavior before they get a chance to affect online users. AI–enabled software can also detect mutated malware that attempts to avoid detection by legacy antivirus systems.
Today, there are more interconnected devices and online usage ingrained into people’s everyday lives. However, the growing number of digital devices creates a broader attack surface. In other words, hackers will have a higher chance of infiltrating a device and those connected to it.
Additionally, mobile usage is putting online users at significant risk. Over 85% of the Canadian population owns a smartphone. Hackers are noticing the rising number of mobile users and are rapidly taking advantage of the fact to target users with mobile-specific malware.
The increased online connectivity through various devices also means that more information is being stored and processed online. Nowadays, more people are placing their data and privacy in the hands of corporations that have a critical responsibility to safeguard their users’ data. The fact of the matter is that not all companies can guarantee the safeguards required to uphold this promise, ultimately resulting in data and privacy breaches.
In response to these risks and the rising sophistication of the online landscape, security companies combine AI, threat intelligence, and data science to analyze and resolve new and complex cyber threats. AI-backed threat protection identifies and learns about new malware using machine learning models. This enables AI-backed antivirus software to protect online users more efficiently and reliably than ever before.
AI addresses numerous challenges posed by increasing malware complexity and volume, making it critical for online security and privacy protection. Here are the top 3 ways AI enhances cybersecurity to better protect online users.
The most significant difference between traditional signature-based threat detection methods and advanced AI-backed methods is the capability to detect zero-day malware. Functioning exclusively from either of these two methods will not result in an adequate level of protection. However, combining them results in a greater probability of detecting more threats with higher precision. Each method will ultimately play on the other’s strengths for a maximum level of protection.
AI enables threat detection software to think like a hacker. It can help software identify vulnerabilities that cybercriminals would typically exploit and flag them to the user. It also enables threat detection software to better pinpoint weaknesses in user devices before a threat has even occurred, unlike conventional methods. AI-backed security advances past traditional methods to better predict what a hacker would consider a vulnerability.
AI can help users understand the risks they face daily. An advanced threat detection software backed by AI can provide a more prescriptive solution to identifying risks and how to handle them. A better explanation results in a better understanding of the issue. As a result, users are more aware of how to mitigate the incident or vulnerability in the future.
AI and machine learning are only a piece of an effective threat detection framework. A proper threat detection framework combines new data types with the latest machine learning capabilities to develop a highly advanced analytical framework. This framework will allow for better threat cyber threat detection, prevention, and remediation.
The post The What, Why, and How of AI and Threat Detection appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
With so many of us relying on the internet in ways we simply haven’t before, it follows that a safer internet is more important than ever before too.
June marks Internet Safety Month, a time where we can look back at the past year and realize that the internet was more than just a coping mechanism during the pandemic, it evolved into a survival tool.
Our research published earlier this year showed how. It found that we relied heavily on the internet for our banking, personal finance, shopping, and even healthcare—not to mention the ways we worked, studied, and kept in touch with each other online during the pandemic. For millions of families globally, the internet was their connection to the rest of the world.
None of that would have been possible without a safer internet that we can trust. The truth is, part of creating a safer internet rests with us—the people who use it. When we take steps to protect ourselves and our families, we end up helping protect others as well. How we act online, how we secure our data and devices, how we take responsibility for our children, all of it affects others.
Here are just a few ways you can indeed make a safer internet for your family, and by extension, safer for others too:
Start with the basics: get strong protection for your computers and laptops. And that means more than basic antivirus. Using a comprehensive suite of security software like McAfee® Total Protection can help defend your entire family from the latest threats and malware, make it safer to browse, help steer you clear of potential fraud, and look out for your privacy too.
Protecting your smartphones and tablets is a must nowadays as well. We’re using them to send money with payment apps. We’re doing our banking on them. And we’re using them as a “universal remote control” to do things like set the alarm, turn our lights on and off and even see who’s at the front door. Whether you’re an Android owner or iOS owner, get security software installed on your smartphones and tablets so you can protect all the things they access and control.
Another thing that comprehensive security software can do is create and store unique passwords for all your accounts and automatically use them as you surf, shop, and bank. Further, it can keep those passwords safe—unlike when they’re stored in an unprotected file on your computer, which can be subject to a hack or data loss—or sticky notes that can simply get lost.
With stories of data breaches and identity theft making the news on a regular basis, there’s plenty of focus on the things we can do to protect ourselves from identity theft. However, children can be targets of identity theft as well. The reason is, they’re high-value targets for hackers. Their credit reports are clean, and it’s often years before parents become aware that their child’s identity was stolen, such as when the child enters adulthood and rents an apartment or applies for their first credit card.
One way you can spot and even prevent identity theft is by checking your child’s credit report. Doing so will uncover any inconsistencies or outright instances of fraud and put you on the path to set them straight. In the U.S., you can do this for free once a year. Just drop by the FTC website for details on your free credit report. And while you’re at it, you can go and do the same for yourself.
You can take your protection a step further by freezing your child’s credit. A freeze will prevent access to your child’s report and thus prevent any illicit activity. In the U.S., you’ll need to create a separate freeze with each of the three major credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). It’s free to do so, yet you’ll have to do a little legwork to prove that you’re indeed the child’s parent or guardian.
Smartphone safety for kids is a blog topic in itself. Several topics, actually—such as when it’s the “right” time to get a child their first smartphone, how they can stay safe while using them, placing limits on their screen time, and so on.
Taking it from square one, make sure that all your smartphones are protected like we called out above—whether it’s yours or your child’s. From there, there are eight easy steps you can take to hack-proof your family’s smartphones, such as juicing up your passwords, making sure the apps on them are safe and setting your smartphone to automatic updates.
If you’re on the fence about getting your child their first smartphone, you’re certainly not alone. So many parents are drawn to the idea of being able to get in touch with their children easily, and even track their whereabouts, yet they’re concerned that a smartphone is indeed too much phone for younger children. They simply don’t want to expose their children to the broader internet just yet.
The good news is that there are plenty of smartphone alternatives for kids. Streamlined flip phones are still a fine option for parents and kids, as are cellular walkie-talkies and new lines of devices designed specifically with kids in mind.
And if you’re ready to make the jump, check out our tips for keeping your child safe when you purchase their first smartphone. From basic security and parental controls to keeping tabs on your child’s activity and your role in keeping them safe, this primer makes for good reading, and good sharing with other parents too, when you get serious about making that purchase.
Cyberbullying is another broad and in-depth topic that we cover in our blogs quite often, and for good reason. Data from the Cyberbullying Research Center shows that an average of more than 27% of kids have experienced cyberbullying over the past 13 years. In 2019, that figure was as high as 36.5%. Without question, it’s a problem.
What exactly is cyberbullying? Stopbullying.gov defines it as:
“Cyberbullying is bullying that takes place over digital devices like cell phones, computers, and tablets. Cyberbullying can occur through SMS, Text, and apps, or online in social media, forums, or gaming where people can view, participate in, or share content. Cyberbullying includes sending, posting, or sharing negative, harmful, false, or mean content about someone else. It can include sharing personal or private information about someone else causing embarrassment or humiliation.”
