FreshRSS

🔒
❌ About FreshRSS
☷
▽ 🔃
There are new available articles, click to refresh the page.
Before yesterdayhttp://blog.trendmicro.com/feed

This Week in Security News: Skimming and Phishing Scams Ahead of Black Friday and Polish Hacking Team Wins Capture the Flag Competition

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about recent skimming and phishing scams as we head into the holidays and how you can protect yourself and your organization. Also, read about how the p4 hacking team from Poland won Trend Micro’s Capture the Flag (CTF) competition in Tokyo.

Read on:

Skimming Scams and Redirection Schemes Phish Consumers Credentials Days Before Black Friday

Ahead of Black Friday, cybercriminals are busy rolling out schemes to trick consumers into sharing their card credentials. In one skimming operation, threat actors faked a retailer’s third-party payment service platform (PSP), resulting in a hybrid skimmer-phishing page. Another campaign used redirection malware on WordPress websites so that users would land on their malicious phishing page.

Polish Hacking Team Triumphs in Trend Micro CTF Competition

Machine learning, reverse engineering, and unearthing mobile and IoT vulnerabilities were among the disciplines tested during Trend Micro’s latest international capture the flag (CTF) competition. The fifth Raimund Genes Cup final pitted 13 teams of young hackers against one another. The winning team, p4 from Poland, claimed a ¥1 million prize (US $9,000) and 15,000 Zero Day Initiative points per player at the Tokyo event.

Patched GIF Processing Vulnerability CVE-2019-11932 Still Afflicts Multiple Mobile Apps

CVE-2019-11932, a vulnerability in WhatsApp for Android, was patched with version 2.19.244 of WhatsApp, but the underlying problem lies in the library called libpl_droidsonroids_gif.so, which is part of the android-gif-drawable package. While this flaw has also been patched, many applications still use the older version and remain at risk.

Don’t Overlook the Security of Your Supply Chain

In its 2020 Predictions report, Trend Micro states that organizations will face a growing risk from their cloud and the supply chain. The reliance on open source and third-party software and the introduction of modern workplace practices all present immense risks.

Trickbot Appears to Target OpenSSH and OpenVPN Data in Upgraded Password-Grabbing Module

Trickbot, which was a simple banking trojan when it arrived in 2016, has since mutated into a constantly evolving malware family that includes information theft, vulnerability exploitation, and rapid propagation among its capabilities. In Trend Micro’s recent blog, learn more about how to combat Trickbot and other similarly sophisticated threats.

Stranger Hacks into Baby Monitor, Tells Child, ‘I Love You’

A stranger hacked a Seattle couple’s baby monitor and used it to peer around their home remotely and tell the pair’s 3-year-old, “I love you,” the child’s mother said. It’s not the first time the monitor brand in question, Fredi, made by Shenzhen Jinbaixun Technology Co., Ltd., according to its website, has come under fire for being comparatively easy to access.

Microsoft Says New Dexphot Malware Infected More Than 80,000 Computers

Microsoft security engineers detailed today a new malware strain that has been infecting Windows computers since October 2018 to hijack their resources to mine cryptocurrency and generate revenue for the attackers. Named Dexphot, this malware reached its peak in mid-June this year when its botnet reached almost 80,000 infected computers.

How are you protecting yourself from skimming and phishing scams during this holiday season? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: Skimming and Phishing Scams Ahead of Black Friday and Polish Hacking Team Wins Capture the Flag Competition appeared first on .

Stalking the Stalkerware

By Trend Micro
A recently released survey interviewed black hat hackers to get a better sense of the strategies and methodologies today's cybercriminals are using.

Ever get the feeling you’re being followed? Unfortunately, when it comes to our digital lives, this is increasingly the case. But while we’re all keen to boost our followers on social media, it’s a different matter when it comes to anonymous third parties secretly stalking us online. Yes, we’re already tracked by ISPs every time we go online, or by web providers like Google and social sites like Facebook and Twitter. But in these cases, we do get a little back in return: more streamlined, personalized services, and at the least, more relevant (if annoying) advertising. In the best scenario, though, we’d never be tracked without our consent.

With a phenomenon known as stalkerware, however, there’s zero gain for the victim. This is nothing short of government-style surveillance software used by individuals to spy on others – usually someone you know.

What is stalkerware?

We’re all spending more time on our smartphones. For the first time ever this year, time spent on mobile devices exceeded that spent in front of the TV. By 2021, it’s predicted that Americans will be glued to their handsets for nearly four hours per day. We chat and flirt with friends on social media. We post our photos and status updates. We email, text, IM and call via our devices. We also shop, hail taxis, or navigate around town, listen to music or watch YouTube or TV, and even bank online – all from the mini-computer in the palm of our hands.

Unfortunately, for some of us, there are people out there that want to know what we’re doing and who we’re with at all times. It could be a jealous partner, a jilted ex, over-protective parents, or even a suspicious employer. For them, a whole mini-industry has appeared over the past couple of years selling monitoring software, or more treacherously, trojan spyware and code that can hide itself, so you don’t even know it’s on your device. For just a few dollars, individuals can get their hands on an app which can monitor everything you do on your device. This includes

  • SMS messages
  • GPS coordinates/location
  • Emails
  • Web browsing
  • Keystroke logging
  • Photo, video, and audio recording

Breaking the law

Let’s be clear: it’s when monitoring software—and certainly, spyware—is used for stalking that it really becomes stalkerware. That means firms selling monitoring software may be operating in a grey area ethically and legally, depending on how the software is used. While they’re technically legitimate, the surveillance software is usually branded in such a way as to keep them just this side of the law. Think of concerned parents who want to ensure their children are safe, or of employers who want to ensure their staff are where they should be during work hours. That said, those who use such software to spy on individuals without their knowledge or consent are violating ethical standards and breaking the law. And if the software or code is specifically designed to hide itself, as with trojan spyware or spying code—then a line has certainly been crossed. You’re now neck deep in the shady gumshoe world of stalkerware.

There’s a huge range of “spyware” or “monitoring” apps available on the market today, including Retina-X, FlexiSpy, Mobistealth, Spy Master Pro, SpyHuman, Spyfone, TheTruthSpy, Family Orbit, mSpy, Copy9, Spyera, SpyBubble, and Android Spy. Given the often covert nature of the industry, it’s hard to get an accurate picture of exactly how widespread the use of such software for stalking is, although the number of titles on the market should give some indication. Reports from 2017 suggested 130,000 people had an account with Retina-X or FlexiSpy, while it was claimed a few years prior that mSpy had as many as two million users.

Stalkerware, or the use of monitoring software for stalking, represents not only a gross intrusion into your privacy, but also a possible security concern if the companies running these apps are themselves hacked or accidentally leak data belonging to victims of their customers.

How do I know if my phone has been hit?

It can be quite difficult for users of stalkerware to install the spying app on your device without physical access to it. However, malicious links in emails, texts, on websites, or even on social media could represent a potential threat vector if attackers manage to trick you into clicking through to an unwanted install. Although iOS devices are difficult to tamper with unless they’re jailbroken—and jailbreaking itself is trickier than it used to be—Android users are more exposed.

While ‘legitimate’ GPS trackers and the like (such as Life360 and other monitoring apps) are available on Google Play and can be installed as visible apps, stalkerware is typically available on 3rd-party app stores, is installed without the user’s consent, and will do its best to stay hidden on your device, potentially disguising itself under different app or process names. So here are a few things you can do to spot the tell-tale signs something is not quite right:

  • Check the setting which allows apps to be downloaded outside the official Google Play store (which doesn’t allow stalkerware). The UI can vary depending on manufacturer, but try Settings -> Security -> Allow unknown sources. If it’s on and you didn’t turn it on, you might have a problem.
  • Check to see if there are any unusual apps on your phone that you can’t remember downloading/installing.
  • Check Settings ->Applications -> Running Services to see if there are any unusual looking services running on your device. Try Googling ones you’re unfamiliar with.
  • Stalkerware could slow your device down, so if you’re noticing any major hit to performance, it could be worth investigating further.
  • Of course, if you start getting messages from the stalker, as in “I’m watching you!” it’s time to scour your device for the offending spying app or code.

How do I keep my device secure?

By its very nature, stalkerware is designed to stay hidden, so it can be hard to spot. But here are a few ideas to keep your device, and life, free from unwarranted snooping:

  • Don’t let your device out of your sight.
  • Don’t click on suspicious links in unsolicited emails, texts, social media messages, etc.
  • Install AV on your device from a reputable vendor who’s publicly addressed the stalkerware problem, to help spot any unusual/malicious activity like keylogging—as well as (potentially) the stalkerware itself. If the AV can catch potentially unwanted applications (PUAs), it could spot the stalkerware, though the AV industry as a whole needs to improve its algorithms for protection from stalkerware.
  • Keep an eye on what apps have been installed on the device.
  • Switch on two-factor authentication for your online accounts, so that even if a third-party has your passwords, they won’t be able to log-in as you, particularly for financial accounts.
  • Use a Password Manager to store long, strong and unique passwords for all your accounts, out of reach of a snooper.

How Trend Micro can help

Trend Micro can help you fight against stalkerware on your Android device with Trend Micro Mobile Security. It can scan your device before, during, and after a download to detect for:

  • Malware, defined as any software intentionally designed to cause damage, which can include theft of private data.
  • Potentially unwanted applications (PUAs), classified as “grayware” (as is stalkerware), which can be created by both legitimate and illegitimate publishers, but that are potentially a threat to your security or privacy.
  • High risk applications – An extension of PUAs, which clearly pose a serious risk to the user’s privacy by asking for too much access to your personal data.

Depending on the type of stalkerware, it could fall into any of the above categories—but Trend Micro Mobile Security can help fight against all of them. Below are typical test examples of the protection processes it provides against Android malware, PUAs, and stalkerware.

Trend Micro also offers protection from PUAs on PCs and Macs via Trend Micro Security, to deal with the broader threat of stalkerware across multiple fixed as well as mobile platforms. Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac also provides protection against webcam hacks, which can be used for stalking.

Together, both solutions can help protect you—and your Windows and Mac desktops and Android mobile devices—against stalkerware.

Tags: Stalkerware, Antimalware, Antivirus, Endpoint Security, Mobile Security

The post Stalking the Stalkerware appeared first on .

What Worries CISOs Most In 2019

By William "Bill" Malik (CISA VP Infrastructure Strategies)

We recently held a valuable conversation (and a great dinner) with about a dozen senior IT security leaders in Atlanta, Georgia. I was fortunate to attend and discuss what plagues them most.

Here are some of their concerns.

Many face considerable change in their business environments – one third of the companies called out the high pace of acquisitions as a source of risk.

Acquisitions draw down information security resources disproportionately. First, IT security must participate in the due diligence phase, prior to the actual acquisition. Under significant time pressure, and strictly bound by the terms of the governing NDA, the InfoSec team must verify the integrity of the target environment’s IT infrastructure. It must render a judgment on the trustworthiness of the underlying procedures, the competence of the support team, the appropriateness of funding and staffing, the effectiveness of policy and awareness training, the fitness of the security technology judged against the changing mission of the target firm, and the accessibility of crucial information. In regulated industries, the acquirer has to review past certifications, audit findings and recommendations, and earlier security events, including how they were handled, and how the organization effectively integrated lessons learned into its updated way of doing business. Some of the attendees reported an acquisition every six weeks over the past two years or more. This pace requires efficient process maturity and open communication among the team members, and ample trust.

Some CIOs reported the challenge of balancing the executive team’s need to know with the managerial desire to optimize team focus on critical initiatives. In the Boardroom and among the C-suite, IT remains a hot topic and IT security is a known vulnerability. This leads some organizations toward micromanaging the IT security team. As we all know, this inappropriate focus has two costs: first, it distracts the Board and the C-suite from their primary missions. Second, it distracts the people doing the job from their task. One effective tactic some adopted is the weekly – or even daily – newsletter. This document provides the status for ongoing projects, notes about top performers, assessment of newly discovered vulnerabilities, and pointers towards effective risk mitigation the leadership team can bring to their respective operational areas. When a Board member has a question for the team, the CISO can intercept it and post a response through the newsletter.

Many CISOs discussed their challenges with BYOD policies. Some mentioned concerns with GDPR impeding their ability to wipe corporate applications and information from employee-owned devices. It’s unclear how to balance that business requirement with privacy concerns for smart phones. With laptops, one approach is to limit corporate access through a locked-down virtual desktop image accessed through a secure VPN. An evil-minded employee could take a picture of the screen, but that attack works on a corporate laptop just as well.

BEC remains a concern, along with phishing attacks leading to possible ransomware infections. One approach is to ignore emails from new domains – those that are less than two months old. This would exclude email from nearly all attackers; anyone legitimately trying to reach an employee will try again in time.

The meeting was quite open and convivial. It was an honor to participate in the discussion, and I look forward to similar meetings in the future. My thanks to the participants!

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below, or message me @WilliamMalikTM!

The post What Worries CISOs Most In 2019 appeared first on .

Network security simplified with Amazon VPC Ingress Routing and Trend Micro

By Trend Micro

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the availability of a powerful new service, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Ingress Routing. As a Launch Partner for Amazon VPC Ingress Routing, we at Trend Micro are proud to continue to innovate alongside AWS to provide solutions to customers—enabling new approaches to network security. Trend Micro™ TippingPoint™ and Trend Micro™ Cloud One integrate with Amazon VPC Ingress Routing deliver network security that allows customers to quickly obtain compliance by inspecting both ingress and egress traffic. This gives you a deployment experience designed to eliminate any disruption in your business.

Cloud network layer security by Trend Micro

A defense-in-depth or layered security approach is important to organizations, especially at the cloud network layer. That being said, customers need to be able to deploy a solution without re-architecting or slowing down their business, the problem is, previous solutions in the marketplace couldn’t meet both requirements.

So, when our customers asked us to bring TippingPoint intrusion prevention system (IPS) capabilities to the cloud, we responded with a solution. Backed by industry leading research from Trend Micro Research, including the Zero Day Initiative™, we created a solution that includes cloud network IPS capabilities, incorporating detection, protection and threat disruption—without any disruption to the network.

At AWS re:Invent 2018, AWS announced the launch of Amazon Transit Gateway. This powerful architecture enables customers to route traffic through a hub and spoke topology. We leveraged this as a primary deployment model in our Cloud Network Protection, powered by TippingPoint, cloud IPS solution, announced in July 2019. This enabled our customers to quickly gain broad security and compliance, without re-architecting. Now, we’re adding a flexible new deployment model.

 

Enhancing security through partnered innovation

This year we are excited to be a Launch Partner for Amazon VPC Ingress Routing, a new service that allows for customers to gain additional flexibility and control in their network traffic routing. Learn more about this new feature here.

Amazon VPC Ingress Routing is a service that helps customers simplify the integration of network and security appliances within their network topology. With Amazon VPC Ingress Routing, customers can define routing rules at the Internet Gateway (IGW) and Virtual Private Gateway (VGW) to redirect ingress traffic to third-party appliances, before it reaches the final destination. This makes it easier for customers to deploy production-grade applications with the networking and security services they require within their Amazon VPC.

By enabling customers to redirect their north-south traffic flowing in and out of a VPC through internet gateway and virtual private gateway to the Trend Micro cloud network security solution. Not only does this enable customers to screen all external traffic before it reaches the subnet, but it also allows for the interception of traffic flowing into different subnets, using different instances of the Trend Micro solution.

Trend Micro customers now have the ability to have powerful cloud network layer security in AWS leveraging Amazon VPC Ingress Routing. With this enhancement, customers can now deploy in any VPC, without any disruptive re-architecture and without introducing any additional routing or proxies. Deploying directly inline is the ideal solution and enables simplified network security without disruption in the cloud.

 

What types of protection can customers expect?

When you think of classic IPS capabilities, of course you think of preventing inbound attacks. Now, with Amazon VPC Ingress Routing and Trend Micro, customers can protect their VPCs in even more scenarios. Here is what our customers are thinking about:

  • Protecting physical and on-premises assets by routing that traffic to AWS via DirectConnect or VPN
  • Detecting compromised cloud workloads (cloud native or otherwise) and disrupting those attacks, including DNS filters and geo-blocking capabilities
  • Preventing lateral movement between multi-tiered applications or between connected partner ecosystems
  • Prevention for cloud-native threats, including Kubernetes® and Docker® vulnerabilities, and container image and repository compromises occurring when pulled into VPCs

 

Trend Micro™ Cloud One ­– Network Security

Amazon VPC Ingress Ingress Routing will be available as a deployment option soon for Cloud Network Protection, powered by TippingPoint, available in AWS Marketplace. It will also be available upon release of our recently announced Trend Micro™ Cloud One – Network Security, a key service in Trend Micro’s new Cloud One, a cloud security services platform.

The post Network security simplified with Amazon VPC Ingress Routing and Trend Micro appeared first on .

You’re In Safe Hands with Trend Micro Home Network Security

By Trend Micro

A three-part series on using Home Network Security to protect your home

Your home should be a haven that protects you. In the cyber age, however, your router, computers, and TVs, your game consoles and smart devices, are continuously connected to the internet and run the risk of being hacked—usually when you least expect it and often without your knowledge. Not only can cybercriminals invade your privacy, they can steal your data, your money and even your identity—if you don’t put the appropriate security measures in place.