Part of the solution is knowing how to spot cyberbullying and likewise taking steps to minimize its impact if you see it happening to your child or someone else’s. The important thing is to act before serious damage sets in or even a criminal act can occur.
The painful truth is that someone’s child is doing the bullying, and what could be more painful than finding out your child is doing the bullying? If you suspect this is happening, or have seen evidence that it’s indeed happening, act right away. Our article “Could Your Child (Glup) be the One Cyberbullying,” outlines ten steps you can take right away.
If you’ve taken steps to solve a situation involving cyberbullying and nothing has worked, know there are cyberbullying resources that can help. Likewise, don’t hesitate to contact your child’s school for assistance. Many schools have policies in place that address cyberbullying amongst their students, whether the activity occurred on campus or off.
With all the emphasis on technology, it’s easy to forget that behind every attack on the internet, there’s a person. A safer internet relies on how we treat each other and how we carry ourselves on the internet (which can be quite different from how we carry ourselves in face-to-face interactions).
With that, National Internet Safety Month presents a fine opportunity to pause and consider how we’re acting online. Very Well Family put together an article on internet etiquette for kids, which covers everything from the online version of “The Golden Rule” to ways you can steer clear of rudeness and drama.
Granted, we can’t control the behavior of others. Despite your best efforts, you or your children may find themselves targeted by poor or hurtful behavior online. For guidance on how to handle those situations, check out our article on internet trolls and how to handle them. There’s great advice in there for everyone in the family.
If we didn’t know it already, the past year proved that a safer internet isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s vital—a trusted resource we can’t do without. Take time this month to consider your part in that, what you can do to make your corner of the internet safer and a thriving place that everyone can enjoy.
The post A Safer Internet for You, Your Family, and Others Too appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
It’s a question I get several times a year from anxious parents, either via a direct message, an email or even in line at the grocery store. It goes something like this: “What’s the one thing you wish you’d done better when monitoring your kids’ technology?”
Both of my kids are now young adults, and together, we survived a handful of digital mishaps. So, I tend to have a few answers ready. I’ll go into one of those answers in this post, and here it is: I’d physically pick up their phone more often and ask questions about the apps I didn’t recognize.
And here’s why.
There are the apps on your child’s phone that are familiar. They are the easy ones. We know what color they are, what their graphic avatars look like — the little ghost on the yellow background, the little bird, the camera on the bright purple and orange background. We may have gone through the app together or even use one or two of the apps ourselves. There’s Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, Kik, and Instagram, among others. There are the mainstay photo apps (VSCO, Facetune, PicsArt) and games (The Sims, Fortnite, Minecraft). We may not like all the apps, but we’ve likely talked about the risks and feel comfortable with how your kids use them. With general recognition, it’s easy to have a false sense of security about what apps our kids are using.
Then, there are the apps on your child’s phone you know nothing about — and there are plenty. Rather than dismiss your concern because you don’t understand the app or because you may not have the energy to start an argument, next time, think about pausing to take a closer look. If you have concerns, address them sooner rather than later.
Here are just a few of the non-mainstream apps that kids use that may not be on your radar but may need a second look. Note: Every app has the potential to be misused. The apps mentioned here are also used every day for connection, entertainment, and harmless fun. Here are just a few this author has had experience with, and others commonly documented in the media.
Quick Tip: It’s possible a child might bury an app inside a folder or behind other apps on their home screens, making it harder to find. By going into settings in either iOS (Settings > General > iPhone Storage) or Android (Google Play Store > Apps >All), you can usually get a quick view of all the apps that exist on a phone.
Almost every app has privacy gaps if settings and monitoring are neglected. However, apps such as Live.Me, Game Pigeon, and Zoomerang (among many others) may have loopholes when it comes to age verification, location tracking, and gaps in personal data security. These gaps can give potential predators access to kids and increases opportunities for cyberbullying.
Safe Family Tip: Sit down with your kids, go through any unfamiliar apps, and use parental controls to monitor all family device activity.
If a child wants to keep activity or content secret from a parent, they will likely find a way. Some of the apps kids use to hide games, photos, or texts are encryption apps (apps that scramble content to outside sources) such as WhatsApp, Proton VPN, ProtonMail, Telegram, and Signal. Other secrecy apps are called vault apps (apps that can be disguised, hidden, or locked), such as Calculator, Vault, HideItPro, App Locker, and Poof.
Safe Family Tip: If you find one of these apps on your child’s phone, stay calm. Kids want privacy, which is normal. However, if the content you see is risky, remind your child that no content is 100% private, even if it’s in a vault app. In addition, commit to the ongoing dialogue that strengthens trust and together, considers setting safety expectations for devices, which may include parental controls.
Some apps, especially dating-type apps, require users to allow geotagging to connect you with people in your area. Yubo, which is an app like Tinder, is one your kids may be using that requires location to use it. Live.Me is another geotagging app.
Safe Family Tip: Go over the reasons location apps (and dating apps) are dangerous with your child. Sharing their location and meeting In Real Life (IRL) has become the norm to many kids. Remind them of the risks of this kind of behavior and together, put new boundaries in place.
The web is full of sketchy, dark pockets kids can stumble into. They can hear about a community forum or app from a friend and be wowed simply because it’s different and edgy. While there are plenty of harmless conversations taking place on these apps, spaces such as Discord, Reddit, and Twitch have reportedly housed communities’ extreme ideologies that target vulnerable kids.
Safe Family Tip: Be aware of behavior changes. Talk with your kids about the wide range of ideals and agendas promoted online, how to think critically about conversations and content, and most importantly, how to spot these communities.
Anonymity online is problematic for a plethora of reasons. Apps such as Yolo, Tumblr, and Tellonym, Omegle, YikYak, Whisper, LMK, MeetMe, are just a few of those apps to look for. Many of these apps are chat apps used to eventually meet up with new friends in real life (IRL). However, when apps allow anonymous accounts, it’s almost impossible to trace inappropriate content, threats, or bullying incidents.
Safe Family Tip: Kids get excited about making friends and having new experiences— so much so, they can ignore potential consequences. Discuss issues that may arise (catfishing, sextortion, scams, bullying) when people hide behind anonymous names and profiles. If needed, give real examples from the news where these apps have been connected to tragic outcomes.
Several apps and online communities have been connected to violence, hate content, intolerance, and fanaticism. A few of these sites include 4Chan, 8Chan, AnyChan, Gab, SaidIt.Net, and 8Kun, among many others.
Safe Family Tip: Note any behavior changes in your child. Talk often about digital literacy and being a responsible publisher (and consumer) of media online.
Staying in step with your child’s latest and greatest app affinity isn’t easy, and every parent makes mistakes in how they approach the task. However, kids of all ages (no matter how tech-savvy they are) need boundaries, expectations, and consistent and honest dialogue when it comes to digital habits and staying safe online. If you don’t know where to start (or start over), one first step is to start today and commit to staying aware of the digital risks out there. In addition, make time to have regular, open conversations with your child about their favorite apps — the ones you know about and the ones you may not.
The post Potentially Malicious Apps Your Kids May Use appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
May 2021 has been an extraordinary month in the cybersecurity world, with the DoD releasing its DoD Zero Trust Reference Architecture (DoDZTRA), the Colonial Pipeline being hit with a ransomware attack, and the White House releasing its Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (EO). Add to that several major vendors that our government depends on for its critical operations disclosing critical vulnerabilities that could potentially expose our nation’s critical infrastructure to even more risk, ranging from compromised email and cloud infrastructures to very sophisticated supply chain attacks like the SolarWinds hack, which could have started as early as 2019.
If the situation sounds ominous, it is. The words and guidance outlined in the DoDZTRA and EO must be followed up with a clear path to action and all the stakeholders, both public and private, are not held accountable for progress. This should not be another roll-up reporting exercise, time to study the situation, or end up in analysis paralysis thinking about the problem. Our adversaries move at speeds we never anticipated by leveraging automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, social engineering, and more vectors against us. It’s time for us to catch up and just very possibly think differently to get ahead.
There is no way around it: This time our nation must invest in protecting our way of life today and for future generations.
The collective “we” observed what happened when ransomware hit a portion of the nation’s critical infrastructure at Colonial Pipeline. If the extortion wasn’t bad enough, the panic buying of gasoline and even groceries in many of Eastern U.S. states impacted thousands of people seemingly overnight, with help from social and traditional media. It’s too early to predict what the exact financial and social impacts may have been on this attack. I suspect the $4.4M ransom paid was very small in the greater scheme of the event.
May 2021 has provided a wake-up call for public-private cooperation like we’ve never seen before. Perhaps we need to rethink cybersecurity altogether. During his keynote remarks at the recent RSA Conference, McAfee CTO Steve Grobman talked about how “as humans, we are awful at perceiving risk.” Influenced by media, anecdotal data, and evolutionary biology, we let irrational fears drive decision-making, which leads humans to misperceive actual risks and sub-optimize risk reduction in both the physical and cyber world. To combat these tendencies, Steve encourages us to “be aware of our biases and embrace data and science-based approaches to assess and mitigate risk.”
Enter Zero Trust Cybersecurity, which is an architectural approach – not a single vendor product or solution. The DoDZTRA takes a broader view of Zero Trust than the very narrow access control focus, saying it is “a cybersecurity strategy and framework that embeds security throughout the architecture to prevent malicious personas from accessing our most critical assets.” And our most critical assets are data.
NSA also recently weighed in on Zero Trust, recommending that an organization invest in identifying its critical data, assets, applications, and services. The NSA guidance goes on to suggest placing additional focus on architecting from the inside out; ensuring all paths to data, assets, applications, and services are secure; determining who needs access; creating control policies; and finally, inspecting and logging all traffic before reacting.
These practices require full visibility into all activity across all layers — from endpoints to the network (which includes cloud) — to enable analytics that can detect suspicious activity. The ability to have early or advanced warnings of global and local threat campaigns, indicators of compromise, and the capability to deliver proactive countermeasures is a must-have as part of an organization’s defensive strategies.
The Zero Trust guidance from both DoD and NSA is worth following. It’s also worth reprising the concept of defense in depth – the cybersecurity strategy of leveraging multiple security mechanisms to protect an organization’s assets. Relying on a single vendor for all an organization’s IT and security needs makes it much easier for the adversary.
If you believe in a good conspiracy theory, the month of May 2021 could provide great material for a made-for-TV movie. Earlier I mentioned that the collective “we” needs to be held accountable. Part of that accountability is defining success metrics as we take on a new path to real cybersecurity.
The post Why May 2021 Represents a New Chapter in the “Book of Cybersecurity Secrets” appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Believe it or not, the baby turns 3 today! And like with every three-year-old, there is a lot to watch out for.
Granted, when GDPR was born it was after a 2-year gestation (transition) period. What followed were many sleepless nights with the new baby when it was born on May 25, 2018; not to mention the sleepless nights in the run up to the birth. Some parents (organisations) were running around frantically trying to figure out what the heck was going on, few parents were over-prepared and some, well, some were coasting. We then hit the Terrible (Schrems) Two’s when tantrums prevailed (i.e. Privacy Shield held invalid) and we cut our first teeth (the first fines). And so, we find ourselves raising this rowdy toddler, who will no doubt create more life-altering changes when it hits teenage years! There is certainly more to follow…
All jokes aside, the privacy space has seen a lot of changes (ups and downs) in these last three years:
And it will continue to be interesting to work in this space:
And so, as this toddler finds its feet in the world, there is only one thing we can do to wish it along: sing together “Happy Birthday, GDPR!!!”
The post Happy Birthday GDPR! appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
The security industry is engulfed in the most asymmetric cyberwarfare we have ever seen.
The outcome of an Attacker’s mission may depend entirely upon a single misplaced charge on a single memory chip on a single server, perhaps the difference between a vulnerable and secure setting in a registry key, and the difference between success and failure to gain access to infrastructure, information, and identities (I3) to subsequently wreak havoc, disable critical operations or infrastructure, and put lives at risk.
The outcome of a Defender’s day depends entirely upon how well they secure trillions of charges across chips, computers, containers, clouds, and even cars against potentially thousands of simultaneous Attackers running millions of attacks, each scouring the Defender’s kingdom for the crown jewels of control and information.
This ridiculously uneven war between Attacker and Defender has been a well-known challenge in cybersecurity for some time, and a few fear-inducing statistics always find their way into the first few slides of PowerPoint presentations. However, this asymmetric dynamic remains perhaps the single most fundamental truth that should guide us to innovate and to design solutions to give our Defenders better outcomes every day. From this lens, first, we must discuss how to shape and prioritize the protection, detection, and response capabilities with which we will arm Defenders.
We must face some harsh and humbling truths that history has taught us about our asymmetric war:
A. Better incident response (IR) programs and better IR training will not solve this problem. Best practices and tool upgrades will win a few battles for the Defender. Still, research suggests a full investment in SOAR and other automation tools will at most reduce costs by roughly 60% for leaders over laggards, all while the cost of breaches continues to rise across all organizations. Investment in IR programs is unquestionably justified from a financial perspective, but that investment is equivalent to sharpening our spears around the campfire while waiting for the tigers to pounce in the long view of the asymmetric war.
B. Continued entrepreneurship and innovation in novel but transient security controls and frameworks will not solve this problem. Simson Garfinkel, currently Senior Data Scientist at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, spoke of “The Cybersecurity Mess” and how “cybersecurity is a wicked problem that can’t be solved” almost a decade ago, which was arguably a much simpler and more manageable time for Defenders. Gartner’s Hype Cycle is an excellent value-lifecycle tracker for categories of inventions, and few categories have a faster ride on the Hype Cycle rollercoaster than cybersecurity. At best, security controls rapidly transition from revolutionary standalone products to line-item features on a data sheet as Attackers adapt to and overcome their main value proposition. Perhaps the next ten tigers are caught in camouflaged traps, but we soon notice that they have adapted to avoid them and even set their own.