Trend Micro Home Network Security (HNS) is specifically designed to be that key security measure for your home network. Attach the HNS station to your router, download and install the management app, pair them up, and HNS immediately begins protecting all the connected devices in your home against a wide variety of threats. These include network intrusions, risky remote connections, phishing, ransomware, harmful websites and dangerous downloads.

Though setup, configuration, monitoring, and maintenance are pretty straightforward, to get the most out of HNS, we’ve written a three-part series to teach you how to maximize its use:

  • Part 1 of the series centers on initial setup and configuration. Choose the right security settings in HNS to maximize its effectiveness in your network.
  • Part 2 is devoted to configuring Parental Controls to best fit your family.
  • Part 3 targets some best practices for daily and weekly monitoring and maintenance over time.

Sound good? Let’s get started with Part 1!

Part 1: Home Network Security: Setup and Configuration

Once you take the Home Network Security Station out of its box, setup and connection is quick and easy:

  1. Plug the Power and the Ethernet cables provided into the station.
  2. Plug the Ethernet cable into your router and then the power adapter into an outlet.
  3. Watch for the green blinking light while you connect your smartphone to the same network via WiFi. This indicates it’s ready to activate.
  4. Download the Home Network Security app from Google Play or Apple App Store and install it.
  5. When prompted, enter your 16-character Pairing Code in the screen, provided in your box and on the back of your HNS Station.
  6. Upon the Connection Successful message, sign into your Trend Micro Account to complete activation.
  7. HNS will register to your Account and automatically scan your network for connected devices. You’re already protected!

Configuration Modes

Trend Micro’s Home Network Security station is designed to be a Plug-n-Protect device. Upon being connected to your router, it will attempt to automatically sense and enable the optimal Mode.

However, if you are experiencing network instability or connection issues, you can also choose the Mode manually from one of four Modes available for the best performance with your particular router. In order to select the correct Mode, you should first determine your router’s optimal Mode. Go to the HNS eSupport website to check the compatibility of your router or to search for its brand and model. The optimal Mode is indicated for tested routers.

While most routers support the default setting automatically, a small number may require manual setup. An even smaller number are not compatible with Trend Micro Home Network Security.

Some additional information about HNS’s station Modes:

  • Modes 1-3 do not require any changes to your router.
  • A 4th DHCP Mode allows you to configure Home Network Security as a DHCP Server (which assigns IP addresses to your devices on the network) but this requires you to first disable your router’s DHCP server. You can find details about it on the HNS DHCP eSupport page.

If you change the mode, run a Test Status check 5 minutes after changing the settings.

Off to a Good Start

As mentioned, after the initial setup, Trend Micro Home Network Security automatically does a network check to see what devices are on your network. (As part of its improved device recognition in version 2.5, released in November 2019, HNS offers more than 150 device icons to help make managing your devices even easier.) If you tap the View Devices button in the resulting popup, HNS provides you with a list of All Devices on the network. By default these online devices are Unassigned. You can create family member profiles, then assign specific devices to each family member later on. (Further information regarding Family Profiles will be discussed in Part 2 of this article series.)

At any time, tap Check Devices to initiate a manual security scan. Once the scan ends, you may see Action Required items displayed in the Dashboard indicator. Tap them to review them. The Action Required screen indicates any security issues that have been discovered. When you tap the panel, you will be able to obtain the Issue Details and read the Potential Risk description to better understand the issue and what you can do to resolve it—or you can also tap Skip for Now to skip the remediation process.

If you decide to proceed with remediation, the HNS App loads your mobile browser and takes you to the Trend Micro eSupport site, which provides more details on the issue. You can scroll through the page to learn more about the possible risks it poses, what you can do to prevent the problem from happening in the future, and places to go for more answers to any questions you may have.

Back in the Dashboard, you can review the HNS Summary protection results in the Security, Parental Controls, Family Members, Top Attacked Devices, and Network Usage panels. You can either tap individual items—e.g., Vulnerability Found, Network Attacks, Web Threats Blocked, etc.—to reveal information on the various threats by device; or you can tap individual panels to show additional details about particular attacks or threats. For a more detailed look, you can check the Timeline to review individual events, which can be filtered by type, such as Security, Parental Controls, Connections, Action Required and System.

Recommended Network and Security Settings

There are a number of useful features that are disabled by default. You can enable these features to heighten your home network protection and maximize user convenience.

  • New Device Approval asks for your permission to approve network access when a new device attempts to join your home network. This component gives you control over the devices that are allowed access to your home network.
  • Remote Access Protection limits remote desktop programs from connecting to your devices. This feature prevents Tech support scams that usually begin with fraudulent phone calls, or infected websites with malicious and fake popups, which can lead to fraudsters installing remote access software on the victim’s computer to gain access to its content. Those working from home who need to use remote access programs need not worry because they can set exceptions for their specific device and app.
  • Voice Control lets you issue voice commands to Alexa to perform specific functions on HNS. You can conduct a scan, obtain your home network’s security status, pause internet usage, disable internet access for a user, and so on.
  • Router Access Protection prevents malicious router attacks by blocking unauthorized access to your Primary Router’s Admin Console.
      1. Ad Block lets you filter out unwanted ads on all your connected devices for privacy protection and a better web browsing experience.
      2. Early Access Program features let you try the latest protection from HNS, while providing feedback to Trend Micro to help these features improve and evolve.
      3. Cyberattack Shield proactively protects all the devices in your home network from threat outbreaks by remotely deploying firewall policies.

For now, this should be enough to get you off to a good start with Trend Micro Home Network Security. Watch for Part 2 of our HNS Series, where we help you create profiles for family members and set up Parental Controls.

For more information about HNS, go to Trend Micro Home Network Security. For more online support, go to Trend Micro Home Network Security eSupport.

The post You’re In Safe Hands with Trend Micro Home Network Security appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: Trend Micro Selected as Launch Partner for AWS Ingress Routing Service and Stalkerware on the Rise

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about stalkerware and why it’s on the rise. Also, read about Trend Micro’s selection as a launch partner for the new Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Ingress Routing service, announced during AWS re:Invent 2019.

Read on:

You’re in Safe Hands with Trend Micro Home Network Security

Your home should be a haven that protects you. In the cyber age, however, your router, computers, TVs, game consoles and smart devices are continuously connected to the internet and run the risk of being hacked—usually when you least expect it. This blog is the first of a three-part series outlining how to implement Home Network Security to protect your home.

Amazon Web Services Recognizes Trend Micro as Launch Partner for New Service

With Amazon VPC Ingress Routing, Trend Micro customers will gain benefits which include more flexibility and control traffic routing with transparent deployment and no need to re-architect. Deploying in-line allows customers to be proactive in their network security, which in turn can prevent and disrupt attacks before they can be successful.

What Worries CISOs Most In 2019

Trend Micro’s VP of infrastructure strategies, Bill Malik, recently sat down with a dozen senior IT security leaders to discuss challenges they are currently facing in light of considerable changes in their business environments. These include the high pace of acquisitions balancing executive and team focuses, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies and ransomware infections.

Ransomware Attack Hits Major U.S. Data Center Provider

CyrusOne, one of the biggest data center providers in the U.S., has suffered a ransomware attack and is currently working with law enforcement and forensics firms to investigate the attack. CyrusOne is also helping customers restore lost data from backups.

Stalking the Stalkerware

Stalkerware is government-style surveillance software used by individuals to spy on others, which is usually someone you know. With smartphone usage continuing to rise, a whole mini industry has appeared over the past couple of years selling monitoring software, or more treacherously, trojan spyware and code that can hide itself so that you don’t even know it’s on your device.  

The California DMV Is Making $50M a Year Selling Drivers’ Personal Information

The California Department of Motor Vehicles is generating revenue of $50,000,000 a year through selling drivers’ personal information, according to a DMV document obtained by Motherboard. This information includes names, physical addresses, and car registration information. 

Operation ENDTRADE: Finding Multi-Stage Backdoors that TICK

Trend Micro has followed cyberespionage group TICK (a.k.a. “BRONZE BUTLER” or “REDBALDKNIGHT”) since 2008 but noticed an unusual increase in malware development and deployments towards November 2018 as part of a campaign dubbed “Operation ENDTRADE.”

Iran Targets Mideast Oil with ZeroCleare Wiper Malware

A freshly discovered wiper malware dubbed “ZeroCleare” has been deployed to target the energy and industrial sectors in the Middle East. According to IBM’s X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS), ZeroCleare was involved in a recently spotted APT attack on an oil and gas company, in which it compromised a Windows machine via a vulnerable driver.

Mobile Cyberespionage Campaign Distributed Through CallerSpy Mounts Initial Phase of a Targeted Attack

Trend Micro has found a new spyware family disguised as chat apps on a phishing website. Trend believes that the apps, which exhibit many cyberespionage behaviors, are initially used for a targeted attack campaign.

Obfuscation Tools Found in the Capesand Exploit Kit Possibly Used in “KurdishCoder” Campaign

In November 2019, Trend Micro analyzed an exploit kit named Capesand that exploited Adobe Flash and Microsoft Internet Explorer flaws. During an analysis of the indicators of compromise (IoCs) in the deployed samples that were infecting the victim’s machines, we noticed that these samples were making use of obfuscation tools that made them virtually undetectable.

Trend Micro More Than Doubles Commitment to Underrepresented Persons in Cybersecurity

This week at AWS re:Invent, Trend Micro announced plans to further strengthen its commitment to underrepresented persons by more than doubling its annual time and financial investments to alleviate the skills and diversity gaps in cybersecurity.

Mobile Security: 80% of Android Apps Now Encrypt Network Traffic by Default

Three years ago, Google started its push to tighten network traffic protection from Android devices to web services. The company has provided an update stating that 80% of Android apps have adopted the HTTPS standard by default. HTTPS encrypts network traffic, preventing third parties from intercepting data from apps.

Magecart Sets Sights on Smith & Wesson, Other High-Profile Stores

After incidents in the past few months that saw the threat actor go after customers of online shops and hotel chains, threat actors from the infamous card-skimming group once again took action, this time on Black Friday on a new set of targets: high-profile stores, including firearms vendor Smith & Wesson (S&W).

Out on a Highway Run: Threats and Risks on ITS and Smart Vehicles

The research firm Counterpoint predicted that by 2022, the number of vehicles with embedded connectivity will grow by 270%. The expected increase in technology adoption, however, does not come without risks — from petty showcases of hacks to possibly bigger threats to safety and financial losses.

StrandHogg Android Vulnerability Allows Malware to Hijack Legitimate Apps

Researchers discovered a vulnerability in Android devices that allows malware to hijack legitimate apps. Using this vulnerability (StrandHogg), cybercriminals could trick users into granting permissions to their malicious apps and provide openings for phishing pages.

Ginp Trojan Targets Android Banking App Users, Steals Login Credentials and Credit Card Details

Counterfeit apps were found carrying a new version of the Android banking trojan Ginp (detected by Trend Micro as AndroidOS_Ginp.HRXB) to steal user login credentials and credit card details. ThreatFabric’s analysis of recent Ginp samples showed that it reused some code from Anubis, an Android malware family notorious for its use in cyberespionage activities before being re-tooled as a banking trojan.

What AWS re:Invent announcement did you find the most interesting? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: Trend Micro Selected as Launch Partner for AWS Ingress Routing Service and Stalkerware on the Rise appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: December Patch Tuesday Updates and Retail Cyberattacks Set to Soar 20 Percent During 2019 Holiday Season

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about the threat campaign Waterbear and how it uses API hooking to evade security product detection. Also, read about December Patch Tuesday updates from Microsoft and Adobe.

Read on:

Waterbear is Back, Uses API Hooking to Evade Security Product Detection

Previously, Waterbear has been used for lateral movement, decrypting and triggering payloads with its loader component. In most cases, the payloads are backdoors that can receive and load additional modules. However, recently Trend Micro discovered a piece of Waterbear payload with a brand new purpose: hiding its network behaviors from a specific security product by API hooking techniques.

Microsoft December 2019 Patch Tuesday Plugs Windows Zero-Day

Microsoft has released today the December 2019 Patch Tuesday security updates. This month’s updates include fixes for 36 vulnerabilities, including a zero-day in the Windows operating system that has been exploited in the wild.

(Almost) Hollow and Innocent: Monero Miner Remains Undetected via Process Hollowing

Recently, Trend Micro found a cryptomining threat using process hollowing and a dropper component that requires a specific set of command line arguments to trigger its malicious behavior, leaving no trace for malicious activity detection or analysis to reference the file as malicious.

2020 Predictions: Black Hats Begin to Target Facial Recognition Technology

Research interest in defeating facial recognition technology is booming. Adversaries are likely taking notice, but don’t expect widespread adoption overnight. Jon Clay, director of threat communication at Trend Micro, points out that techniques ranging from deep fakes to adversarial machine learning are likely still in an early stage.

US, UK Governments Unite to Indict Hacker Behind Dreaded Dridex Malware

Maksim Yakubets, who allegedly runs Russia-based Evil Corp, the cybercriminal organization that developed and distributed banking malware Dridex, has been indicted in the United States by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

Trend Micro, McAfee and Bitdefender Top Cloud Workload Security List

Trend Micro, McAfee and Bitdefender were named among the leaders in a new report from Forrester Research on cloud workload security that covered 13 vendors.

BEC Scam Successfully Steals US $1 Million Using Look-Alike Domains

A Chinese venture capital firm lost US $1 million to scammers who successfully came between a deal the firm had with an Israeli startup. The business email compromise (BEC) campaign used by the attackers consisted of 32 emails and look-alike domains to trick both parties of their authenticity.

Retail Cyberattacks Set to Soar 20% in 2019 Holiday Season

As cybercriminals grow more sophisticated and holiday shoppers continue to flock online, researchers warn internet-based retailers could face a 20 percent uptick in cyberattacks this holiday season compared to last year.

Bug in Ryuk Ransomware’s Decryptor Can Lead to Loss of Data in Certain Files

Ryuk’s decryptor tool could cause data loss instead of reinstating file access to users. According to a blog post from Emsisoft, a bug with how the tool decrypts files could lead to incomplete recoveries, contrary to what the decryptor is meant to achieve.

Hacker Hacks Hacking Platform, Gets Paid $20,000 By the Hacked Hackers

HackerOne operates as a conduit between ethical hackers looking for vulnerabilities, and organizations like General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and the U.S. Pentagon, want to patch those security holes before malicious threat actors can exploit them. One of the hackers registered with the platform hacked HackerOne instead and was paid $20,000 (£15,250) by HackerOne as a result.

 Trickbot’s Updated Password-Grabbing Module Targets More Apps, Services

Researchers from Security Intelligence have reported on a sudden increase of Trickbot’s activities in Japan, and Trend Micro researchers have found updates to the password-grabbing (pwgrab) module and possible changes to the Emotet variant that drops Trickbot.

Ransomware Recap: Snatch and Zeppelin Ransomware

Two ransomware families with noteworthy features – Snatch and Zeppelin –were spotted this week. Snatch ransomware is capable of forcing Windows machines to reboot into Safe Mode. Zeppelin ransomware, on the other hand, was responsible for infecting healthcare and IT organizations across Europe and the U.S.

Brian Krebs is the CISO MAG Cybersecurity Person of the Year

For the first time, CISO Mag named a Cybersecurity Person of the Year, who is defined as someone who been committed to bringing awareness into the realm of cybersecurity. In addition to recognizing Brian Krebs of KrebsOnSecurity.com, two other individuals were recognized: Trend Micro’s Rik Ferguson, VP of security research, and web security expert Troy Hunt.

Do you think retail cyberattacks will soar higher than 20 percent this holiday season? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: December Patch Tuesday Updates and Retail Cyberattacks Set to Soar 20 Percent During 2019 Holiday Season appeared first on .

How To Get The Most Out Of Industry Analyst Reports

By Trend Micro

Whether you’re trying to inform purchasing decisions or just want to better understand the cybersecurity market and its players, industry analyst reports can be very helpful. Following our recent accolades by Forrester and IDC in their respective cloud security reports, we want to help customers understand how to use this information.

Our VP of cybersecurity, Greg Young, taps into his past experience at Gartner to explain how to discern the most value from industry analyst reports.

The post How To Get The Most Out Of Industry Analyst Reports appeared first on .

How to Speed Up a Slow PC Running Windows OS

By Trend Micro

Working with a slow PC is always annoying and frustrating. Enduring sudden frozen windows and stuttered animations can make you want to throw the machine out the window.

Take a deep breath, and consider these 8 tips on how to fix a slow PC running Windows.

 

 

Why is my Windows Running Slow?

First, here is a general analysis on why your Windows PC is running slow:

  • Your computer is running out of memory (RAM)
  • Your PC mode settings
  • There are too many startup items and background programs
  • Useless features or animation
  • Insufficient disk space
  • Too cluttered registry
  • Malware and Virus Infection
  • Unneeded third-party software

1. Restart your Computer

Many users are accustomed to keeping their computers running for several weeks. Their PC is either running or sleeping with the processes saved all the time. This means the running programs are occupying and filling up their RAM continuously, which can lead to the PC running extremely slowly. In addition, the computer might suffer from some bugs, which trigger programs to eat up much more RAM than they should. To avoid these troubles, restart your PC by clicking on the Windows button, selecting the ‘Power’ button, and choosing the ‘Restart’ button at least once a week.

A small hint: make sure you have saved your ongoing work before you shut down your computer.

2. Adjust setting modes

This is a very simple but often overlooked way to boost your PC’s performance. However, it sacrifices a bit of standby time. When you are not worrying about the state of charge and just pursuing maximum efficiency, you can consider opening Advanced System Setting in Windows for this trick.

Enter “Control Panel” in the Cortana search box in the taskbar. In the pop-up window, click “System,” and then click “Advanced system settings” in the left window, as shown below:

Click “Settings” in the performance bar, as shown in the following figure:

In the pop-up window, you can see that there are four setting modes, set “Adjust for best performance,” and then click OK, as shown in the following figure:

3. Disable Startup Programs

Startup items are programs that the system will run in the foreground or background once your computer is ON. When you download and install software, the “start-up” is usually a default choice. Therefore, if the software is not commonly used and you do not need to use it every time you start your PC, you can remove the check because it can slow down system speed. If you forgot to remove the check when installing the application, you can also make changes using the Task Manager.

To check and manage your startup programs, open the Task Manager (Ctrl + Alt + Del), then switch to the ‘Startup’ tab. You’ll also see the “Startup impact” of each startup program — either Low, Medium, or High. If you see “Not measured,” that’s because it was recently added and Windows hasn’t had a chance to observe the program’s behavior yet.

To prevent a program from launching on startup just right-click and choose “Disable.”

If you are not sure whether you can safely disable some programs, you can search the program online and learn about its function. If you are a little worried, you can download a PC cleaner app, which can automatically identify and classify these items and help you delete the unnecessary ones in batches. Remember to choose those apps without pop-up advertisements and hidden fees.

In addition, you can see the first tab named “Processes” in the picture above. Too many programs running simultaneously can slow down the system speed as well. Some programs may continue running in the background even after you have closed them. Under the “Processes” tab, you can select them and click ‘End task’ at the bottom right. However, be careful about this action because you might close some important processes needed to run Windows.

4. Turn off windows tips and tricks

When searching ways to speed up your PC online, your PC will ask you to disable the “Visual Effects” feature as they use up your PC’s performance. However, this operation needs you to balance the operating speed and the appearance of your PC, and even adjust those settings many times to achieve satisfying visual effects. Instead, here is an item that you can change without a hitch.

When you use a windows PC, Windows will always pay attention to what you are doing and provide tips on what you may want to do with your computer. You may find these tips unhelpful and even feel offended by its constant virtual viewing over your shoulders.

If you want to speed up your PC, you can ask Windows to stop giving you advice. To do this, click the START button, select the Settings icon, and then go to Systems > Notification & actions. Scroll down to the notifications section and uncheck the box labeled “Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows.”

5. Run Disk Cleanup

Do not let that “Disk space is almost full” message pop up and stop your work. Too many junk files, useless big files and duplicate files usually cause insufficient disk space. To save gigabytes of disk space for things you really need, you should clean them regularly to free up space.

Here are steps on how to use the built-in Windows utility to run disk cleanup:

Press “WINDOWS + R” and enter the cleanmgr command with parameters:

cleanmgr /sageset

In the Disk Cleanup Settings window, you can find items you can clean.

Note that this operation is only the setting operation of the checked item. It has not been actually cleaned. After clicking OK, you need to press “WINDOWS + R” and enter “cleanmgr /sagerun:99”, and then it can execute specific cleanup operations.

You can also turn ON the storage sense function to remove unnecessary files automatically.

Enter Settings > System > Storage, and then turn ON the Storage sense function to allow Windows to clean up temporary files automatically. It can be set to run automatically every day, every fortnight, every month, or every two months.

Definitely, some cleanup apps can help you do the work more quickly and accurately. Besides useless files, they can even retrieve and delete similar photos. You can evaluate and download them according to your own needs.

6. Clean out your Registry

Registry is an important database, which is used to store the setting information of system and application program running in Windows. As early as Windows 3.0 introduced OLE technology, the registry has appeared. Windows NT was the first operating system to make extensive use of the registry at the system level. However, since the beginning of the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system, the registry has been a critical database that will continue to play a role in the subsequent operating systems.

The command to open the registry is:

Regedit or regedit.exe, regedt32 or regedt32.exe

Under normal circumstances, you can click the operation in the START menu (WINDOWS + R), and then enter regedit or regedit.exe and click OK to open the registry editor of Windows operating system.

The registry is a very messy thing. For example, when a program is uninstalled, the program’s settings are not always cleared in the registry. So over time, it will be filled with various outdated settings. This may lead to poor performance of your PC system.

A word of caution: Editing the registry manually is risky. A mistake can lead to system-level interruptions. Therefore, to clean the registry, it is recommended that a professional registry cleaner is used.

7. Malware and Virus Infection

As we all know, malware and viruses will infect the computer and make it run more sluggishly. There are a large number of antivirus apps in the marketplace. Trend Micro offers several options to consider.

8. Disable third-party services  

If you installed a lot of software on your PC, the system may become chaotic and some unexpected problems might occur. For example, several security applications are running at the same time can create conflicts that make the system misbehave. You can disable all third-party software services and only keep the system itself. The system status will also be called “Clean Boot.”

Here is how to perform a clean boot of Windows:

Press “WINDOWS + R” and type “msconfig”, then click OK. Open System Configuration, go to the Services tab and put a tick in the “Hide all Microsoft services” box at the bottom left before choosing the items and hitting Disable all.

We hope the listed solutions can help you boost your PC performance conveniently. Manually checking what is wrong with your Windows can be time-consuming and painstaking. When those irritating system messages pop up and interfere with your work, it is time to turn to a trusted all-in-one system care utility like Cleaner One. By employing this productive worker, you can retrieve and delete unnecessary items, have less clutter, make your computer more efficient, and optimize your Windows OS with just a few clicks. Why not give it a go?

The post How to Speed Up a Slow PC Running Windows OS appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: Microsoft vs. Amazon in the Cloud and Escalated Risk in the Oil and Gas Industry

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about cybersecurity risk facing the oil and gas industry and its supply chain. Also, read about what Trend Micro’s CEO, Eva Chen, has to say about Microsoft and Amazon’s battle for cloud leadership.

Read on:

How to Get the Most Out of Industry Analyst Reports

In this video blog, Trend Micro’s Vice President of Cybersecurity, Greg Young, taps into his past experience at Gartner to explain how to discern the most value from industry analysts and help customers understand how to use the information.

Top Gun 51 Profile: Trend Micro’s Jeff Van Natter Sees Distributors as Key to Reaching New Partners

In an interview with Channel Futures, Trend Micro’s Jeff Van Natter explains why he believes distributors will continue to play an important role for Trend as it looks to expand its partner ecosystem.

How to Speed Up a Slow PC Running Windows OS

The first step to improving your Windows PC performance is to determine what’s causing it to run slow. In this blog, learn about eight tips on how to fix a slow PC running Windows and how to boost your PC’s performance.

We Asked 13 Software Execs Whether Microsoft Can Topple Amazon in the Cloud, and They Say There’s a Chance but It’ll Be a Hard Battle

Business Insider talked to 13 executives at companies that partner with Microsoft and Amazon on cloud platforms for their take on the rivalry between the two, and whether Microsoft can win. In this article, read about what Trend Micro CEO Eva Chen has to say about the rivalry.

DDoS Attacks and IoT Exploits: New Activity from Momentum Botnet

Trend Micro recently found notable malware activity affecting devices running Linux. Further analysis of the malware samples revealed that these actions were connected to a botnet called Momentum, which has been used to compromise devices and perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Oil and Gas Industry Risks Escalate, Cybersecurity Should Be Prioritized

The oil and gas industry and its supply chain face increased cybersecurity risks from advanced threat groups and others as they continue to build out digitally connected infrastructure, Trend Micro research reveals.

Christmas-Themed Shopping, Game and Chat Apps Found Malicious, Lure Users with Deals

Security researchers caution Android users when downloading apps for shopping, games, and Santa video chats as they found hundreds of malicious apps likely leveraging the season to defraud unwitting victims via command-and-control (C&C) attacks, adware or “excessive or dangerous combinations of permissions,” such as camera, microphone, contacts and text messages.

New Orleans Mayor Declares State of Emergency in Wake of City Cyberattack

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell declared a state of emergency last Friday after the city was hit by a cyberattack where phishing attempts were detected. Cantrell said the attack is similar to the July 2019 attack on the state level where several school systems in Louisiana were attacked by malware.

Credential Harvesting Campaign Targets Government Procurement Sites Worldwide

Cybersecurity company Anomali uncovered a campaign that used 62 domains and around 122 phishing sites in its operations and targeted government procurement services in 12 countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan, and Poland.

Schneider Electric Patches Vulnerabilities in its EcoStruxure SCADA Software and Modicon PLCs

Schneider Electric released several advisories on vulnerabilities they have recently fixed in their EcoStruxure and Modicon products. Modicon M580, M340, Quantum and Premium programmable logic controllers (PLCs) were affected by three denial of service (DoS) vulnerabilities.

FBot aka Satori is Back with New Peculiar Obfuscation, Brute-force Techniques

Trend Micro recently observed that the Mirai-variant FBot, also known as Satori, has resurfaced. Analysis revealed that this malware uses a peculiar combination of XOR encryption and a simple substitution cipher, which has not been previously used by other IoT malware variants. Additionally, the credentials are not located within the executable binary — instead, they are received from a command-and-control (C&C) server.

15 Cyber Threat Predictions for 2020

As 2020 nears, this article outlines the cyber threats that Trend Micro’s research team predicts will target organizations in the coming year, and why.

Negasteal/Agent Tesla Now Gets Delivered via Removable Drives, Steals Credentials from Becky! Internet Mail

Trend Micro recently spotted a Negasteal/Agent Tesla variant that uses a new delivery vector: removable drives. The malware also now steals credentials from the applications FTPGetter and Becky! Internet Mail.

Into the Battlefield: A Security Guide to IoT Botnets

The internet of things (IoT) has revolutionized familiar spaces by making them smarter. Homes, offices and cities are just some of the places where IoT devices have given better visibility, security and control. However, these conveniences have come at a cost: traditional cyberthreats also found a new arena for attacks and gave rise to realities like IoT botnets.

 

What’s your take on whether or not Microsoft can topple Amazon in the cloud? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: Microsoft vs. Amazon in the Cloud and Escalated Risk in the Oil and Gas Industry appeared first on .

Parental Controls – Trend Micro Home Network Security has got you covered

By Trend Micro

We continue our three-part series on protecting your home and family. If you missed our first part, you can find it here. 

Are your kids at that formative age when they’re beginning to use mobile devices? How about at that inquisitive age when they start to discover the wonders of the Internet? Or that age when they tend to be more carefree and self-indulgent?

The Internet and the digital devices our children use are valuable tools when used the right way. They give them access to a wide range of information, pave the way to explore worthwhile ideas, and keep them socially connected with family, relatives and friends. That said, though there are big advantages to kids’ use of the Internet, there are dangers as well. Part 2 of our 3-part series on home network security discusses those dangers to your children and what you can do to protect them, leveraging Trend Micro Home Network Security’s Parental Controls to help you do so.

Internet Access Threats are Real

Gone are the days when simple malware was the focal point for internet safety. Nowadays, children have so many devices giving them access to the internet, unknown dangerous situations have multiplied. As a parent, the challenges include the following:

  • Your children can come across unwanted or explicit content (such as porn), whether intentionally or unintentionally.
  • Your children can become victims of cyber bullies or internet predators through messaging apps they use or websites they visit.
  • Your kids could be concealing their delinquent online activities from you.
  • There also may be apps your kids are using that you don’t approve of. Conversely, there may be apps you approve, but your kids are spending too much time on them.
  • Your youngers could be consuming too much time with their digital devices, instead of studying or doing other productive activities.

Parental Controls: Your Silent Partner

Finding the right balance between parenting and controlling the child’s use or possible misuse of the internet is tricky. Here’s where Trend Micro Home Network’s (HNS) Parental Controls can come in. In addition to protecting your home network from security risks and attacks, HNS also provides a robust and flexible parental control system to keep internet usage safe for your children. Controls include:

  • Web Access Control and Monitoring, which gives parents the ability to allot Daily Time Quotas as well as to implement a Customizable Schedule for your child’s screen time. The controls include the means to Pause Internet Access by each Family Member’s Profile; and they also provide general Online Connectivity Monitoring for observing family members’ internet usage.
  • Website and Content Filtering blocks inappropriate websites and content. It also enables parents to turn on Google Safe Search and YouTube Restricted Mode.
  • App Controls manages YouTube Pause and Time Limits. In addition, App Detection alerts you if your children are detected using potentially inappropriate apps.

Parental Controls that Work for You

Protecting your family members online starts with Adding a Profile.

You can add a new Profile for each Family Member and assign to them the devices they control. To do this, you can just simply tap Family in the Command Menu and choose the family member by tapping Add Someone. This will let you provide the Profile Name and Profile Picture as well as Assign Devices to the person by tapping the device(s) in the Unassigned panel. The devices you select will then be automatically moved into the ownership panel for that person. Tap Done and you’ll be presented with the Settings screen for that child’s Profile, where you can configure Parental Controls as you see fit.

Website Filtering

Next, let’s proceed with the most common component: Website Filtering.

  • To set this up, tap Set Up Now for Filtering to block inappropriate websites and content for this family member.
  • Once the Filtering screen appears, you can toggle on Get Notifications for this family member when selected websites are visited, and Block to block selected websites for this family member’s profile.
  • You can also tap the appropriate pre-configured setting for the Age Level for this particular profile. You can choose from Child, Pre-Teen, and Teen; or tap Custom to manually select categories and subcategories to block. Filtered Categories include: Adult or Sexual (e.g. Pornography), Communication or Media (e.g. Social Networking), Controversial (e.g. Violence, Hate, Racism) and Shopping and Entertainment (e.g. Games, Gambling).
  • There may be instances where you may want to set exceptions to allow specific websites to be accessed or blocked. To do so, tap Set Exceptions and then add the website URL to either the Allowed List or Denied List.

Content Filtering

Moving on, you can also set up Content Filtering.

  • Setting up Content Filtering is quite straightforward. For example, you can toggle Turn On Google Safe Search to filter Google search results on your child’s phone, tablet or computer within your home network.
  • Likewise, all you need to do to restrict mature, inappropriate and offensive content on YouTube search results on your child’s devices is to toggle Turn On YouTube Restricted Mode.

App Controls

To continue, there are apps that parents disapprove of, but there are always those instances when the children try to use them anyway against their parent’s wishes. That’s when you can choose to be informed of the Inappropriate Apps Used by your children.

  • You can achieve this by tapping Set Up Now under Inappropriate App Used and then enabling Get Notifications.
  • You can then choose from the App Categories such as Games, Adult, Social Network or Chat, Shopping or Advertisement, Media/Streaming, Dating and VPN, which will send an alert once those selected apps are used by your kids on their respective devices.

Time Limits and Notifications

Even when you try to teach your kids about being responsible about their online time, it’s easier said than done. Thus, parents or guardians can schedule the hours of screen time their children are allowed each day, along with the hours when screen time is available. HNS’s Parental Controls provide both of these features and more.

  • To set up Time Limits, just tap Set Up Now to bring up Add First Rule. You can select the days for this rule and the number of hours per day that your child can use the internet.
  • You can indicate the Internet Time Limit and Time on YouTube by scrolling back and forth to see the limits available, then tap the total time per day you want to allow.
  • Once you set the limits, you may want to toggle Get Notifications to tip you off when your child reaches the limit.
  • Next, you’ll set the time period when your child can use the Internet by tapping the From and To fields, and moving the Time Wheelbar accordingly for the Beginning and Ending
  • You can opt to be informed by selecting Get Notifications when your child attempts to use the internet outside the allowed time period, as well as Block Internet Access for the child when they do.
  • Before tapping Done to finalize the rule(s), the Rule Complete screen shows a summary of the rule you’ve set, providing a clock to show the Allowed Time, the Days for which the rule is set, the Hours of Internet allowed, including any time allowed for YouTube viewing, and the Times

Connection Alerts

Last but not least, since it’s tough to keep monitoring when your child is online, tapping Trend Micro HNS’ Connection Alert to toggle it on makes it easier for parents to get notifications when their kid’s digital devices connect to the home network during a specified time period.

In the end, Trend Micro Home Network Security’s Parental Controls can assist parents in dealing with the online safety challenges all children are exposed to in the 21st century. HNS’ flexible and intuitive feature set comprised of Filtering, Inappropriate App Used, Time Limits and Connection Alerts support every parent or guardian’s goal to ensure a safe and secure internet experience for their kids. Coupled with kind face-to-face conversations, where you let your children know your care for them extends to how they use the Internet, HNS becomes your silent partner when ensuring your family’s safety.

For more information, go to Trend Micro Home Network Security.

The post Parental Controls – Trend Micro Home Network Security has got you covered appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: Latest Cyber Risk Index Shows Elevated Risk of Cyber Attack and IoT Company Wyze Exposes Information of 2.4M Customers

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about Trend Micro’s Cyber Risk Index (CRI) and its results showing increased cyber risk. Also, read about a data breach from IoT company Wyze that exposed information of 2.4 million customers.

Read on:

The 5 New Year’s Tech Resolutions You Should Make for 2020

Now is the perfect time to reflect on the past and think of all the ways you can make this coming year your best one yet. With technology playing such a central role in our lives, technology resolutions should remain top of mind heading into the new year. In this blog, Trend Micro shares five tech resolutions that will help make your 2020 better and safer.