So, do we accept our fate and ultimate defeat of the Defender at the hands of the Attackers? Or is there a Mars Shot initiative that could dwarf anything we have accomplished in the past, bringing symmetry to the war and erasing millions of person-years of Attacker experience and superiority in a flash? And what the heck does this have to do with eXtended Detection and Response (XDR)?
Almost 25 years ago, IBM’s Deep Blue overcame 1500 years of cumulative chess knowledge to defeat Garry Kasparov. Five years ago, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo destroyed over 3000 years of accumulated techniques and strategy to supplant Lee Sedol as the greatest go player ever. Shortly after, Google’s next-gen AlphaZero rendered its own AlphaGo mentor obsolete, having learned chess and go without any human interaction. It seems unfathomable that human beings will even attempt to win these titles back, and we have deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL) to thank.
We have the same massively disruptive opportunity to give hope to the Defender by looking to embed self-learning automated AI systems into our prevention, detection, and response controls, as outlined by the MIT Technology Review discussing security uses for AIOps. Less a point on the Gartner Hype Cycle, and more an entirely new dimension of innovation, this cybersecurity AI system, like all AI systems, requires two major components to feed its hunger to learn: (a) large amounts of data related to the inputs and outputs of the I3 systems across the attack surface, and (b) reliable feedback mechanisms and workflows to train the algorithms. The precursors of these needs map readily to (a) the well-established SIEM and Security Analytics markets and (b) the newer EDR and emerging XDR markets.
Source: Sutton, R.S., Barto, A.G. (2015). Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, pp. 54.
Allie Mellen, an analyst with Forrester Research who covers SecOps, has already written an excellent research report succinctly describing key strengths and weaknesses of these markets and the dynamics likely to unfold in the near term:
A. A convergence of critical technologies and capabilities from the SIEM, SOAR, and XDR markets is inevitable; and,
B. EDR and EDR platforms are the natural evolutionary precursors to XDR, given that endpoints have become pivotal nodes in attack chains.
EDR technology on computers, notebooks, and phones has proven to give us the most detailed and robust knowledge about end-user behavior and risk. EDR provides a natural data-rich progression to XDR on the Gartner 2020 Hype Cycle for Endpoint Security as the “next tech up” to provide meaningful and prescriptive training feedback to emerging AI platforms (e.g., IR Analyst A carried out Steps X, Y, and Z across Controls 1, 2 and 3 to negate Threat A). Through research such as Google’s multi-task machine learning exercise and Zhamak Dehghani’s groundbreaking rethinking of data architectures, we have also come to understand that future I3 datasets for AI consumption will likely reside in globally distributed data meshes and not monstrous and monolithic data lakes. The evolution from SIEM to Security Analytics and from EDR to XDR offer the preliminary steps to bring us to a fully integrated “DeepSecOps” platform that has the potential to turn the Attacker-Defender asymmetry on its head. For this blog, let’s define DeepSecOps as a platform or system that seamlessly and automatically integrates the components and processes described in the diagram above (and potentially more), with self-fueled learning and effective automated response as the fundamental goals.
There also exists a more foreboding reason to invest in XDR as a precursor to DeepSecOps. Tomorrow’s Attacker is honing their craft today: They will casually launch thousands of containers across a hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure designed to morph into multiple target infrastructure profiles with various off-the-shelf security controls already in place, and then unleash thousands of simulated attacks while their own Deep RL engine watches and measures its success.
Defenders should look to cybersecurity partners who offer them a clear path to build the foundation for a DeepSecOps future. What does this look like today? Some key considerations:
Make these considerations the tactical precursors to unleashing the DeepSecOps technology that will reframe and contain the Attacker-Defender asymmetry.
On what wings dare [they] aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
Whether you are building a SOC function with limited resources or maturing a well-established SOC, McAfee is here to help you simplify and strengthen your security operations with MVISION XDR. With MVISION XDR, you can proactively identify, investigate and mitigate threat actors targeting your organization before they can gain a foothold in the network. By combining the latest machine-learning techniques with human analysis, XDR connects and amplifies the early warning signals from your sensors at the network, endpoint, and cloud to improve situational awareness, drive better and faster decisions, and elevate your SOC.
To learn more about what MVISION XDR can do for you watch the video below.
* With apologies to William Blake for dragging his brilliant metaphor into the world of cybersecurity and with a nod to that early Wolverine comic.
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To enjoy online life to the fullest these days, we often have to give out a certain amount of personal information. That also means the moment you go online you’re giving personal data away. Whether it’s your phone, a game console, or a connected speaker, someone, somewhere, is monitoring your connection. Knowing what data your device sends, and who has access to that information, is an important part of maintaining your online privacy. However, without the right tools, you’re probably giving away a lot more information than you realize. Many believe that one effective way to maintain online privacy is by using a private mode on a browser.
However, it’s a common misconception that “private browsing” modes–like Google’s Incognito–protect your online privacy. It makes sense, they’re called “private browsing”, what else would they do? Well, if you’ve read the news lately, you may have seen that Google is in a $5 billion lawsuit specifically because of their private browsing mode.
The thing is, incognito mode is often misunderstood. When you open an incognito window, you’re told that “You’ve gone incognito.” The explanation underneath says that your browsing history, website visits, cookies, and information you put in forms, won’t be saved. This is where the confusion starts. What the incognito explanation doesn’t tell you is that your browsing information isn’t blocked or hidden from advertisers while in incognito mode. So even though your browsing information “won’t be saved” on your device or available after you close the window, that doesn’t stop the internet from seeing everything you’ve been up to while in that session.
For these reasons, more people use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to protect their browsing history from prying eyes. If you’re new to VPN, this might be the perfect time to learn about what they are, how they work and why you might choose a VPN over private browsing.
VPN protects your devices by wrapping your internet connection in a secure tunnel that only you can access. This stops people —like those nosey advertisers—from seeing what sites you visit. With a secure connection to the Internet, every search request, every website you browse, is hidden from sight. It’s important to point out that VPN doesn’t make you anonymous; they make it so only you can see what you’re doing online. You can learn even more about VPN in this blog.
Without private browsing, your browser tells websites–and their owners–all kinds of things about you like what device you’re using, where you are, what sites you’ve visited, and when. Websites use this information to serve you relevant ads, but it can also be used to track your location and browsing habits.
With private browsing, your browser window is isolated from the rest of your operating system. Isolating the browser is supposed to help block websites from seeing who you are, block cookies and prevent access to your browsing history, but even when using private browsing, tests like EFF’s Panopticlick privacy test can see what device you’re on, where you’re connecting, if you can accept cookies, your OS, and many other types personally-identifying information.
We wouldn’t recommend using incognito mode instead of a VPN, ever. However, Incognito mode has its place in your online security toolkit, as long as you don’t think of it as a replacement for other types of protection. For instance, if you share a device with other people, like family members, then you might want to use incognito mode to make sure your partner doesn’t accidentally find out how much you spent on their surprise birthday gift. But, if you’re concerned with advertisers tracking you and watching what you do online, then you should consider also using a VPN to protect your privacy.