Security Study: Businesses Remain at Elevated Risk of Cyber Attack

Elevated risk of cyber attack is due to increased concerns over disruption or damages to critical infrastructure, according to the Trend Micro’s latest Cyber Risk Index (CRI) study. The company commissioned Ponemon Institute to survey more than 1,000 organizations in the U.S. to assess business risk based on their current security postures and perceived likelihood of attack.

Parental Controls – Trend Micro Home Network Security Has Got You Covered

In the second blog of a three-part series on security protection for your home and family, Trend Micro discusses the risks associated with children beginning to use the internet for the first time and how parental controls can help protect them.

Cambridge Analytica Scandal: Facebook Hit with $1.6 Million Fine

The Cambridge Analytica scandal continues to haunt Facebook. The company has been receiving fines for its blatant neglect and disregard towards users’ privacy. The latest to join the bandwagon after the US, Italy, and the UK is the Brazilian government.

Why Running a Privileged Container in Docker is a Bad Idea

Privileged containers in Docker are containers that have all the root capabilities of a host machine, allowing the ability to access resources which are not accessible in ordinary containers. In this blog post, Trend Micro explores how running a privileged, yet unsecure, container may allow cybercriminals to gain a backdoor in an organization’s system.

IoT Company Wyze Leaks Emails, Device Data of 2.4M

An exposed Elasticsearch database, owned by Internet of Things (IoT) company Wyze, was discovered leaking connected device information and emails of millions of customers. Exposed on Dec. 4 until it was secured on Dec. 26, the database contained customer emails along with camera nicknames, WiFi SSIDs (Service Set Identifiers; or the names of Wi-Fi networks), Wyze device information, and body metrics.

Looking into Attacks and Techniques Used Against WordPress Sites

WordPress is estimated to be used by 35% of all websites today, making it an ideal target for threat actors. In this blog, Trend Micro explores different kinds of attacks against WordPress – by way of payload examples observed in the wild – and how attacks have used hacked admin access and API, Alfa-Shell deployment, and SEO poisoning to take advantage of vulnerable sites.

FPGA Cards Can Be Abused for Faster and More Reliable Rowhammer Attacks

In a new research paper published on the last day of 2019, a team of American and German academics showed that field-programmable gate array (FPGA) cards can be abused to launch better and faster Rowhammer attacks. The new research expands on previous work into an attack vector known as Rowhammer, first detailed in 2014

Emotet Attack Causes Shutdown of Frankfurt’s IT Network

The city of Frankfurt, Germany, became the latest victim of Emotet after an infection forced it to close its IT network. There were also incidents that occurred in the German cities of Gießen, Bad Homburgas and Freiburg.

BeyondProd Lays Out Security Principles for Cloud-Native Applications

BeyondCorp was first to shift security away from the perimeter and onto individual users and devices. Now, it is BeyondProd that protects cloud-native applications that rely on microservices and communicate primarily over APIs, because firewalls are no longer sufficient. Greg Young, vice president of cybersecurity at Trend Micro, discusses BeyondProd’s value in this article.

How MITRE ATT&CK Assists in Threat Investigation

In 2013, the MITRE Corporation, a federally funded not-for-profit company that counts cybersecurity among its key focus area, came up with MITRE ATT&CK™, a curated knowledge base that tracks adversary behavior and tactics. In this analysis, Trend Micro investigates an incident involving the MyKings botnet to show how the MITRE ATT&CK framework helps with threat investigation.

TikTok Banned by U.S. Army Over China Security Concerns

With backlash swelling around TikTok’s relationship with China, the United States Army this week announced that U.S. soldiers can no longer have the social media app on government-owned phones. The United States Army had previously used TikTok as a recruiting tool for reaching younger users,

Mobile Money: How to Secure Banking Applications

Mobile banking applications that help users check account balances, transfer money, or pay bills are quickly becoming standard products provided by established financial institutions. However, as these applications gain ground in the banking landscape, cybercriminals are not far behind.

What security controls do you have in place to protect your home and family from risks associated with children who are new internet users? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: Latest Cyber Risk Index Shows Elevated Risk of Cyber Attack and IoT Company Wyze Exposes Information of 2.4M Customers appeared first on .

Celebrating Decades of Success with Microsoft at the Security 20/20 Awards

By Sanjay Mehta

Effective collaboration is key to the success of any organization. But perhaps none more so than those working towards the common goal of securing our connected world. That’s why Trend Micro has always been keen to reach out to industry partners in the security ecosystem, to help us collectively build a safer world and improve the level of protection we can offer our customers. As part of these efforts, we’ve worked closely with Microsoft for decades.

Trend Micro is therefore doubly honored to be at the Microsoft Security 20/20 awards event in February, with nominations for two of the night’s most prestigious prizes.

Better together

No organization exists in a vacuum. The hi-tech, connectivity-rich nature of modern business is the source of its greatest power, but also one of its biggest weaknesses. Trend Micro’s mission from day one has been to make this environment as safe as possible for our customers. But we learned early on that to deliver on this vision, we had to collaborate. That’s why we work closely with the world’s top platform and technology providers — to offer protection that is seamless and optimized for these environments.

As a Gold Application Development Partner we’ve worked for years with Microsoft to ensure our security is tightly integrated into its products, to offer protection for Azure, Windows and Office 365 customers — at the endpoint, on servers, for email and in the cloud. It’s all about simplified, optimized security designed to support business agility and growth.

Innovating our way to success

This is a vision that comes from the very top. For over three decades, our CEO and co-founder Eva Chen has been at the forefront of industry leading technology innovation and collaborative success at Trend Micro. Among other things during that time, we’ve released:

  • The world’s first hardware-based system lockdown technology (StationLock)
  • Innovative internet gateway virus protection (InterScan VirusWall)
  • The industry’s first two-hour virus response service-level agreement
  • The first integrated physical-virtual security offering, with agentless threat protection for virtualized desktops (VDI) and data centers (Deep Security)
  • The first ever mobile app reputation service (MARS)
  • AI-based writing-style analysis for protection from Business Email Compromise (Writing Style DNA)
  • Cross-layer detection and response for endpoint, email, servers, & network combined (XDR)
  • Broadest cloud security platform as a service (Cloud One)

Two awards

We’re delighted to have been singled out for two prestigious awards at the Microsoft Security 20/20 event, which will kick off RSA Conference this year:

Customer Impact

At Trend Micro, the customer is at the heart of everything we do. It’s the reason we have hundreds of researchers across 15 threat centers around the globe leading the fight against emerging black hat tools and techniques. It’s why we partner with leading technology providers like Microsoft. And it’s why the channel is so important for us.

Industry Changemaker: Eva Chen

It goes without saying that our CEO and co-founder is an inspirational figure within Trend Micro. Her vision and strong belief that our only real competition as cybersecurity vendors are the bad guys and that the industry needs to stand united against them to make the digital world a safer place, guides the over 6000 employees every day. But she’s also had a major impact on the industry at large, working tirelessly over the years to promote initiatives that have ultimately made our connected world more secure. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without Eva’s foresight and dedication, the cybersecurity industry would be a much poorer place.

We’re all looking forward to the event, and for the start of 2020. As we enter a new decade, Trend Micro’s innovation and passion to make the digital world a safer place has never been more important.

 

The post Celebrating Decades of Success with Microsoft at the Security 20/20 Awards appeared first on .

The Everyday Cyber Threat Landscape: Trends from 2019 to 2020

By Trend Micro

The past 12 months have been another bumper year for cybercrime affecting everyday users of digital technology. Trend Micro blocked more than 26.8 billion of these threats in the first half of 2019 alone. The bad news is that there are many more out there waiting to steal your personal data for identity fraud, access your bank account, hold your computer to ransom, or extort you in other ways.

To help you stay safe over the coming year we’ve listed some of the biggest threats from 2019 and some trends to keep an eye on as we hit the new decade. As you’ll see, many of the most dangerous attacks will look a lot like the ones we warned about in 2019.

As we enter 2020 the same rules apply: stay alert, stay sceptical, and stay safe by staying protected.

Top five threats of 2019

Cybercrime is a chaotic, volatile world. So to make sense of the madness of the past 12 months, we’ve broken down the main type of threats consumers encountered into five key areas:

Home network threats: Our homes are increasingly powered by online technologies. Over two-thirds (69%) of US households now own at least one smart home device: everything from voice assistant-powered smart speakers to home security systems and connected baby monitors. But gaps in protection can expose them to hackers. As the gateway to our home networks, routers are particularly at risk. It’s a concern that 83% are vulnerable to attack. There were an estimated 105m smart home attacks in the first half of 2019 alone.

Endpoint threats: These are attacks aimed squarely at you the user, usually via the email channel. Trend Micro detected and blocked more than 26 billion such email threats in the first half of 2019, nearly 91% of the total number of cyber-threats. These included phishing attacks designed to trick you into clicking on a malicious link to steal your personal data and log-ins or begin a ransomware download. Or they could be designed to con you into handing over your personal details, by taking you to legit-looking but spoofed sites. Endpoint threats sometimes include social media phishing messages or even legitimate websites that have been booby-trapped with malware.

Mobile security threats: Hackers are also targeting our smartphones and tablets with greater gusto. Malware is often unwittingly downloaded by users, since it’s hidden in normal-looking Android apps, like the Agent Smith adware that infected over 25 million handsets globally this year. Users are also extra-exposed to social media attacks and those leveraging unsecured public Wi-Fi when using their devices. Once again, the end goal for the hackers is to make money: either by stealing your personal data and log-ins; flooding your screen with adverts; downloading ransomware; or forcing your device to contact expensive premium rate phone numbers that they own.

Online accounts under attack: Increasingly, hackers are after our log-ins: the virtual keys that unlock our digital lives. From Netflix to Uber, webmail to online banking, access to these accounts can be sold on the dark web or they can be raided for our personal identity data. Individual phishing attacks is one way to get these log-ins. But an increasingly popular method in 2019 was to use automated tools that try tens of thousands of previously breached log-ins to see if any of them work on your accounts. From November 2017 through the end of March 2019, over 55 billion such attacks were detected.

Breaches are everywhere: The raw materials needed to unlock your online accounts and help scammers commit identity fraud are stored by the organizations you interact with online. Unfortunately, these companies continued to be successfully targeted by data thieves in 2019. As of November 2019, there were over 1,200 recorded breaches in the US, exposing more than 163 million customer records. Even worse, hackers are now stealing card data direct from the websites you shop with as they are entered in, via “digital skimming” malware.

What to look out for in 2020

Smart homes under siege: As we invest more money in smart gadgets for our families, expect hackers to double down on network attacks. There’s a rich bounty for those that do: they can use an exposed smart endpoint as a means to sneak into your network and rifle through your personal data and online accounts. Or they could monitor your house via hacked security cameras to understand the best time to break in. Your hacked devices could even be recruited into botnets to help the bad guys attack others.

Social engineering online and by phone: Attacks that target user credulity are some of the most successful. Expect them to continue in 2020: both traditional phishing emails and a growing number of phone-based scams. Americans are bombarded by 200 million automated “robocalls” each day, 30% of which are potentially fraudulent. Sometimes phone fraud can shift quickly online; for example, tech support scams that convince the user there’s something wrong with their PC. Social engineering can also be used to extort money, such as in sextortion scams designed to persuade victims that the hacker has and is about to release a webcam image of them in a “compromising position.” Trend Micro detected a 319% increase in these attacks from 2H 2018 to the first half of 2019.

Threats on the move: Look out for more mobile threats in 2020. Many of these will come from unsecured public Wi-Fi which can let hackers eavesdrop on your web sessions and steal identity data and log-ins. Even public charging points can be loaded with malware, something LA County recently warned about. This comes on top of the escalating threat from malicious mobile apps.

All online accounts are fair game: Be warned that almost any online account you open and store personal data in today will be a target for hackers tomorrow. For 2020, this means of course you will need to be extra careful about online banking. But also watch out for attacks on gaming accounts.  Not only your personal identity data and log-ins but also lucrative in-game tokens will become highly sought after. Twelve billion of those recorded 55 billion credential stuffing attacks were directed at the gaming industry.

Worms make a comeback: Computer worms are dangerous because they self-replicate, allowing hackers to spread attacks without user interaction. This is what happened with the WannaCry ransomware attacks of 2017. A Microsoft flaw known as Bluekeep offers a new opportunity to cause havoc in 2020. There may be more out there.

How to stay safe

Given the sheer range of online threats facing computer users in 2020, you’ll need to cover all bases to keep your systems and data safe. That means:

Protecting the smart home with network monitoring solutions, regular checks for security updates on gadgets/router, changing the factory default logins to strong passwords, and putting all gadgets onto a guest network.

Tackling data-stealing malware, ransomware and other worm-style threats with strong AV from a reputable vendor, regular patching of your PC/mobile device, and strong password security (as given below).

Staying safe on the move by always using VPNs with public Wi-Fi, installing AV on your device, only frequenting official app stores, and ensuring you’re always on the latest device OS version. And steer clear of public USB charging points.

Keeping accounts secure by using a password manager for creating and storing strong passwords and/or switching on two-factor authentication where available. This will stop credential stuffing in its tracks and mitigate the impact of a third-party breach of your log-ins. Also, never log-in to webmail or other accounts on shared computers.

Taking on social engineering by never clicking on links or opening attachments in unsolicited emails, texts or social media messages and never giving out personal info over the phone.

How Trend Micro can help

Fortunately, Trend Micro fully understands the multiple sources for modern threats. It offers a comprehensive range of security products to protect all aspects of your digital life — from your smart home, home PCs, and mobile devices to online accounts including email and social networks, as well as when browsing the web itself.

Trend Micro Home Network Security: Provides protection against network intrusions, router hacks, web threats, dangerous file downloads and identity theft for every device connected to the home network.

Trend Micro Security: Protects your PCs and Macs against web threats, phishing, social network threats, data theft, online banking threats, digital skimmers, ransomware and other malware. Also guards against over-sharing on social media.

Trend Micro Mobile Security: Protects against malicious app downloads, ransomware, dangerous websites, and unsafe Wi-Fi networks.

Trend Micro Password Manager: Provides a secure place to store, manage and update your passwords. It remembers your log-ins, enabling you to create long, secure and unique credentials for each site/app you need to sign-in to.

Trend Micro WiFi Protection: Protects you on unsecured public WiFi by providing a virtual private network (VPN) that encrypts your traffic and ensures protection against man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks.

Trend Micro ID Security (Android, iOS): Monitors underground cybercrime sites to securely check if your personal information is being traded by hackers on the Dark Web and sends you immediate alerts if so.

The post The Everyday Cyber Threat Landscape: Trends from 2019 to 2020 appeared first on .

The Summit of Cybersecurity Sits Among the Clouds

By Trend Micro

Trend Micro Apex One™ as a Service

You have heard it before, but it needs to be said again—threats are constantly evolving and getting sneakier, more malicious, and harder to find than ever before.

It’s a hard job to stay one step ahead of the latest threats and scams organizations come across, but it’s something Trend Micro has done for a long time, and something we do very well! At the heart of Trend Micro security is the understanding that we have to adapt and evolve faster than hackers and their malicious threats. When we released Trend Micro™ OfficeScan™ 11.0, we were facing browser exploits, the start of advanced ransomware and many more new and dangerous threats. That’s why we launched our connected threat defense approach—allowing all Trend Micro solutions to share threat information and research, keeping our customers one step ahead of threats.

 

With the launch of Trend Micro™ OfficeScan™ XG, we released a set of new capabilities like anti-exploit prevention, ransomware enhancements, and pre-execution and runtime machine learning, protecting customers from a wider range of fileless and file-based threats. Fast forward to last year, we saw a huge shift in not only the threats we saw in the security landscape, but also in how we architected and deployed our endpoint security. This lead to Trend Micro Apex One™, our newly redesigned endpoint protection solution, available as a single agent. Trend Micro Apex One brought to the market enhanced fileless attack detection, advanced behavioral analysis, and combined our powerful endpoint threat detection capabilities with our sophisticated endpoint detection and response (EDR) investigative capabilities.

 

We all know that threats evolve, but, as user protection product manager Kris Anderson says, with Trend Micro, your endpoint protection evolves as well. “While we have signatures and behavioral patterns that are constantly being updated through our Smart Protection Network, attackers are discovering new tactics that threaten your company. At Trend Micro, we constantly develop and fine-tune our detection engines to combat these threats, real-time, with the least performance hit to the endpoint. This is why we urge customers to stay updated with the latest version of endpoint security—Apex One.”

Trend Micro Apex One has the broadest set of threat detection capabilities in the industry today, and staying updated with the latest version allows you to benefit from this cross-layered approach to security.

 

One easy way to ensure you are always protected with the latest version of Trend Micro Apex One is to migrate to Trend Micro Apex One™ as a Service. By deploying a SaaS model of Trend Micro Apex One, you can benefit from automatic updates of the latest Trend Micro Apex One security features without having to go through the upgrade process yourself. Trend Micro Apex One as a Service deployments will automatically get updated as new capabilities are introduced and existing capabilities are enhanced, meaning you will always have the most recent and effective endpoint security protecting your endpoints and users.

 

Trend Micro takes cloud security seriously, and endpoint security is no different. You can get the same gold standard endpoint protection of Trend Micro Apex One, but delivered as a service, allowing you to benefit from easy management and ongoing maintenance.

The post The Summit of Cybersecurity Sits Among the Clouds appeared first on .

INTERPOL Collaboration Reduces Cryptojacking by 78%

By Trend Micro

Cybercriminals are often seen as having the upper hand over the “white hat” community. After all, they’re anonymous, can launch attacks from virtually anywhere in the world, and usually have the element of surprise. But there’s one secret weapon the good guys have: Collaboration. That’s why Trend Micro has always prioritized its partnerships with law enforcement, academia, governments and other cybersecurity businesses.

We’re proud to have contributed to yet another successful collaborative operation with INTERPOL Global Complex for Innovation (IGCI) in Singapore that’s helped to reduce the number of users infected by cryptomining malware by 78%.

Cryptomining On The Rise

Also known as cryptojacking, these attacks have become an increasingly popular way for cybercriminals to make money.

Why?

Because victims don’t know they’ve been infected. The malware sits on their machine in the background mining for digital currency 24/7/365. Increasingly, hackers have taken to launching sophisticated attacks against enterprise IT systems and cloud servers to increase their mining and earning potential. But many still target home computer systems like routers, as these are often left relatively unprotected. Stitch enough of these devices together in a botnet and they have a ready-made cash cow.

That’s why cryptojacking remained the most detected threat in the first half of 2019 in terms of file-based threat components, according to our data.

Unlike serious data breaches, phishing attacks, ransomware and banking Trojans, cryptojacking doesn’t have major impact on the victim. They don’t lose sensitive personal data, there’s no risk of follow-on identity fraud and they’re not extorted for funds by being locked out of their PC.

However, it’s not without consequences: Cryptomining malware can slow your home network to a crawl while running up serious energy bills. It may even bring your home computers to a premature end. Also, there’s always the risk with any kind of malware infection that hackers may switch tactics and use their footprint on your home machines to launch other attacks in the future.

Enter Operation Goldfish Alpha

That’s why we were keen to offer our assistance to INTERPOL during this year’s Operation Goldfish Alpha. Thanks to our broad global visibility into attack trends and infection rates, we were able to articulate the scale of the cryptojacking threat and key mitigation steps, at a pre-operation meeting with ASEAN law enforcement officers in June.

A few months later, we developed and disseminated a key Cryptojacking Mitigation and Prevention guidance document. It details how a vulnerability in MikroTik routers had exposed countless users in the region to the risk of compromise by cryptomining malware. The document explains how to scan for this flaw using Trend Micro HouseCall for Home Networks, and how HouseCall can be used to detect and delete the Coinhive JavaScript that hackers were using to mine for digital currency on infected PCs.

Spectacular Success

Over the five months of Operation Goldfish Alpha, experts from national Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and police across 10 countries in the region worked to locate the infected routers, notify the victims and use our guidance document to patch the bugs and kick out the hackers.

Having helped to identify over 20,000 routers in the region that were hacked in this way, we’re delighted to say that by November, the number had reduced by at least 78%.

That’s the value of partnerships between law enforcement and private cybersecurity companies: They combine the power of investigative policing with the detailed subject matter expertise, visibility and resources of industry experts like us. We’ll continue to lend a hand wherever we can to make our connected, digital world a safer place.

The post INTERPOL Collaboration Reduces Cryptojacking by 78% appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: INTERPOL Collaboration Reduces Cryptojacking by 78% and Three Malicious Apps Found on Google Play May be Linked to SideWinder APT Group

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about how Trend Micro’s collaboration with INTERPOL’s Global Complex for Innovation helped reduce cryptojacking by 78% in Southeast Asia. Also, read about three malicious apps in the Google Play Store that may be linked to the SideWinder threat group.

Read on:

First Active Attack Exploiting CVE-2019-2215 Found on Google Play, Linked to SideWinder APT Group

Trend Micro found three malicious apps in the Google Play Store that work together to compromise a device and collect user information. The three malicious apps — disguised as photography and file manager tools — are likely to be connected to SideWinder, a known threat group that has reportedly targeted military entities’ Windows machines.

Operation Goldfish Alpha Reduces Cryptojacking Across Southeast Asia by 78%

Interpol announced the results of Operation Goldfish Alpha, a six-month effort to secure hacked routers across the Southeast Asia region. The international law enforcement agency said its efforts resulted in a drop of cryptojacking operations across Southeast Asia by 78%, compared to levels recorded in June 2019. Private sector partners included the Cyber Defense Institute and Trend Micro.

Celebrating Decades of Success with Microsoft at the Security 20/20 Awards

Trend Micro, having worked closely with Microsoft for decades, is honored to be nominated for the Microsoft Security 20/20 Partner awards in the Customer Impact and Industry Changemaker categories. Check out this blog for more information on the inaugural awards and Trend Micro’s recognitions.

Security Predictions for 2020 According to Trend Micro

Threat actors are shifting and adapting in their choice of attack vectors and tactics — prompting the need for businesses and users to stay ahead of the curve. Trend Micro has identified four key themes that will define 2020: a future that is set to be Complex, Exposed, Misconfigured and Defensible. Check out Digital Journal’s Q&A with Greg Young, vice president of cybersecurity at Trend Micro, to learn more about security expectations for this year.

The Everyday Cyber Threat Landscape: Trends from 2019 to 2020

In addition to security predictions for the new year, Trend Micro has listed some of the biggest threats from 2019 as well as some trends to keep an eye on as we begin 2020 in this blog. Many of the most dangerous attacks will look a lot like the ones Trend Micro warned about in 2019.

5 Key Security Lessons from the Cloud Hopper Mega Hack

In December 2019, the U.S. government issued indictments against two Chinese hackers who were allegedly involved in a multi-year effort to penetrate the systems of companies managing data and applications for customers via the computing cloud. The men, who remain at large, are thought to be part of a Chinese hacking collective known as APT10.

The Summit of Cybersecurity Sits Among the Clouds

Shifts in threats in the security landscape have led Trend Micro to develop Trend Micro Apex One™, a newly redesigned endpoint protection solution. Trend Micro Apex One™ brings enhanced fileless attack detection and advanced behavioral analysis and combines Trend Micro’s powerful endpoint threat detection capabilities with endpoint detection and response (EDR) investigative capabilities.

New Iranian Data Wiper Malware Hits Bapco, Bahrain’s National Oil Company

Iranian state-sponsored hackers have deployed a new strain of data-wiping malware on the network of Bapco, Bahrain’s national oil company. The incident took place on December 29th and didn’t have the long-lasting effect hackers might have wanted, as only a portion of Bapco’s computer fleet was impacted and the company continued to operate after the malware’s detonation. 

Ransomware Recap: Clop, DeathRansom, and Maze Ransomware

As the new year rolls in, new developments in different ransomware strains have emerged. For example, Clop ransomware has evolved to integrate a process killer that targets Windows 10 apps and various applications; DeathRansom can now encrypt files; and Maze ransomware has been targeting U.S. companies for stealing and encrypting data, alerted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

4 Ring Employees Fired for Spying on Customers

Smart doorbell company Ring said that it has fired four employees over the past four years for inappropriately accessing customer video footage. The disclosure comes in a recent letter to senators from Amazon-owned Ring as it attempts to defend the privacy of its platform, which has been plagued by data privacy incidents over the past year.

Web Skimming Attack on Blue Bear Affects School Admin Software Users

A web skimming attack was recently used to target Blue Bear, a school administration software that handles school accounting, student fees, and online stores for educational institutions. Names, credit card or debit card numbers, expiration dates and security codes, and Blue Bear account usernames and passwords may have been collected.

Patched Microsoft Access ‘MDB Leaker’ (CVE-2019-1463) Exposes Sensitive Data in Database Files

Researchers uncovered an information disclosure vulnerability (CVE-2019-1463) affecting Microsoft Access, which occurs when the software fails to properly handle objects in memory. The vulnerability, dubbed “MDB Leaker” by Mimecast Research Labs, resembles a patched information disclosure bug in Microsoft Office (CVE-2019-0560) found in January 2019.

Cryptocurrency Miner Uses Hacking Tool Haiduc and App Hider Xhide to Brute Force Machines and Servers

A Trend Micro honeypot detected a cryptocurrency-mining threat on a compromised site, where the URL hxxps://upajmeter[.]com/assets/.style/min was used to host the command for downloading the main shell script. The miner, a multi-component threat, propagates by scanning vulnerable machines and brute-forcing (primarily default) credentials.

What are your thoughts on the rise of cryptomining malware and cryptojacking tactics? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: INTERPOL Collaboration Reduces Cryptojacking by 78% and Three Malicious Apps Found on Google Play May be Linked to SideWinder APT Group appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: The First Patch Tuesday Update of 2020 and Pwn2Own Vancouver Announced

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about a major crypto-spoofing bug impacting Windows 10 that has been fixed as part of Microsoft’s January Patch Tuesday update. Also, read about the launch of Pwn2Own Vancouver, where it will pay to hack a Tesla Model 3.

Read on:

Can You Hack a Tesla Model 3? $500,000 Says That You Can’t

Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) has officially announced that its Pwn2Own Vancouver competition will be hosted at CanSecWest March 18-20. This time, the stakes have been upped in the automotive category: the hacker who can evade the multiple layers of security found in a Tesla Model 3 to pull off a complete vehicle compromise will win a $500,000 prize and a new Tesla Model 3.

Texas School District Loses $2.3 Million to Phishing Scam, BEC

Manor Independent School District (MISD) in Texas is investigating an email phishing attack after a series of seemingly normal school-vendor transactions resulted in the loss of an estimated $2.3 million. According to the statement posted on Twitter, the district is cooperating with the Manor Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Equifax Settles Class-Action Breach Lawsuit for $380.5M

A Georgia court granted final approval for an Equifax settlement in a class-action lawsuit, after the credit-reporting agency was hit by its massive 2017 data breach. This week, the Atlanta federal judge reportedly ruled that Equifax will pay $380.5 million to settle lawsuits regarding the breach.

Sodinokibi Ransomware Increases Year-End Activity, Targets Airport and Other Businesses

The Sodinokibi ransomware, detected as Ransom.Win32.SODINOKIBI,was involved in several high-profile attacks in 2019. The ransomware ended the year by launching a new round of attacks aimed at multiple organizations, including the Albany International Airport and the foreign exchange company Travelex.

ICS Security in the Spotlight Due to Tensions with Iran

Given the heightened tensions between the U.S. and Iran, organizations with connected industrial infrastructure should be on guard. In the wake of the assassination, several cybersecurity experts and U.S. government officials have warned of the ICS security risk that Iran-affiliated adversaries pose. Others point to the likelihood of smaller cyberattacks designed to distract rather than prompt retaliation.

Dymalloy, Electrum, and Xenotime Hacking Groups Set Their Targets on US Energy Sector

At least three hacking groups have been identified aiming to interfere with power grids across the United States. The oil, gas, water and energy industries have proved to become a valuable target for threat actors looking to compromise ICS environments, and according to a report on the state of industrial control systems (ICSs), attempts in attacking the utilities industry are on the rise.

Microsoft Patches Major Crypto Spoofing Bug

A major crypto-spoofing bug impacting Windows 10 users has been fixed as part of Microsoft’s January Patch Tuesday security bulletin. The vulnerability could allow an attacker to spoof a code-signing certificate, vital to validating executable programs in Windows, and make it appear as if an application was from a trusted source.

Mobile Banking Trojan FakeToken Resurfaces, Sends Offensive Messages Overseas from Victims’ Accounts

Researchers recently discovered an updated version of the mobile banking trojan FakeToken after detecting 5,000 smartphones sending offensive text messages overseas. Once the malware infects an unprotected Android device, FakeToken is able to send and intercept text messages such as 2FA codes or tokens, as well as scan through the victim’s contacts to possibly send phishing messages.

Report: Chinese Hacking Group APT40 Hides Behind Network of Front Companies

An online group of cybersecurity analysts calling themselves “Intrusion Truth” doxed their fourth Chinese state-sponsored hacking operation. After previously exposing details about Beijing’s hand in APT3 (believed to operate out of the Guangdong province), APT10 (Tianjin province), and APT17 (Jinan province), Intrusion Truth has now begun publishing details about China’s cyber apparatus in the state of Hainan, an island in the South China Sea.

What are your thoughts on the major crypto-spoofing bug that was found by the NSA? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: The First Patch Tuesday Update of 2020 and Pwn2Own Vancouver Announced appeared first on .

Don’t Let the Vulnera-Bullies Win. Use our free tool to see if you are patched against Vulnerability CVE-2020-0601

By Trend Micro

So much for a quiet January! By now you must have heard about the new Microsoft® vulnerability CVE-2020-0601, first disclosed by the NSA (making it the first Windows bug publicly attributed to the National Security Agency). This vulnerability is found in a cryptographic component that has a range of functions—an important one being the ability to digitally sign software, which certifies that the software has not been tampered with. Using this vulnerability, attackers can sign malicious executables to make them look legitimate, leading to potentially disastrous man-in-the-middle attacks.

 

Here’s the good news. Microsoft has already released a patch to protect against any exploits stemming from this vulnerability. But here’s the catch: You have to patch!

While Trend Micro offers industry-leading virtual patching capabilities via our endpoint, cloud, and network security solutions, the best protection against vulnerabilities is to deploy a real patch from the software vendor. Let me say it again for effect – the best protection against this very serious vulnerability is to ensure the affected systems are patched with Microsoft’s latest security update.

We understand how difficult it can be to patch systems in a timely manner, so we created a valuable tool that will test your endpoints to see if whether they have been patched against this latest threat or if they are still vulnerable. Additionally, to ensure you are protected against any potential threats, we have just released additional layers of protection in the form of IPS rules for Trend Micro Deep Security™ and Trend Micro Vulnerability Protection™ (including Trend Micro Apex One™).  This was rolled out to help organizations strengthen their overall security posture and provide some protection during lengthy patching processes.

 

You can download our Trend Micro Vulnerability Assessment Tool right now to see if you are protected against the latest Microsoft vulnerability. And while you’re at it, check out our latest Knowledge Based Article for additional information on this new vulnerability along with Trend Micro security capabilities that help protect customers like you 24/7. Even during those quiet days in January.

The post Don’t Let the Vulnera-Bullies Win. Use our free tool to see if you are patched against Vulnerability CVE-2020-0601 appeared first on .

Defend Yourself Now and in the Future Against Mobile Malware

By Trend Micro

The world has gone mobile and the US is leading the way. It’s estimated that that the number of smartphone users alone topped 257 million in the States in 2018. That means three-quarters (74%) of households now boast at least one mobile device. And in this new digital world, it’s mobile applications that really matter. They’re a one-click gateway to our favorite videos, live messaging, email, banking, social media and much more.

There are said to be around 2.8 million of these apps on the official Google Play Store today. But unfortunately, where there are users, there are also hackers looking to capitalize. And one of their favorite ways to make money is by tricking you into downloading a malicious app they’ve sneaked onto the marketplace.

Most recently, 42 such apps had to be removed after being installed eight million times over the period of a year, flooding victims’ screens with unwanted advertising. This is just the tip of the iceberg. As more of us turn to mobile devices as our primary internet gateway, the bad guys will follow suit. Trend Micro blocked over 86 million mobile threats in 2018, and we can expect this figure to increase into the future.

So how can you protect your devices and your data from hackers?

Adware ahoy

The latest bunch of 42 apps are from a class of malicious software known as adware. This follows a previous discovery by Trend Micro earlier this year of a further 85 adware-laden apps downloaded eight million times. Cyber-criminals fraudulently make money by displaying unwanted ads on the victim’s device. In the meantime, the user has to contend with annoying pop-ups which can run down the device’s battery and eat up computing resources. Some even silently gather user information.

Ones to watch

Unfortunately, it’s increasingly difficult to spot malicious apps on the Play Store. A popular tactic for hackers is to hide their malware in titles which impersonate legitimate applications. A recent two-year study found thousands of such counterfeits on the Play Store, exposing users unwittingly to malware. Banking apps are a particularly popular type of title to impersonate as they can provide hackers with highly lucrative log-ins to open users’ accounts.

Some malware, like the recently disclosed Agent Smith threat, works by replacing all the legitimate apps on a user’s device with malicious alter-egos.

So, as we hit 2020, what other threats hidden in legitimate-seeming apps should mobile users be looking out for?

  • More intrusive adware.
  • Cryptocurrency mining malware. This will run in the background, eating up your device battery and computing power. Trend Micro noted a 450% increase in infections from 2017 to 2018.
  • Banking Trojans designed to harvest your log-ins so hackers can get their hands on your savings. Our detections of this malware soared 98% between 2017-18.
  • These attacks have evolved from simple screen lockers to malware designed to encrypt all the files on your device.
  • Premium rate services. Some malware will covertly text or call premium rate SMS numbers under the control of the hacker, thus making them money and costing you potentially significant sums. ExpensiveWall malware, for example, was found in 50 Google Play apps and downloaded millions of times, charging victims’ accounts for fake services.
  • Information theft. Some malware will allow hackers to eavesdrop on your conversations, and/or hoover up your personal data, including phone number, email address, and account log-ins. This data can then be sold on the dark web and used in follow-on identity fraud attempts.

Is Google helping?

The Android ecosystem has always and remains to be a bigger threat than iOS because it’s relatively easier for developers to get their applications onto the official marketplace. Now, it’s true that Google carries out some vetting of the apps on its Play Store and it is getting better and quicker at spotting and blocking malware. It says the number of rejected app submissions grew by over 55% in 2018 while app suspensions increased by over 66%.