If you’re already a McAfee Total Protection subscriber, you have access to unlimited VPN usage. Protect your personal information, like your banking information and credit cards, from prying eyes with McAfee Total Protection’s Secure VPN. If you haven’t already signed up, now’s the perfect time. McAfee Total Protection provides security for all your devices, giving you peace of mind while you shop, bank, and browse online.
The post Private browsing vs VPN – Which one is more private? appeared first on McAfee Blog.
In response to the latest MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK® Evaluation 3, McAfee noted five capabilities that are must-haves for Sec Ops and displayed in the evaluation. This blog will speak to the alert actionability capability which is essential. This critical ability to react in the fastest possible way, as early as possible on the attack chain, while correlating, aggregating and summarizing all subsequent activity while reducing alert fatigue to allow Sec Ops to uphold efficient actionability.
As a Sec Ops practitioner and former analyst, I can remember the days of painstakingly sifting through countless alerts to determine if any of them could be classified as an incident. It was up to me to decide if the alert were a false positive, false alarm, or something the business should take more seriously… was it something we should wake someone up in the middle of the night over?
It’s been years since I sat on the front line, triaging the results of millions of dollars in investments installed on 100’s of 1000’s of systems worldwide. Thank goodness, times have changed. But the concept of “Alert Actionability” is still a very real aspect of SOC tooling, and it seeks to address 3 primary factors: trustworthiness, detail, and reaction capabilities.
When I say “trustworthiness” I’m referring to a quality of fidelity that has two equal, yet opposing, faces of efficacy: false positives and false negatives. Now, it would be very easy for a SOC solution provider to claim that its product offers 100% visibility if it creates an alert for every process activity and artifact recorded. Sure, its coverage is present, but how actionable is the needle in a stack of needle? As a result, the vendor is likely pressured to fine tune it’s alerting and as such introduces the risk of false negatives, or actual malicious events which go undetected. In the zeal of appealing to useability requirements the false positive curve decreases but the false negative volumes have no choice but to rise.
Resulting in a graph like this:
The secret sauce in the vendor’s capabilities lies in its capacity to push the intersection of these as far right as possible: minimize the false positives and maximize true positives while simultaneously attempting to bring false negatives down to zero. The better a vendor’s product can perform these non-trivial goals, the more likely it is to win your trust as a solution! And the more likely you are to trust the results you see on the dashboard.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools have a unique property in which they offer both telemetry and alerting. This implies that there are two goals for EDR platforms: to include event level (telemetry) visibility with automated detection and to provide alerting capabilities for triggering action and triage. With telemetry, the concept of “falsing” is negated because it’s used in a post-facto context. After the alert is constructed, the telemetry can be correlated with the alert logic to provide supporting details. Simply, for EDR telemetry, the more the better.
As an analyst, I remember how much I loved putting together the pieces to tell a story. Extracting key artifacts from several disparate data sources and correlating hypothesis allowed me to present a compelling case as to the conclusion of the alert’s disposition. And I knew that I needed as much detail as possible to make my case; this is just as true today. The detail needs to be easily accessible, and it’s even better when the platform provides the detail proactively. In cases where such supporting evidence may not be possible in the alerting, an analyst’s expectation is that the platform makes hunting for those details easy; I’d even venture to say, “a delight.”
Many EDR platforms on the market offer reaction capabilities to address the “Response” moniker of the acronym. How flexible those response capabilities are in the platform provides a domain of options to act in response to the alert. For example, its rather evident that once an alert is convicted, the analyst may want to block the process, or remove a file from disk. But these reactions imply that the conviction is monolithic in that the analyst is absolutely sure of her conclusion. What if the conclusion is that we simply need more data? Having a robust reaction library that allows for further investigation with routines like sending a sample to a running sandbox, interacting with a given endpoint to act as an administrator, view system logs, or check the history of network connections all empower the analyst with further investigatory options. But why stop there? Having any fixed set of reactions would be presumptive. Instead, EDR products with a dynamic library and flexible, customizable, and modular reaction platform is key as every single SOC I’ve ever worked with has unique Incident Management and Standard Operating Procedures.
MITRE ENGINUITY released results for its 3rd round of ATT&CK® Evaluations in April 2021. The industry is certainly fortunate to receive such 3rd party efficacy testing in the EDR market completely free to consumers. It is incredibly important to add that the ATT&CK Evaluations should be used as a single component of your EDR evaluation program. Efficacy helps determine how fit-for-purpose the product is by answering questions like, “Will it detect a threat when I need it to?” or “Can I find what I need, when I need it?”. But practitioners realize there are also pivotal points that need to be addressed around manageability. Understanding that not alerting on everything is just as important as alerting on the right things. And giving you a plethora of alerting response capabilities helps complete the alert investigation and response actions. McAfee’s MVISION EDR embraces all of these key alert actionability factors and will help displace the manual efforts in your analytics processes. McAfee’s MVISION EDR (soon to evolve to MVISION Extended Detection & Response (XDR)) provided insight through detail and reduced alert fatigue during the evaluation providing context and enrichment, resulting in a ratio of 62% analytic detections (non-telemetry detections) out of the 274-total detections.
Check out other McAfee discussion on MITRE (see resources tab.)
The post Alert Actionability In Plain English From a Practitioner appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
In Part 1 of our Through Your Mind’s Eye series, we explored how our brains don’t give each decision we make equal attention, and we take mental shortcuts known as biases. These biases allow us to react quickly, but they can also lead to mistakes and oversights. Because we all have biases that shape who we are, our decisions in and out of cybersecurity can be impacted in both good and bad ways.
Safety bias is focusing on shortcomings so as not to take a risk. Many studies have shown that we as humans would prefer not to lose money even more than we’d prefer to gain money. You may have heard about studies where people are offered a lower amount of money now or higher amount in two years. Most participants took the sure thing of money now rather than wait for more. However, this changes when people are faced with a loss decision. For instance, when asked if they would rather definitely lose $100 or take a 50% chance of losing $1000, most say they would take the option to risk losing $1000. Because of safety biases, progress in decision making is slowed and healthy forms of risk taking are held back.
Safety bias is seen in security development operations, risk assessment, policies and procedures, decision making, and identity and access management. For the area of security development operations, is your dev ops team applying traditional network controls to the cloud or are they looking at how they can refactor to help take their organization to the next level? Are they stuck in the past or moving to the future?
When was the last time you reviewed your security products and their capabilities for risk assessment? Are you keeping what you have because you already purchased those solutions, or are you reviewing them to ensure they’re the best at keeping your organization safe? For example, does your current solution have a vulnerability scanner that can identify advanced vulnerabilities? Would you upgrade if it didn’t? If you aren’t evaluating your security products against emerging threats on a regular basis, your risks can be impacted without realizing it.
There are also parallels with our example above where participants took the immediate sure thing. The same thinking causes companies to invest in solutions that may be overkill to address overly specific and high impact/low probability risk factors. They are solving for something with a low probability of happening and, as a result, may be spending much more on policies and procedures than necessary.