However, Google’s Play Protect, which is pre-installed on Android devices, has garnered less than favorable reviews. This anti-malware solution is intended to scan for malicious apps to prevent you downloading them. However, it has received poor reviews for its “terrible malware protection.”

In fact, in independent tests run in July by German organization AV-TEST, Google Play Protect found just 44% of the 3,347 “real-time” online malware threats, and just 55% of the 3,433 malware samples that were collected in the previous month. According to Tom’s Guide, “these scores are all well below the industry averages, which were always 99.5% or above in both categories for all three rounds.”

How do I stay safe?

So how can mobile users ensure their personal data and devices are secure from the growing range of app-based threats?

Consider the following:

  • Only visit official app stores. Even though Google Play has a malware problem, it is more secure than third-party app stores. In fact, you are 23 times more likely to install a potentially harmful application (PHA) outside Play, according to Google.
  • Ensure you’re on the latest operating system version.
  • Do not root your device as this can expose it to threats.
  • Be cautious. If the app is requesting an excessive number of permissions, it may be malicious.
  • Install on-device AV from a reputable third-party provider like Trend Micro.

How Trend Micro Mobile Security helps

Trend Micro Mobile Security (TMMS) offers customers comprehensive anti-malware capabilities via its real-time Security Scan function. Security Scan alerts you to any malware hidden in apps before they are installed and suggests legitimate versions. It can also be manually run on devices to detect and remove malicious apps, including ransomware, that may already have been installed.

To use the manual scan, simply:

1. Tap the Security Scan panel in the TMMS Console. The Security Scan settings screen appears, with the Settings tab active by default.

2. Tap Scan Now to conduct a security scan. The result appears.

3. In the example shown, “Citibank” has been detected as a fake banking app, installed on the device before Mobile Security was installed. Apps are recommended for you to remove or to trust.

4. Tap Uninstall to uninstall the fake app. A Details screen defines the security threats.

5. Tap Uninstall A popup will ask if you want to uninstall the app.

6. Tap Uninstall once more to uninstall it. The app will uninstall.

7. If there are more potentially unwanted apps, tap the panel for Apps Removal Recommended to show the list of apps recommended for removal. The Removal Recommended list will show apps to Remove or Trust.

8. You can configure settings via Security Scan > Settings This will allow you to choose protection strength (Low, Normal, and High).

9. In Settings, check the Pre-Installation Scan, which is disabled by default, to block malware from Google Play before it’s installed. It sets up a virtual private network (VPN) and enables the real-time scan.

Among its other features, Trend Micro Mobile Security also:

  • Blocks dangerous websites from loading in any browsing app with Web Guard
  • Checks if public WiFi connections are safe with Wi-Fi Checker
  • Guards financial and commercial apps with Pay Guard Mobile
  • Optimizes your device’s performance System Tuner and App Manager
  • Protects your kids’ devices with Parental Controls
  • Protects your privacy on social media with Social Network Privacy
  • Provides Lost Device Protection.

To find out more about Trend Micro Mobile Security, go to our Mobile Security Solutions website, where you can also learn about our Mobile Security solution for iOS.

Tags: Mobile Security, Mobile Antivirus, Mobile Antimalware, Android Antivirus

The post Defend Yourself Now and in the Future Against Mobile Malware appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: Trend Micro Creates Factory Honeypot to Trap Malicious Attackers and Microsoft Leaves 250M Customer Service Records Open to the Web

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, dive into a research study that explores the risks associated with common cybersecurity vulnerabilities in a factory setting. Also, read about how misconfigured Microsoft cloud databases containing 14 years of customer support logs exposed 250 million records.

Read on:

Don’t Let the Vulnera-Bullies Win. Use Our Free Tool to See If You Are Patched Against Vulnerability CVE-2020-0601

Last week, Microsoft announced vulnerability CVE-2020-0601 and has already released a patch to protect against any exploits stemming from the vulnerability. Understanding how difficult it can be to patch systems in a timely manner, Trend Micro created a valuable tool that will test endpoints to determine if they have been patched against this latest threat or if they are still vulnerable.

Ransomware, Snooping and Attempted Shutdowns: See What Hackers Did to These Systems Left Unprotected Online

Malicious hackers are targeting factories and industrial environments with a wide variety of malware and cyberattacks including ransomware and cryptocurrency miners. All of these incidents were spotted by researchers at Trend Micro who built a honeypot that mimicked the environment of a real factory. The fake factory featured some common cybersecurity vulnerabilities to make it appealing for hackers to discover and target.

Defend Yourself Now and In the Future Against Mobile Malware

Recently, 42 apps were removed from the Google Play Store after being installed eight million times over the period of a year, flooding victims’ screens with unwanted advertising. Trend Micro blocked more than 86 million mobile threats in 2018, and that number is expected to continue to increase. To learn how to protect your mobile device from hackers, read this blog from Trend Micro.

Trend Micro Joins LOT Network to Fight ‘Patent Trolls’

Trend Micro announced this week that it has joined non-profit community LOT Network in a bid to combat the growing threat posed to its business and its customers by patent assertion entities (PAEs). The community now has more than 500 members, including some of the world’s biggest tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Cisco.

Blocking A CurveBall: PoCs Out for Critical Microsoft-NSA Bug CVE-2020-0601

Security researchers have released proof-of-concept (PoC) codes for exploiting CVE-2020-0601, a bug that the National Security Agency (NSA) reported. The vulnerability affects Windows operating systems’ CryptoAPI’s validation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) certificates and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) trust. Enterprises and users are advised to patch their systems immediately to prevent attacks that exploit this security flaw.

Microsoft Leaves 250M Customer Service Records Open to the Web

Misconfigured Microsoft cloud databases containing 14 years of customer support logs exposed 250 million records to the open internet for 25 days. The account information dates back as far as 2005 and as recent as December 2019 and exposes Microsoft customers to phishing and tech scams. Microsoft said it is in the process of notifying affected customers.

Microsoft Releases Advisory on Zero-Day Vulnerability CVE-2020-0674, Workaround Provided

On January 17, Microsoft published an advisory (ADV200001) warning users about CVE-2020-0674, a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability involving Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) web browser. A patch has not yet been released as of the time of writing — however, Microsoft has acknowledged that it is aware of limited targeted attacks exploiting the flaw.

Google to Apple: Safari’s Privacy Feature Actually Opens iPhone Users to Tracking

Researchers from Google’s Information Security Engineering team have detailed several security issues in the design of Apple’s Safari anti-tracking system, Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). ITP is designed to restrict cookies and is Apple’s answer to online marketers that track users across websites. However, Google researchers argue in a new paper that ITP leaks Safari users’ web browsing habits.

Hacker Publishes Credentials for Over 515,000 Servers, Routers, and IoT Devices

A hacker has published the credentials of over 515,000 servers, routers, and IoT devices on a well-known hacking website. ZDNet reported that the list consists of IP addresses and the usernames and passwords used by each for unlocking Telnet services, the port that allows these devices to be controlled through the internet.

Pwn2Own Miami Contestants Haul in $180K for Hacking ICS Equipment

The first Pwn2Own hacking competition that exclusively focuses on industrial control systems (ICS) has kicked off in Miami. So far, a total of $180,000 has been awarded for pwning five different products. The contest hosts at Trend Micro’s Zero Day initiative (ZDI) have allocated more than $250,000 in cash and prizes for the contest, which is testing eight targets across five categories.

Sextortion Scheme Claims Use of Home Cameras, Demands Bitcoin or Gift Card Payment

A new sextortion scheme has been found preying on victims’ fears through social engineering and follows in the footsteps of recent sextortion schemes demanding payment in bitcoin. Security researchers at Mimecast observed the scheme during the first week of the year. The scheme reportedly sent a total of 1,687 emails on Jan. 2 and 3, mostly to U.S. email account holders.

NetWire RAT Hidden in IMG Files Deployed in BEC Campaign

A recent business email compromise (BEC) campaign, purportedly coming from a small number of scammers in Germany, targets organizations by sending them emails with IMG file attachments hiding a NetWire remote access trojan (RAT). The campaign was discovered by IBM X-Force security researchers and involves sending an employee of the targeted organization an email masquerading as a corporate request.

What are your thoughts on the results of Trend Micro’s factory honeypot study? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: Trend Micro Creates Factory Honeypot to Trap Malicious Attackers and Microsoft Leaves 250M Customer Service Records Open to the Web appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: Over 2,000 WordPress Accounts Compromised and Facebook to Pay $550M to Settle Class Action Case Over Facial Recognition

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, over two thousand WordPress sites were compromised using a malicious script that redirects visitors to scam websites. Also, read about how Facebook has agreed to pay $550 million to Illinois users to settle a class action lawsuit filed over the use of its face-tagging technology.

Read on:

Security Analysis of Devices that Support SCPI and VISA Protocols

The Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments (SCPI) protocol, now 30 years old, was initially designed for sensors communicating over serial lines to make adoption via different languages and hardware interfaces easier. Today, these devices are being exposed to the internet as more networks get connected, but they have never been designed for it and network administrators might not be aware that this is happening.

The Rich Are Different, but their Smartphones Aren’t

After Jeff Bezos’ phone was hacked, it raised the question of how high-profile people protect their cybersecurity. In this article, Mark Nunnikhoven, vice president of cloud research at Trend Micro, explains that the rich and famous can’t buy phones that are more secure than the average.

Malicious Script Plagues Over 2,000 WordPress Accounts, Redirects Visitors to Scam Sites

Besides leading visitors to scam websites, the malicious script can also gain unauthorized admin access to affected WordPress sites, allowing attackers to inject malware and apply modifications. Sucuri reported that the attackers gained access to the affected sites by exploiting plugins such as the vulnerable versions of the “CP Contact Form with PayPal” and the “Simple Fields” plugins.

Avast Winds Down Jumpshot, Cites User Data Sale Privacy Concerns

Avast is winding down its subsidiary Jumpshot following an explosive investigation into the sale of user data to third parties that may pose a risk to consumer privacy. The antivirus vendor said the unit will no longer have access to user information harvested from users of Avast products and services will eventually be fully terminated.

Unsecured AWS S3 Bucket Found Leaking Data of Over 30K Cannabis Dispensary Customers

An unsecured Amazon S3 bucket owned by cannabis retailer THSuite was found leaking the data of more than 30,000 individuals. Discovered by a vpnMentor research team during a large-scale web mapping project, the unsecured bucket exposed 85,000 files that included records with sensitive personally identifiable information (PII).

Facebook to Pay $550M to Settle Class Action Case Over Facial Recognition

Facebook has agreed to pay $550 million to Illinois users to settle a class action lawsuit filed over the use of its face-tagging technology to collect facial-recognition data on its social media platform. The suit stems from a class-action proceeding from Facebook users in Illinois over a feature called Tag Suggestions, which identifies Facebook users in photos based on biometric identification technology.

Google, Mozilla Crack Down on Malicious Extensions and Add-ons

The Google security team has temporarily disallowed the publishing or updating of paid extensions that use the Chrome Web Store payments due to an influx of fraudulent transactions performed via the extensions. Mozilla banned 197 suspicious Firefox add-ons that executed malicious code, ran codes from a remote server, stole user data, collected user search terms and obfuscated source code.

Microsoft Azure Flaws Could Have Let Hackers Take Over Cloud Servers

Cybersecurity researchers at Check Point disclosed details of two recently patched vulnerabilities in Microsoft Azure services that are potentially dangerous and, if exploited, could have allowed hackers to target several businesses that run their web and mobile apps on Azure.

3 Indonesian Hackers Arrested for Global Magecart Attacks, Other Members Still at Large

The International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), together with the Indonesian National Police, recently publicized the arrest of three Indonesian men suspected of being behind intercontinental Magecart attacks. Known targets of this attack include online shops, hotel chains, advertising companies and even schools.

Inside the World’s Highest-Stakes Industrial Hacking Contest

Pwn2Own Miami, held at the S4 industrial control system security conference, has focused its participants’ skills for the first time exclusively on industrial control software (ICS). Every target is an application that touches physical machinery. The compromises could have catastrophic effects, from blackouts to life-threatening industrial accidents. In this article, read more about the inaugural Pwn2Own Miami competition.

Over 30 Million Stolen Credit Card Records Being Sold on the Dark Web

Cybercriminals were found selling more than 30 million credit card records on the dark web, purportedly from a data breach suffered by a U.S.-based gas station and convenience store chain last year. The breach was caused by a PoS malware attack and affected 860 convenience stores, of which 600 were also gas stations.

What are your thoughts on the class action lawsuit over Facebook’s facial recognition technology? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: Over 2,000 WordPress Accounts Compromised and Facebook to Pay $550M to Settle Class Action Case Over Facial Recognition appeared first on .

Four Reasons Your Cloud Security Is Keeping You Up At Night

By Trend Micro

We are excited to introduce guest posts from our newest Trenders from Cloud Conformity, now Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity. More insights will be shared from this talented team to help you be confident and in control of the security of your cloud environments!

Why your cloud security is keeping you up at night

We are all moving to the cloud for speed, agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency and have realized that it demands equally powerful security management. As the cloud keeps on attracting more businesses, security teams are spending sleepless nights securing the infrastructure.

Somewhere, a cyber con artist has a target set on you and is patiently waiting to infiltrate your security. Managing your security posture is as critical as wearing sunscreen even if the sun is hiding behind a cloud. You may not feel the heat instantly, but it definitely leaves a rash for you to discover later.

Analyzing the volume of issues across the global Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity customer base clearly shows that ‘Security’ is the most challenging area within AWS infrastructure.

According to an internal study in June 2019, more than 50% of issues belonged to the ‘Security’ category.

We can definitely reduce the number of security issues affecting cloud infrastructure, but first need to conquer the possible reasons for security vulnerabilities.

 1. Not scanning your accounts regularly enough

If you deploy services and resources multiple times a day, you must continuously scan all your environments and instances at regular intervals. Tools like Conformity Bot scans your accounts against 530 rules across five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework to help you identify potential security risks and prioritize them. You can even set up the frequency of scans or run them manually as required.

2. Not investing in preventative measures

Seemingly harmless misconfigurations can cause enormous damage that can rapidly scale up and result in a security breach. You can prevent potential security risks from entering live environments by investing some time in scanning your staging or test accounts before launching any resources or services. You can use a Template Scanner to scan your account settings against CloudFormation Template and identify any security and compliance issues before deployment.

3. Not monitoring real-time activity

Catastrophes don’t wait! It may take a few minutes before someone barges into your cloud infrastructure while you are away on the weekend. You need to watch activity in real-time to act on threats without delay. A tool such as Real-Time Monitoring Add-on tracks your account’s activity in real time and triggers alerts for suspicious activity based on set configurations. For example, you can set up alerts to monitor account activity from a specific country or region.

4. Not communicating risks in a timely manner

The information trickling from your monitoring controls is fruitless until you get the right people to act quickly. One of the best practices to maintain smooth security operations is to merge the flow of security activity and events into information channels. Conformity allows you to integrate your AWS accounts with communication channels, for example Jira, email, SMS, Slack, PagerDuty, Zendesk, ServiceNow ITSM, and Amazon SNS. Moreover, configuring communication triggers sends notifications and alerts to set teams through the selected channels.

AWS provides you with the services and resources to host your apps and infrastructure, but remember – Security is a shared responsibility in which you must take an active role.

See how Trend Micro can support your part of the shared responsibility model for cloud security: https://www.trendmicro.com/cloudconformity.

Stay Safe!

The post Four Reasons Your Cloud Security Is Keeping You Up At Night appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: ZDI Bug Hunters Rake in $1.5M in 2019 and Metamorfo Trojan Malware Campaign Targets Online Banking Users

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, read about Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative’s $1.5 million in awards and other noteworthy milestones in 2019. Also, learn about a crafty malware that makes you retype your passwords so it can steal them for credit card information and other personal data.

Read on:

Four Reasons Your Cloud Security is Keeping You Up at Night

Organizations are migrating to the cloud for speed, agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency – but they have realized that it demands equally powerful security management. As the cloud continues to attract more businesses, security teams are spending sleepless nights securing the infrastructure. We can reduce the number of security issues affecting cloud infrastructure; however, we must first conquer the possible reasons for security vulnerabilities.

Trend Micro and Baker Hughes Collaborate to Help Deliver Protection for Critical Infrastructure

Trend Micro announced this week that it will collaborate with Baker Hughes’ Nexus Controls operational technology (OT) security experts through a strategic framework agreement, signed in late 2019. Together the companies aim to provide comprehensive, industry leading guidance and support for enterprises running critical OT environments.

Malicious Optimizer and Utility Android Apps on Google Play Communicate with Trojans that Install Malware, Perform Mobile Ad Fraud

Trend Micro recently discovered several malicious optimizer, booster and utility apps (detected as AndroidOS_BadBooster.HRX) on Google Play. The apps can access remote ad configuration servers that can be used for malicious purposes, perform mobile ad fraud, and download as many as 3,000 malware variants or malicious payloads on affected devices.

Zero Day Initiative Bug Hunters Rake in $1.5M in 2019

Zero Day Initiative, a division of Trend Micro, awarded more than $1.5 million in cash and prizes to bug-hunters throughout 2019, resulting in 1,035 security vulnerability advisories for the year. Most of those advisories (88 percent) were published in conjunction with a patch from the vendor.

ICS in VUCA: Insights from the World‘s Biggest ICS Security Event – S4

Many sessions at this year’s S4 discussed strengthening leadership. The environment surrounding the ICS community is filled with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), and it requires strong leadership to drive changes. In this blog, read about the key takeaways coming out of the world’s leading ICS security event, S4.

This Crafty Malware Makes You Retype Your Passwords So It Can Steal Them

A trojan malware campaign is targeting online banking users around the world with the aim of stealing credit card information, finances and other personal details. Detailed by researchers at Fortinet, the Metamorfo banking trojan has targeted users of over 20 online banks in countries around the world including the US, Canada, Peru, Chile, Spain, Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico.

SORA and UNSTABLE: 2 Mirai Variants Target Video Surveillance Storage Systems

Trend Micro researchers encountered two variants of the notorious internet of things (IoT) malware, Mirai, employing a new propagation method. The two variants, namely SORA (detected as IoT.Linux.MIRAI.DLEU) and UNSTABLE (detected as IoT.Linux.MIRAI.DLEV), gain entry through Rasilient PixelStor5000 video surveillance storage systems by exploiting CVE-2020-6756.

Vulnerability in WhatsApp Desktop Exposed User Files

Facebook has patched a vulnerability in WhatsApp Desktop that could allow an attacker to launch cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and access files from the victim’s system when paired with WhatsApp for iPhone. The vulnerability was discovered by PerimeterX security researcher Gal Weizman, who found he could bypass WhatsApp’s CSP to execute code on a target system using maliciously crafted messages.

Ryuk Ransomware Infects US Government Contractor

The internal system of U.S. government contractor Electronic Warfare Associates (EWA) was infected with Ryuk ransomware last week, ZDNet reported. EWA is a contractor that supplies electronic equipment and services to the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Justice (DOJ).

New Lemon Duck Malware Campaign Targets IoT, Large Manufacturers

Printers, smart TVs and automated guided vehicles that depend on Windows 7 have become the latest targets for cybercriminals leveraging a “self-spreading” variant of the malware Lemon Duck. In a report released Wednesday by TrapX Security, researchers warn manufacturers dependent on IoT devices are targets in a new global campaign leveraging the malware variant.

New Extortion Campaign Threatens Victims of the 2015 Ashley Madison Breach

A new extortion campaign is targeting victims of the Ashley Madison data breach that happened five years ago, Vade Secure reports. Avid Life Media — the company behind the site — was hacked in 2015 by a group known as Impact Team. The actors behind this new campaign tell victims that they will publicize proof of their profile as well as other “embarrassing” activities and demand bitcoins as payment. 

Emotet Uses Coronavirus Scare in Latest Campaign, Targets Japan

Threat actors behind the Emotet malware used the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) scare as a hook for their spam email campaign against targets in Japan. IBM X-Force reported that the coronavirus spam emails were disguised as official notifications sent by a disability welfare provider and public health centers. The email content warns recipients about the rapid spread of the virus and instructs them to download an attached notice that allegedly contains preventive measures.

Researchers Use Smart Light Bulbs to Infiltrate Networks

Researchers successfully infiltrated networks through a vulnerability in Philips Hue light bulbs. The CVE-2020-6007 vulnerability, which involves the Zigbee communication protocol, can be abused to remotely install malicious firmware in smart light bulbs and spread malware to other internet-of-things (IoT) devices.

What was your biggest takeaway from the S4 ICS security conference this year? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: ZDI Bug Hunters Rake in $1.5M in 2019 and Metamorfo Trojan Malware Campaign Targets Online Banking Users appeared first on .

How to Manage Your Privacy On and Off Facebook

By Trend Micro

Social media has come a long way in a short space of time. In a little over a decade, it’s grown from being the preserve of a relatively small group of online enthusiasts to one of the defining trends of 21st century life. As the undisputed global leader in this field, Facebook now boasts nearly 1.7 billion daily active users.

Not only do we share personal and global news, photos and videos with each other every day on the site, we also log-in to our favorite third-party websites and apps via Facebook to shop, chat, play games and much more. In short, social media makes life more fun, more social, and more connected.

But at the same time, our digital lives have become more complicated. Sometimes we share without realizing the significance of the data we’re showing others — including strangers, trolls and maybe even fraudsters. Sometimes we sign-up for third-party apps/services that take advantage of small print agreements to sell our data on to others — possibly for uses we did not want. And often, the websites we visit independently of Facebook send data on our browsing behavior back to the social network without our knowledge.

Some of us view this kind of tracking as the price we pay for free internet services, and welcome the improved personalization it enables. But others may feel creeped out that their family’s every click and swipe is being silently monitored, logged, and shared.

Time for action

The good news is that Facebook has been listening (to some extent!) to regulators and consumers, and has started the new year by offering users more tools to shine a light on where and how their data is being used, and how they can protect their privacy. But we’re talking here about a platform that has been growing non-stop for the past 15 years. Complexity is everywhere, and it’s not always easy to find the tools you need to enhance your privacy on the site.

That’s why we’ve put together this short guide. It’ll teach you where your privacy is most at risk on Facebook, and what you can do to manage these risks, including an assist by Trend Micro’s own Privacy Scanner tool.

Why should I be worried?

Although social media offers much to enrich and improve our lives, there are multiple levels of privacy risk involved in using it. For many of us, the stakes have risen almost silently in the background over the past few years. We can split these into three basic areas:

Oversharing: At a very basic level Facebook allows you to share news, pictures, stories and more with the world. But would you want your boss, prospective employer, law enforcement, credit agencies and other users to see every little thing about you? Yes, they increasingly use Facebook as a source of intelligence gathering, so you may want to limit who can view your information to just those in your friendship network.

Among the most prodigious collectors and monetizers of our private data are cyber-criminals. A Facebook account is a trove of sensitive personal information: everything from email addresses and phone numbers to partners and political preferences. It could all be leveraged to commit identity fraud or craft convincing phishing emails which trick you into giving away even more details. Something as innocuous as a photo of a family pet could provide hackers with some useful intel for guessing your online passwords. Or what about a real-time update from the beach? It might be all an opportunistic burglar needs to raid your home.

Third-party apps and websites: One of the most controversial aspects of data collection and use on Facebook relates to partner sites and services. Often, users sign-up for these apps without being fully aware of how their data will be used, or even what profile data the app may be gaining permission to harvest. It was data on 87 million Facebook users and their friends collected by a popular third-party personality test app that ended up being sold to Cambridge Analytica. It was then controversially used to target US voters ahead of the last Presidential election.

Following a huge FTC fine, Facebook is now more rigorous in ensuring third-party developers comply with its privacy and data use policies. But some users may still balk at their private data being sold on to third parties.

Other Off-Facebook activity: Apps and websites that you log into with your Facebook ID technically count as “off-Facebook activity”: that is, stuff that happens outside of the social site. But there’s more. Did you know, for example, that Facebook collects data from a huge number of additional sites and apps that aren’t obviously connected to the platform?

It uses code embedded on these sites to track what you do there, in order to make advertising on Facebook more targeted and personalized. So accurate and covert is this technology that it has given rise to a conspiracy theory that Facebook is somehow listening in to its users’ phone calls. It’s not. Users simply don’t know that, when they visit many sites and apps on the web, those same sites are secretly sending data back to Facebook, which then serves up relevant ads. Just bought Season One of your favorite show on a streaming app? You may get an ad for Season Two when you next visit your Facebook account.

Some people may be fine with this trade-off: privacy for a more tailored user experience. But many others may not. It’s one thing monitoring what you bought off an e-commerce site, quite another to track who you swiped left on when you were last on a dating site.

How can I manage my privacy better?

Fortunately, Facebook provides tools to help you to manage your privacy. Let’s go through some of them, from the newest to the oldest.

Off-Facebook
Facebook has just released a way of checking which sites/apps track and send data on your web usage back to the social network, clearing your data sharing history with them, and disconnecting for the future.

  • The Off-Facebook Activity tool can be reached here, or you can go to Settings > Your Facebook Information > Off-Facebook Activity.
  • Click Manage Your Off-Facebook Activity and you’ll see a list of the (possibly many) apps and sites that have shared info about you with Facebook, including how they shared the data, and what kind of data it is.
  • You can turn off this activity by going to Clear History. However, to prevent such data sharing in future, you will need to go to Manage Future Activity and then toggle it Off.

There are some caveats. Disconnecting in this way will log you out of any apps/sites you used Facebook to log into. In addition, it will not stop Facebook serving you advertising — you’ll get the same number of ads, except these won’t be as personalized as before. Facebook will also continue to receive information about your interactions on various sites, but this will be anonymized.

Particular apps, games and websites

You can also directly edit the privacy and settings of particular apps, games and websites you’ve logged into with your Facebook account.

  • Go here, or click Settings, then Apps and Websites in the menu on the left.
  • Click the name of the app, game or website you want to update, or Search Apps and Websites with the Search tool on the upper right to find it.
  • Once you’ve found the app, game, or website in question, update the information you’re sharing, who can see that you use it, and the notifications you receive.
  • Click Save to save your changes.

Basic privacy settings

Facebook has also overhauled its most basic privacy settings. Its Privacy Checkup tool features four distinct sections.

  • Click at the top of any page on Facebook and select Privacy Checkup. Then choose
  • Who Can See What You Share to review and change who can view your profile info and posts, and to block individuals if you wish.
  • How to Keep Your Account Secure to choose a stronger password and turn on login alerts.
  • How People Can Find You On Facebook enables you to choose who can look you up and send friend requests.
  • Your Data Settings on Facebook provides a list of apps and sites you’ve used Facebook to log-in to and allows you to remove these.

How Trend Micro can help

An easier option for managing your basic privacy on Facebook is the Trend Micro Privacy Scanner, which is available within Trend Micro Security on Windows and Mac, and within Mobile Security on Android and iOS. It automates the process of finding and fixing any potentially risky settings to keep your personal data safe from prying eyes.

It’s turned on by default in Trend Micro Internet and Maximum Security, as well as in Mobile Security.

  • Either click on the Privacy icon in the TMS Console, or in the PC or Mac browser click the Trend Micro Toolbar and select Check Your Online Privacy/Check Social Network Privacy
  • In Mobile Security, tap the panel for Social Network Privacy > Facebook.
  • Once you’re signed-in to Facebook, See Scan Results, and then click or tap Fix All, or click or tap on the drop down to view and edit each issue separately.

Facebook is getting better at privacy, but its controls can be hard to find, and functionality is constantly being updated. That’s why we recommend a privacy audit every few months. Check in with your Facebook Privacy settings directly or via the Privacy Scanner to make sure you’re not leaking personal data. Privacy is subjective, but we’re all getting more critical about how big corporations use our data — and that’s not a bad thing.

Go here for more information on Trend Micro Security and Trend Micro Mobile Security.

The post How to Manage Your Privacy On and Off Facebook appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: February 2020 Patch Tuesday Update and Misconfigured AWS S3 Bucket Leaks 36,000 Inmate Records

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about the more than 140 February Patch Tuesday updates from Microsoft and Adobe. Also, read about how an unsecured and unencrypted Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket was found leaking 36,077 inmate records in several U.S. states.

Read on:

February 2020 Patch Tuesday: Microsoft Fixes 99 Vulnerabilities, Adobe 42

This week, patches from Microsoft and Adobe for February were announced. Microsoft released fixes for 99 vulnerabilities – 12 critical, one of which is being exploited in the wild – and Adobe released fixes for 42, most of which are critical, and none actively exploited.

How to Manage Your Privacy On and Off Facebook

Where on Facebook is your privacy most at risk and what can you do to mange these risks? Although Facebook has taken steps to offer users tools to manage their data, such as their recent broad launch of their Off-Facebook Activity tool, they are not always easy to find. This blog from Trend Micro serves as a guide on how to protect your privacy on Facebook.

Emotet Malware Now Hacks Nearby Wi-Fi Networks to Infect New Victims

Emotet, the notorious trojan behind several botnet-driven spam campaigns and ransomware attacks, has found a new attack vector: using already-infected devices to identify new victims that are connected to nearby Wi-Fi networks. According to researchers at Binary Defense, the newly discovered Emotet sample leverages a “Wi-Fi spreader” module to scan Wi-Fi networks, and then attempts to infect devices that are connected to them.

Outlaw Updates Kit to Kill Older Miner Versions, Targets More Systems

Trend Micro discovered that the hacking group Outlaw has been busy developing their toolkit for illicit income sources. While they had been quiet since Trend Micro’s analysis in June, there was an increase in the group’s activities in December, with updates on the kits’ capabilities reminiscent of their previous attacks.

Irving Security Company Spun Out of Trend Micro Lands $26M in Funding

Cysiv announced this week the close of a $26 million Series A financing led by ForgePoint Capital, a top tier venture capital firm that invests in transformative cybersecurity companies. Trend Forward Capital has been actively backing Cysiv and is also participating in this financing. Proceeds will be used to scale business operations and fuel further platform enhancements.

Trickbot, Emotet Use Text About Trump to Evade Detection

Threat actors have been using text from news articles about U.S. President Donald Trump to make malware undetectable. Trickbot samples employing this technique were recently found, while Trend Micro researchers detected Emotet samples using the same method.

Puerto Rico Gov Hit By $2.6M Phishing Scam

According to reports, an email-based phishing scam hit Puerto Rico’s Industrial Development Company, which is a government-owned corporation aimed at driving economic development to the island along with local and foreign investors. The scam email alleged a change to a banking account tied to remittance payments, which is a transfer of money (often by a foreign worker) to an individual in their home country.

Malicious Spam Campaign Targets South Korean Users

The spam campaign, detected by Trend Micro researchers, utilizes attachments compressed through ALZip, an archive and compression tool widely used in South Korea. When decompressed, the attachment is revealed to contain two executable (.EXE) files that carry the information stealer TrojanSpy.

Google Removes 500+ Malicious Chrome Extensions from the Web Store

Google has removed more than 500 malicious Chrome extensions from its official Web Store following a two-month long investigation conducted by security researcher Jamila Kaya and Cisco’s Duo Security team. The removed extensions operated by injecting malicious ads (malvertising) inside users’ browsing sessions.

Dynamic Challenges to Threat Detection and Endpoint Security — and How to Overcome Them

As a result of great technological advancements, our environments are steadily changing. Now more than ever, individuals and organizations rely on technology to make life more dynamic. This reliance on technology and the consequent expanding attack surface are what cybercriminals bank on as they create threats that are meant to trick users and organizations. In this blog, learn how to step up your threat detection and endpoint security.

YouTube, Twitter Hunt Down Deepfakes

YouTube and Twitter have taken measures to clamp down on synthetic and manipulated media, including deepfakes. Deepfakes are media (images, audio, video, etc.) synthetically generated through artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), which have been exploited in adult videos and propaganda using the faces and voices of unwitting celebrities, politicians, and other well-known figures.

Misconfigured AWS S3 Bucket Leaks 36,000 Inmate Records

An unsecured and unencrypted Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket was found leaking 36,077 records belonging to inmates of correctional facilities in several U.S. states. The leak, which was discovered by vpnMentor, exposed personally identifiable information (PII), prescription records and details of inmates’ daily activities.

An In-Depth Technical Analysis of CurveBall (CVE-2020-0601)

CVE-2020-0601 is a vulnerability that was discovered by the National Security Agency (NSA) and affects how cryptographic certificates are verified by one of the core cryptography libraries in Windows that make up part of the CryptoAPI system. Dubbed CurveBall or “Chain of Fools,” an attacker exploiting this vulnerability could create their own cryptographic certificates that appear to originate from a legitimate certificate that is trusted by Windows by default.

In your opinion, what was the most noteworthy patch from this month’s update? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: February 2020 Patch Tuesday Update and Misconfigured AWS S3 Bucket Leaks 36,000 Inmate Records appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: LokiBot Impersonates Popular Game Launcher and DRBControl Espionage Operation Hits Gambling, Betting Companies

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about a variant of LokiBot that has been discovered impersonating a popular game launcher, known for Fortnite, to trick users into executing it on their machines. Also, read about how an advanced threat actor has been targeting gambling and betting companies with malware linked to two Chinese hacker groups.

Read on: 

LokiBot Impersonates Popular Game Launcher and Drops Compiled C# Code File

LokiBot, which can harvest sensitive data such as passwords and cryptocurrency information, has been discovered impersonating game launcher Epic Games—the company behind games such as Fortnite–to trick users into executing it on their machines. Further analysis revealed that a sample of this variant employs a quirky, installation routine that involves dropping a compiled C# code file.

DRBControl Espionage Operation Hits Gambling, Betting Companies

An advanced threat actor has been targeting gambling and betting companies with malware that links to two Chinese hacker groups. The mission — named “DRBControl” by security researchers — appears to be cyberespionage and includes stealing databases and source code from the targets. Researchers at Trend Micro painted a larger picture of DRBControl’s activities after analyzing a backdoor used by the group against a company in the Philippines.

Uncovering Risks in Ordinary Places: A Look at the IoT Threat Landscape

As the IoT continues to become more integrated into enterprises and homes, the threat landscape also expands. In this blog, Trend Micro looks at the most significant threats and vulnerabilities in IoT devices on the edge of the network, within the network itself, and on the cloud; as well as gains insights from the cybercriminal underground.