When there is an ambiguity in decision making, system owners may be reluctant to upgrade or apply the latest patches. There may also be an unwillingness of end-users to configure security features, and a lack of interest from developers to add new security features to an existing application. As a result, these system owners err on the side of caution so as to not break or change something since they see this as more of a risk than installing the latest patches. Likewise, developers may opt for cost savings rather than add in security features.
As you move from on-prem to cloud solutions, have you considered what software applications need to be retooled for optimization in the cloud for your identity and access management requirements? What new identity analytics solutions need to be put in place to be prepared for the future? Or are you keeping things “as is” because that is the safe thing to do?
Some social scientists lump the ostrich effect with safety bias. The ostrich effect is based on a myth that ostriches bury their head in the sand when they sense danger. Is your team “burying their heads in the sand” when they need to make a risky decision?
To overcome safety bias, get some distance between you and the decision being made. Imagine a past self already having made the choice successfully in order to weaken the perception that there will be loss. Another idea, if you feel this is something happening in your environment, is to balance out your team with both risk-taking and risk adverse team members.
Framing Effect – The framing effect also influences safety bias and relates to how something is “framed” or described. For instance, if something is worded in a negative way to emphasize the potential for loss, the receiver may be afraid to take a risk. You may have seen commercials for cyber services that say, “1 in 5 companies lost their data while using another service”. Instead of focusing on the 4 that did not lose their data, they focused on the 1 that did lose so you’ll think about them protecting you instead of their competition. Another example that drives home the point is related to health. Let’s say you needed an operation. How would you feel if the doctor told you that you had an 80% chance of recovery? Now what if the doctor said you had a 20% chance of death by having this same operation? Would you think differently how you approached the operation? Pay attention to how statements are phrased to overcome gut reactions when deciding.
Affinity Bias – Affinity bias is gravitating to what we know or are comfortable with as opposed to the unknown. For example, when you see a stranger wearing your college alma mater sweatshirt in another city you instantly feel a connection to them even though you have never met. This creates an “in-group” bias. This can manifest in cyber as an aversion to new product offerings. Are you still using the same solutions you’ve been using for the last 20 years because they are familiar and comfortable to you or are you using an XDR solution now? You may also feel your direct team alone has all the right answers and no one else knows how to secure the environment or application better than your team. Is that because it’s true or because you are most comfortable with them?
Similarity Bias – Similarity bias occurs because we as humans are highly motivated to see ourselves and those who are similar to us in a favorable light. We unconsciously create “ingroups” and “outgroups”. These could be related to the city or country where we grew up or live today, where we went to school, areas of interest, etc. Are you hiring people who are similar to who you currently have on the team or are you looking for skills and individuals that bring diverse perspectives or meet your needs in the next 1-2 years?
Loss Aversion – An example of loss aversion can be observed when companies have already invested in their traditional IT infrastructure so why move to the cloud? Moving to the cloud takes time and resources. Instead of modernizing, they keep buying new servers and storage to keep the environment running as it had been for decades.
Distance Bias – Distance bias is prioritizing what is nearby whether it is in physical space, time, or other domains. Prior to the pandemic when we were in conference rooms having conversations, how many times did you observe people in the meeting room failing to gather inputs from their remote colleagues on the phone? Or have you decided based on what you needed to do sooner in time instead of considering the long-term effects of what was best for the company?
As you saw in each of the biases featured in both of our articles, they are not mutually exclusive. There are many overlaps between the different types of cognitive biases. How do we address these?
Awareness of the cognitive biases at play for you and your teams is one of the first steps to ensuring your company is not at risk. After you have acknowledged the possibility of biases and flaws in your environment, examine where you may have biases influencing your cybersecurity posture. This requires personal insight and empathy by all involved.
Begin to educate others on where and how biases could be impacting your cybersecurity posture. Once that is done, have a thorough review of your current cybersecurity posture and adjust as necessary. Over the next few months, work on building habits across the team to ensure you are consciously removing biases that could be influencing your cybersecurity posture.
Our adversaries understand human biases and actively try to exploit them. Removing these biases as much as possible can help you and your team improve your security posture and defend your organization across all levels.
The post Through Your Mind’s Eye: How to Address Biases in Cybersecurity – Part 2 appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Imagine this scenario: a CEO, CIO, CTO, CISO walk into a bar…
The CTO has heard about cocktails that go beyond the “pour and shake,” and asks the bartender what they know about molecular gastronomy to take their drink to the next level. The CIO considers the CTO’s choice, weighing the risk versus reward of trying something new. The CEO orders a Long Island iced tea – a bold, ambitious, and challenging choice that incorporates a bit of everything, but they know in their gut it is the right decision and direction. The CISO orders a water.
Why? Because somebody always must be the designated driver, taking the responsibility to protect the integrity of the entire team and organization. They are the eyes and ears, proactively anticipating what may happen, knowing the onus is also on them to respond reactively to anything that may occur.
While in a bar this may mean things getting a bit rowdy, in the security operations center (SOC) it means an entire business can be compromised, creating a catastrophic spiral of events that can have massive impact and implications for customers, not to mention severe cost to the business.
Needless to say, the consequences are more extreme than a hangover. They remain always-on in the mind of the CISO – and this isn’t the only challenge the role faces. It is no secret in the security industry that elevating the role of the CISO to carry equal weight and footing as the rest of the executive or c-suite has been an uphill battle. While progress has certainly been made, there is always more work to be done to thwart and combat the seemingly never-ending barrage of threats that continue to emerge.
Nearly every industry has been impacted in some manner by the events of 2020 and so far, across 2021. Attacks have increased and promise to become even more plentiful, more sophisticated. Enterprises and organizations have struggled against unforeseen challenges, yet at the same time have faced increased pressure and demand to modernize, digitize, and transform.
We’ve seen that with today’s distributed workforce, cloud usage has increased, and enterprises are tasked with maintaining efficiency across even more endpoints – and keeping those endpoints safe. This has presented a tremendous opportunity for CISOs to maximize their full power and impact by proving to be the clear connection and catalyst merging technology and business.
This means today’s CISOs may need to do more with less, convincing fellow c-suite members that integration is more important than introducing new toolsets, applications, or solutions at a time when enterprises may be more vulnerable or susceptible to risk due to staffing constraints or conflicting priorities across the business. With the amount of change rapidly occurring across enterprises, CISOs have an increased impetus, responsibility, and opportunity to show enhanced value to the organization. They must continue to shift the perception that security can be a barrier to business efficiency and success and instead show that security is more than a compliance function, but a true business enabler.
In order for CISOs to be successful, they must stay steadfast in aligning with the CIO, CTO, CEO, and all the way up to the board. They can do this by showing up with data to demonstrate the impact (both past and potential) made to business, including proof points related to vendor sprawl and legacy technologies (and any associated cost or complexity) as well as insight into threats that were prevented and the damage they could have caused.
CISOs will also need to continue the shift on their end, adapting their role and approach from waiting for a compromise to happen to understanding threat actors, their common techniques, and how to get ahead. In short, they need to become what they fight against – proactive threat management means you need to think like a threat actor. Ideally, the CISO should not only be able to articulate business risks and impacts – they also need to show foresight and maturity to suggest controls or process improvements that can improve business efficiencies because security is built in to protect and enable this agility.
Once CISOs truly understand the business side of an organization and can not only relate but prove this value to the rest of the c-suite, they can be viewed as more of a strategic partner. With this line of thinking, the SOC can move from being viewed as a cost center to being a more deliberate and proactive part of the enterprise facilitating business success.
The post Give CISOs a Shot – They Deserve It appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Summer is here, which means more sun and more fun for everyone. It also means more streaming, gaming, and downloading. This seasonal reality reminds us that to enjoy the best of summer, it’s important to stay aware of the digital risks that could sink the fun faster than you can say, “it’s hammock time!”
Emerging from the pandemic, we’re familiar with the increase in online time that came with remote learning. However, shift into summer means the remote learning hours will quickly turn into hours spent gaming, TikTok scrolling, and social networking. If you add summer travel plans to those activities, your family also becomes vulnerable to Wi-Fi breaches, viruses, sketchy apps, and device theft.
Suppose your family’s screen time rules became laxer this year. In that case, summer is the perfect time to start re-establishing healthy digital habits for gamer security, app security, and Wi-Fi security, be it at home or while traveling. Here are just a few tips to get you rolling.
According to a recent McAfee study 2021 Consumer Security Mindset: Travel Edition, 2 out of 3 Americans plan to travel this summer. However, the study also highlighted a troubling discrepancy: while 68% of Americans confirm they are more digitally connected since the onset of COVID-19, only about half of them have implemented additional levels of internet security.
Chances are someone in your immediate family — perhaps an elderly relative or a younger child — is among those who are more connected since COVID-19 but less secure as they head into the summer months. One way to close that gap is to educate and share family internet security tips. Here are just a few.
This summer can unfold seamlessly and be packed with unforgettable family memories. Or, it could be a season you’d rather forget if you wander into a digital danger zone. Remember: Your family’s privacy is as strong as your weakest family member’s security IQ. One vulnerable person exposes the data and security of everyone under your roof. So, taking the time to build up your family’s internet security is a big step in bummer-proofing your summer. Here’s to fun, sunny, safe days ahead!
The post At Home or On-the-Go: Boost Your Internet Safety this Summer appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
When we think of tipping, many don’t see it as anything beyond a display of gratitude. However, Twitter’s latest feature is prompting its users to rethink this sentiment. It hasn’t been long since Twitter released their new Tip Jar feature, which allows users on the platform to send tips to designated accounts. However, online users and security experts are already exposing the vulnerabilities in its architecture.
Twitter’s Tip Jar has sparked concerns over user privacy due to the exposure of user’s shipping address, not to mention concerns over fraudulent payment disputes. Here’s what you need to know about this feature and what it means for your financial and data privacy.
It was recently revealed that the new feature may not be as secure as it was believed to be. Users were quick to point out a critical flaw that reveals their shipping address to the recipient when sending money through PayPal. Shortly after, others also discovered that Twitter Tip Jar could reveal a user’s email address even if no transaction took place. Only a limited number of accounts can receive payments, including creators, journalists, experts, and nonprofits. However, anyone can send tips, making the new feature’s vulnerabilities more concerning.
The reason why PayPal displays the sender’s shipping address is because Twitter categorizes tipping as a payment transaction. Therefore, recipients would receive the sender’s payment and shipping details by default, just like any other vendor would in a typical online transaction.
While your information is not shared publicly, exposing it to recipients poses increased security risks.
Picture this: Hackers recognize notable recipients and hack their accounts to steal their information—including your personal address. They then use your information to carry out targeted phishing attacks and ransomware. You lose your data, your device becomes infected and therefore unusable, and you’re even more susceptible to identity fraud—all stemming from an attempt to leave a digital tip as a token of goodwill.
Twitter Tip Jar is a prime example of a good idea gone awry. Twitter released the feature to support notable members of their community, many of whom prefer to use Twitter due to the level of anonymity that is allowed by the platform — it does not require your real name, which potentially leads to more anonymous interactions than other social media sites. For this reason, Twitter users are more vulnerable to privacy concerns when using the Tip Jar.
In addition to privacy concerns, hackers could also misuse the Tip Jar feature through fraudulent payment disputes. If someone tips a Twitter user using the Tip Jar and later files a “dispute” regarding the payment, PayPal requires the recipient pay a $20 dispute charge. Now imagine if a malicious entity does this to a recipient multiple times. The user could quickly accumulate hundreds of dollars in dispute charges instead of tips, causing the direction of money flow to effectively be reversed and financial stress on the recipient.
It can be challenging to safely navigate social media from a cybersecurity perspective because sharing is now synonymous with social networking. If you actively participate on social platforms, here are the three tips you should follow to side-step any security gotchas along the way:
Fortunately, there’s a simple workaround to avoid publicly sharing your shipping address while using the Twitter Tip Jar. When sending a tip using Tip Jar, rather than inputting an address under the shipping address form field, simply defer to the “No address needed” option to keep your address private.
Double check your privacy settings in both your social apps and your connected third-party payment systems. As you navigate this new feature and any that are up–and–coming, take note of the privacy policies that impact how your personal data is being used. (e.g. Twitter has updated its tipping prompt and Help Center to make it clear that other apps, such as PayPal, may share information between people sending and receiving tips).
Security researchers and engineers are constantly working to fix software bugs and vulnerabilities in the background. By turning on automatic updates, you are guaranteed to have all the latest security patches and enhancements for your apps and tools as soon as they become available.
It can be tempting to jump on the bandwagon when a shiny, new feature makes its way to the social media platforms you use and love. But taking the time to learn about these features before choosing to participate can save you from a potential privacy headache, especially in the case of the Twitter Tip Jar. By educating yourself on both the benefits and the risks, you’ll be able to take actionable steps that protect your personal information.
To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, subscribe to our newsletter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.
The post Keep the Change: 3 Tips for Using the Twitter Tip Jar appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
In the wake of the Schrems II decision[1], and even more in the light of Friday’s Facebook ruling[2], the question on everyone’s mind is how to truly protect personal data from the prying eyes of national security agencies around the world. Despite detailed guidelines[3] issued in November 2020, in the absence of new definitive guidelines for transferring data across European borders[4], many are starting to wonder whether data localisation is the magic bullet to protect personal data.
The terms ‘data sovereignty’, ‘data residency’ and ‘data localization’ are a source of confusion for most people. They are effectively three degrees of a single concept: how data privacy impacts cross-border data flows. This subject has become increasingly important following the Schrems II decision and its requirement that organizations when processing personal data must ensure their privacy is not put at risk and subject to governmental surveillance when shared across borders.
Data residency refers to the country where an organisation specifies that its data is stored, usually for regulatory or policy reasons. A common data residency requirement example is for tax purposes: to prove an organisation conducts a greater portion of its business in a given country, it will put in place an infrastructure that requires a strict data management in order to protect its taxation rights.
Data sovereignty differs from data residency in that not only is the data stored in a designated location, but it is also subject to the laws of the country in which it is physically stored. This difference is crucial, as there will be different privacy and security requirements depending on where the data centres physically sit. From a legal perspective, the difference is important because a government’s data access rights vary from country to country.
Data localisation is the most stringent concept of the three, which is the reason why it is often referred to as “hard data localisation”. It requires that data created within certain borders stay within them and is almost always applied to the creation and storage of personal data, without exception. A good example is Russia’s On Personal Data Law (OPD-Law), which requires the storage, update and retrieval of data on its citizens to be limited to data center resources within the Russian Federation.
In the post-Schrems II world, some organisations have taken the view that the GDPR requires hard data localisation. The question is then whether such practices are realistic, and whether they offer similar privacy protection to that of the GDPR.
Data localisation runs counter to the principles of cloud computing (and the internet) – allowing the free flow of data for the greatest use. It is also potentially contrary to the principles of free movement of data under EU law[5]. The Internet is global and beyond the Internet, most companies operate in an integrated global environment, bearing in mind that “remote access by an entity from a third country to data located in the EEA is also considered a transfer.”[6].
The cost of operating a localised service must also be factored in, including support, engineering (e.g. development, debugging and maintenance), and backup (e.g. redundancy) costs. So, whilst the creation of local infrastructure may in the short-term imply jobs for local economies, the reality is that given there are often fully automated, the jobs and investment dividend may be short-lived.
Data localisation is also often touted as a mean to shield European citizen data from 3rd country government surveillance in particular US Government access under the CLOUD Act. While localisation does offer some protections (i.e. from transfer of data out of the territory), it does not automatically mean that data will be protected adequately in country. For example, data localisation does not mean that appropriate encryption standards are met, nor does it mean that there is no local surveillance – even in adequate countries[7].
You have probably heard of the Five EYES, Nine EYES, and Fourteen EYES Alliances. If not, these are all about intelligence sharing agreements. Initially, the Five Eyes Alliance arose out of the cold war era and was a pact between the United States and the UK aimed at decrypting Soviet Russian intelligence. By the late 1950s, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also joined the Alliance. These five English-speaking countries are the Five Eyes Alliance. On top of this alliance, two other international intelligence-sharing agreements are publicly known: the Nine Eyes (Five Eyes + Denmark, France, Holland, Norway) and the Fourteen Eyes Alliances (Nine Eyes + Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain).
With this in mind, some companies argue, without evidence, that by doing business from a given jurisdiction, they are able to offer more adequate protection against surveillance. And without much surprise, not one country, even within the European Union, offers the same level of protection against surveillance, and the US’ surveillance activity isn’t much more extensive than other countries viewed as providing adequate protection.[8] Let’s take for instance the use of a VPN to protect privacy. Many providers argue that choosing a VPN outside the 5/9/14 Eyes countries may offer further protection.
The truth is once this very obvious statement is said, the question still remains wide open for many valid reasons. VPNs are international operations, meaning effectively, any organisation operating in a given country may be liable to that country’s law enforcement, whether by treaty, or by any other type of court orders. If a country does not have a general treaty and is not part of 5/9/14 eyes, there’s nothing stopping one country from putting political pressure on the other (sanctions, for example) to get what they want. Additionally, operating in a given country, for instance Panama, does not mean a country will refuse to cooperate with another country’s authorities, such as Canada.
There is little chance to find one country that is completely immune to data access laws in one way or the other, and nothing can stop one country from putting pressure on another one to obtain what it wants. That works for companies as well. For instance, Microsoft recently announced that it has “answered Europe’s call,”[9] but it cannot reject a request based on the CLOUD Act, and the compensation offered by Microsoft for a violation of the GDPR is not equivalent to the recourse to an available judicial remedy as requested under the Schrems II decision.
Now, once all of the above is said, it must be kept in mind that just because being anonymous is impossible, that you shouldn’t still try to protect your personal data as much as possible, or request companies to strictly comply with data minimization principles. All in all, governments would not have access to so much data if companies were not holding themselves so much data. Data minimization ends up being not only a good tool for increasing security, since attackers can’t steal what you don’t have, but also because it could potentially help people decrease the costs of data redundancy, storage, etc.
In 2020, the Internet Society penned a report on the implication of data localisation for cybersecurity that has much merit, and stated that “Cybersecurity may suffer as organizations are less able to store data outside borders with the aim of increasing reliability and mitigating a wide variety of risks including cyber-attacks and national disasters.”[10]
Data localization practices may harm cybersecurity services through the following facts:
This train of thought also applies to the selling of data to unsecure third parties within the same region or preventing unauthorised access to the data gained by third parties.
Some also argue that data localisation interferes with fraud prevention. For example, the inability to mirror data across several data centers can prevent the provider from seeing patterns and trends of fraud or other risks.
Data localisation may be presented by some as a magic bullet, but the complete implications are yet to be fully understood. Hence policies or commercial practices requiring forced data localisation must be thought through carefully as they can impact the free flow of data, can comprise the ability to scale platforms and services for global customers in addition to the many cybersecurity harms that may impact operational effectiveness.
Disclaimer: This blog reflects the authors’ personal opinions. Any statements, opinions, and any errors are the authors’ own and not those of McAfee. The statements in this blog do not constitute legal advice, and each company must determine for itself its obligations under all laws. Nothing herein establishes an attorney-client relationship.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2020/652073/EPRS_ATA(2020)652073_EN.pdf
[2] The EU-U.S. Data Transfer Problem Is Bigger Than Most People Realise (linkedin.com)
[3] Recommendations 2020/1 and 2020/2 of the EDPB – https://edpb.europa.eu/sites/default/files/consultation/edpb_recommendations_202001_supplementarymeasurestransferstools_en.pdf
[4] European Standard Contractual Clauses, available on https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/international-dimension-data-protection/standard-contractual-clauses-scc_en
[5] The European Parliament considers “the free movement of data as the Fifth Freedom in the single market after the free movement of persons, goods, services and capital” – Morrison Foerster Client Alert “New EU Regulation to Strengthen the Free Movement of Data 06 Nov 2018” https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/181106-eu-regulation-data-movement.html
[6] https://iapp.org/news/a/why-this-french-court-decision-has-far-reaching-consequences-for-many-businesses/
[7] For example, French surveillance laws authorises surveillance not only to combat terrorism and other criminal offences, but also to protect France’s major economic, industrial, and scientific interests.
[8] https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/surveillance-states/
Canada is part of the 5 Eyes but has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to free and unrestricted internet access and has strong protections for freedom of speech and press, and the government has expressed support for net neutrality. Iran is not part of any of the know alliances. However, VPN providers are required to request government approval before providing their services, and people accessing the international internet network using VPNs without such government approval risk up to 1 year of prison time.
[9] https://blogs.microsoft.com/eupolicy/2021/05/06/eu-data-boundary/
[10] https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2020/internet-impact-assessment-toolkit/use-case-data-localization/
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