Newly Discovered Vulnerability Can Let Hackers Impersonate LTE Mobile Device Users, Researchers Say

German researchers have found a new vulnerability on 4G/LTE mobile devices that could allow hackers to impersonate the phone’s owner. In this article, Mark Nunnikhoven, vice president of cloud research for cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, discusses the threat level of this vulnerability and its risks, which include  running up a person’s bill by making international calls or using premium services offered by the victim’s provider, like a TV streaming service.

Fake Dating Apps Found as Top Source of Malware in Africa

According to research from Kaspersky, 7,734 attacks from 1,486 threats were detected, affecting 2,548 mobile users from the continent. The countries with the most recorded attacks were South Africa with 58%, as Kenya (10%) and Nigeria (4%) trail behind.

US Govt Warns Critical Industries After Ransomware Hits Gas Pipeline Facility

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a warning to all industries operating critical infrastructures about a new ransomware in response to a cyberattack targeting an unnamed natural gas compression company’s internal network, encrypting critical data and knocking servers out of operation for almost two days. 

Plugin Leaves Nearly 100,000 WordPress Sites Vulnerable to Compromise

According to a report by WebARX, a vulnerability in a plugin for WordPress themes allows remote attack execution, gives full administrator rights, and can possibly even wipe out the entire website database. The vulnerability was discovered in ThemeGrill Demo Importer, a plugin that offers demo options for themes, widgets, and other content that can help customize websites.

MGM Grand Breach Leaked Details of 10.6 Million Guests Last Summer

A hacking forum this week published personal details of more than 10.6 million guests who stayed at MGM Resorts, the result of a breach due to unauthorized access to a cloud server that occurred at the famous Las Vegas hotel and casino last summer. Those guests included celebrities, tech CEOs, reporters, government officials, and employees at some of the world’s largest tech companies.

Stolen Credit Card Data Concealed through Fake Club Membership Cards

Stolen credit card data has been disguised through counterfeit club membership cards, as revealed by the U.S. Secret Service and reported by Brian Krebs. The cards, purportedly for exclusive use at name-brand retailers, had barcodes that contained the credit card information as well expiration dates and card verification values (CVVs). 

Adobe Releases Out-of-Band Patch for Critical Code Execution Vulnerabilities

Adobe has released an out-of-schedule fix to resolve two vulnerabilities that may expose user systems to code execution attacks. Users of Adobe Media Encoder and After Effects should update their software builds immediately. The tech giant thanked researcher Francis Provencher, alongside Matt Powell from Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative for reporting the vulnerabilities.  

Surprised by the scale of the giant MGM Grand breach? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: LokiBot Impersonates Popular Game Launcher and DRBControl Espionage Operation Hits Gambling, Betting Companies appeared first on .

In Safe Hands with Trend Micro Home Network Security – Part 3: Testing Its Functions

By Trend Micro

We continue our four-part series on protecting your home and family. See the links to the previous parts at the end of this blog.

As you use more internet-connected devices and smart appliances in your home, it’s of utmost importance to make sure your gadgets are properly protected from malware and hackers—and Trend Micro Home Network Security (HNS) helps you do just that. But while it’s easy to set up, connect, and configure (and even to forget!), you reap the most benefit when you’re actively involved with it, maintaining and monitoring its features and controls.

Start by asking the question: Are you sure your home network is secure? As you learn what network security entails, by the end of this blog you’ll be able to answer that question confidently. The more you’re involved with HNS, as the tech-savvy “guru” of the household, the more you’ll know when things are properly secured.

We’ll cover three main topics in Part 3 of our 4-part series, where we help you to test the following features: Threat Blocking, Access Control, and Parental Controls.

1.   Threat Blocking

To better understand how HNS blocks malware on malicious websites from being downloaded to your devices, open your browser either from your mobile device or PC then proceed to these links:

http://www.eicar.org/download/eicar.com

http://test-malware.hns.tm

When you run these tests, the test URL will be blocked, your browser will say “Website Blocked by Trend Micro™ Home Network Security,” and the payload will not be downloaded to the test device. The HNS app will then notify you that a web threat has been blocked, along with the name of the test device that was able to detect it. In the future, you should monitor the HNS app for such messages, so you can see which malicious sites your family has been accessing and warn them.

2.   Access Control

Next, there are three aspects of Access Control that you should test to familiarize yourself with the features. They are: Approving and Rejecting Devices, Remote Access Protection, and Disconnecting Devices.

Approving and Rejecting Devices

Device control is the first part of access control.

  • Navigate to Settings -> Access Control and enable New Device Approval, after completing setup and allowing HNS to scan the network for devices.
  • Connect a device that has never been connected to the HNS-secured network. The phone that’s managing the HNS Station will receive a notification indicating, “Request from a new device to join the network”.
  • Once you tap the notification, you’re given the option to either Allow Connection or Block the new device’s connection to your network.

Based on the decision to Allow Connection, verify the connection status on the new device by navigating to a webpage or using an application that connects to the internet.

Remote Access Protection

For the next test, Remote Access Protection, you’ll use a real-world remote-access program commonly used in tech support scams. Note that remote desktop software such as LogMeIn, AnyDesk, TeamViewer, and others are not inherently harmful, but malicious hackers often use them for nefarious activities, such as tech support scams, where they lure you into downloading such a program, pretending they need it to “solve” your computer problems. Unsuspecting consumers around the world have fallen victim to such scams, often losing a large amount of money in fake support fees and ransoms. Additionally, such hackers can use remote desktop programs to scoop up your private data and sell it on the Dark Web.

Home Network Security gives owners peace of mind by preventing these types of Remote Desktop programs from establishing connections with remote computers.

In this test, we will use the free version of TeamViewer.

  • Download the remote access software from https://www.teamviewer.com and install it on two devices—e.g., a laptop and desktop computer. (It’s available for phones and tablets too.) One will act as the source, the other the target. The target PC should be on the same home network where HNS is installed. The source PC should be on another network.
  • Navigate to Settings -> Access Control -> Remote Access Protection in the HNS app and enable Block Remote Access.
  • From the source PC outside of your network, attempt to establish a TeamViewer connection to the target PC and start a session.

HNS will block the TeamViewer session and the HNS app will receive a notification of a remote access connection attempt, along with the name of the target PC. Once you’ve run your tests and understand how this access blocking works, you can delete the instances of TeamViewer on your devices, if you have no need of them.

Disconnecting Devices

Next, you should test Disconnecting Devices.

  • To do this, navigate to the Devices page and choose a connected device (indicated by a green status indicator next to the device’s name).
  • On the chosen device’s detail page, turn off the “Connect to the Network” switch to disconnect it from the network.
  • Using the disconnected device, attempt to browse to a webpage or use an online application to verify that the device no longer has access.

3.   Parental Controls

As we indicated in our last installment of this series, there are many facets to HNS’s Parental Controls. In this segment we will check the effectiveness of its Website Filtering, Content Filtering, App Controls, Time Limits, and Connection Alert & Notification capabilities.

Website Filtering

Testing Website Filtering is easy.

  • For this test, under the Filtering sector, first assign a test PC with the Pre-Teen-Age Level default profile for Filtered Categories.
  • Next, using the browser of your assigned test PC, attempt to go to a website that belongs to the default blocked categories in the Pre-Teen level, such as Personals or Dating.

The browser will show, “Website Blocked by Trend Micro Home Network Security” and indicate the rule that triggered the block, i.e., the Category: Personals/Dating rule in our test. The HNS app will receive a notification indicating HNS prevented your “Pre-Teen device” was from visiting a Personals/Dating site. Tapping the notification will show more details, such as the time and website visited.

Content Filtering

Moving forward, Content Filtering is next in our checklist.

  • Go to the HNS app, proceed to the test user’s profile Settings -> Filtering. Then scroll down to the Content Turn ON Google SafeSearch and YouTube Restricted Mode if they’re turned OFF, or vice-versa.
  • The change in settings should be reflected on the browser. To verify this, open a new instance of the browser.
  • From the Google Search results page go to Settings -> Search Settings and Turn On SafeSearch should have a check mark beside it if it’s turned ON by HNS, or it’s unchecked when turned OFF by HNS.
  • For YouTube, go to https://www.youtube.com and locate the 3 vertical dots near the SIGN IN button. Scroll down and check whether Restricted Mode is turned ON or OFF, depending on the toggled setting made from the HNS app.

When it’s toggled ON, you can try to search for inappropriate content, such as red band trailersDoing this, the user will see a message that says, “Some results have been removed because Restricted Mode is enabled by your network administrator.” In addition, videos with mature or inappropriate content will not be displayed when you open YouTube’s Home page.

App Controls

To continue, you can test the Inappropriate App Used functionality. Note that this feature only logs the apps opened in your devices; it does not block those apps from being used by the child.

  • From the HNS app, toggle on Inappropriate App Used from the Settings of the same test user account profile of the assigned test mobile device.
  • Enable Notifications and choose any or all that are listed in the App Category.

Next, on your test mobile device, open any of the apps that correspond to the App Categories you’ve chosen. For instance, when a gaming app is opened, The HNS app should get a notification that a Games App was found in the user’s device. Tapping this notification should open the Report section where more detailed information is presented, such as the name of the app, the amount of time it was used, and the name of the device that triggered the notification.

Time Limits

To test Time Limits, you can set up a simple rule that consists of the chosen days the family member can use the internet, set the internet time limit, and set the time spent on YouTube within the set time period they’re allowed to use the internet, then enable notifications for this rule.

As an example:

  • Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
  • 30 minutes of Internet allowed, including 15 minutes of YouTube
  • Times allowed: 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM

To check if the rule is working, look for when the user attempts to surf and use YouTube beyond what’s permitted by the rule. HNS will block access to the internet and YouTube and provide you with a notification that says the YouTube or internet time limit has been reached by the user account. This notification is also logged in the user profile’s Report section.

Connection Alert & Notification

Let’s wrap up testing the Parental Control features with enabling Connection Alert. This allows you to receive a notification when a device you choose, like your child’s mobile phone, reconnects to your HNS-secure network after getting home from school.

To do this, from the HNS App’s User Account > Settings, enable Connection Alert to indicate when the devices you have selected connect to the home network, according to your set schedule. You’ll only receive notifications of connections from HNS during that scheduled time.

And Now, the Answer to Your Question

Is your network secure? As the techie in your household, you’re the designated technical support for the family. As the saying usually goes, “Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” but armed with what you’ve just learned about Trend Micro Home Network Security’s capabilities, your burden will lighten significantly and you and your family will stay safe and secure from constantly evolving network threats.

Go to our website for more information on Trend Micro Home Network Security. And watch for Part 4 of this series, where we wind up with some additional monitoring and maintenance best practices.

Go here for Parts 1 and 2 of our series:

You’re in Safe Hands with Trend Micro Home Network Security – Part 1: Setup and Configuration

Trend Micro Home Network Security Has Got You Covered – Part 2: Parental Controls

The post In Safe Hands with Trend Micro Home Network Security – Part 3: Testing Its Functions appeared first on .

Hackers Expand Their Repertoire as Trend Micro Blocks 52 Billion Threats in 2019

By Trend Micro

Variety is welcome in most walks of life, but not when it comes to the threat landscape. Yet that is unfortunately the reality facing modern cybersecurity professionals. As Trend Micro’s 2019  roundup report reveals, hackers have an unprecedented array of tools, techniques and procedures at their disposal today. With 52 billion unique threats detected by our filters alone, this is in danger of becoming an overwhelming challenge for many IT security departments.

In response, many CISOs are rightly re-examining how they approach threat defense. Rather than create potential security gaps and risk budget shortfalls through best-of-breed investments, they’re understanding that it may be better to consolidate on one provider that can do it all.

The state of play

Our report provides an alarming snapshot into a threat landscape characterized by volatility and chaos. Financially motivated cybercriminals collaborate and compete with each other on a daily basis to elicit profits from their victims. And there are plenty of those, thanks to increased investments in cloud and digital platforms that have broadened the corporate attack surface.

Three trends in the report stand out:

Ransomware is on the rise: Although the number of new families fell, the number of detected ransomware components jumped by 10% to top 61 million during the year. Attacks have been causing chaos across the US, particularly among under-funded public sector authorities and schools. The recent outage at Redcar council could be ominous for UK local authorities. As if service downtime wasn’t enough, several groups have also begun stealing sensitive data before they encrypt, and releasing it if victims don’t pay up — which will require organisations to evolve their threat defense strategies.

Phishing is evolving: As always, email-borne attacks accounted for the vast majority (91%) of threats we blocked last year, and increased 15% in volume from 2018. What does this mean? That phishing remains the number one vector for attacks on organisations. Although we noted an overall decline in total attempts to visit phishing sites, there were some spikes. Fraudsters appear to be targeting Office 365 in an attempt to bypass security filters: the number of unique phishing URLs that spoofed the Microsoft cloud platform soared by 100% from the previous year. BEC attacks, which the FBI has claimed cost more than any other cybercrime type last year, grew 5%.

The supply chain is exposed: At the same time, the digital supply chain has rapidly expanded in recent years, exposing more organisations to risk. This was particularly notable in the e-commerce space last year, as Magecart gangs managed to compromise an estimated two million sites. Many of these attacks focused on attacking supply chain partners, which provide JavaScript libraries to the victim sites. We also observed an increase in attacks focused on compromising DevOps tools and deployments, such as misconfigured versions of Docker Engine – Community and unsecured Docker hosts.

What happens now?

This is just the tip of the iceberg. We also detected a 189% brute force IoT logins, an increase in mobile malware, and much more. To regain the initiative in the face of such a wide-ranging set of threats, CISOs may find more value in taking a connected threat defence approach. This would consolidate protection onto a single provider across gateways, networks, servers and endpoints, with underlying threat intelligence optimizing defense at each layer.

Here’s a quick checklist of elements to consider:

  • Network segmentation, regular back-ups and continuous network monitoring to help tackle ransomware
  • Improved security awareness programs so users can better spot BEC and phishing attempts
  • Monitor vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in supply chain partners’ systems to defend against Magecart attacks
  • Scan container images at build and runtime for malware and vulnerabilities
  • Keep all systems and software on latest versions
  • Two-factor authentication and least privilege access policies to prevent abuse of tools that can be accessed via admin credentials, like RDP and developer tools

To find out more, read Trend Micro’s 2019 roundup report here: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/research-and-analysis/threat-reports/roundup/the-sprawling-reach-of-complex-threats.

The post Hackers Expand Their Repertoire as Trend Micro Blocks 52 Billion Threats in 2019 appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: Trend Micro Detects a 10 Percent Rise in Ransomware in 2019 and New Wi-Fi Encryption Vulnerability Affects Over a Billion Devices

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, read about how Trend Micro detected a 10 percent rise in ransomware attacks in 2019. Also, learn about a new Wi-Fi encryption vulnerability affecting over a billion devices.

Read on:

Trend Micro Detects a 10 Percent Rise in Ransomware

In its 2019 Annual Security Roundup, Trend Micro detected a decrease in the number of new ransomware families despite the overall attack increase. Additionally, it found that ransomware groups formed alliances in 2019 for more effective attacks. The healthcare industry remains the most targeted by ransomware; meanwhile, government and education sectors were also highly targeted.

In Safe Hands with Trend Micro Home Network Security – Part 3: Testing Its Functions

Are you sure your home network is secure? In the third post of its four-part series, Trend Micro breaks down home network security to help you test the following features: threat blocking, access control and parental controls.

Six Suspected Drug Dealers Went Free After Police Lost Evidence in Ransomware Attack

US prosecutors were forced to drop 11 narcotics cases against six suspected drug dealers after crucial case files were lost in a ransomware infection at a Florida police department. Evidence from the 11 cases could not be recovered following the attack that hit the Stuart police department in April 2019.

Hackers Expand Their Repertoire as Trend Micro Blocks 52 Billion Threats in 2019

Trend Micro’s 2019 roundup report reveals just how many tools, techniques and procedures hackers have at their disposal today. With 52 billion unique threats detected in 2019 by Trend Micro’s filters alone, threats are becoming an overwhelming challenge for many IT security departments.

New Wi-Fi Encryption Vulnerability Affects Over A Billion Devices

Cybersecurity researchers uncovered a new high-severity hardware vulnerability residing in Wi-Fi chips manufactured by Broadcom and Cypress—reportedly powering over a billion devices. Dubbed ‘Kr00k’ and tracked as CVE-2019-15126, the flaw could let nearby remote attackers intercept and decrypt some wireless network packets transmitted over-the-air by a vulnerable device.

Cybercrime Group Uses G Suite, Physical Checks in BEC Scam

An African cybercrime group named Exaggerated Lion uses G Suite and physical checks as new tools for Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks, reported in a research paper by Agari. Like other BEC scams, the targets belong to company departments that handle finance.

Cisco Patches Flaws in FXOS, UCS Manager and NX-OS Software

On Wednesday, Cisco released patches for 11 vulnerabilities in its products, including multiple flaws that impact Cisco UCS Manager, FXOS, and NX-OS software. The most important of the bugs is a high severity flaw in FXOS and NX-OS that could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to execute arbitrary code as root. The weakness can also be exploited for denial of service (DoS).

PowerGhost Spreads Beyond Windows Devices, Haunts Linux Machines

Trend Micro researchers encountered a PowerGhost variant that infects Linux machines via EternalBlue, MSSQL and Secure Shell (SSH) brute force attacks. The malware, previously known to target only Windows systems, is a fileless cryptocurrency-mining malware that attacks corporate servers and workstations, capable of embedding and spreading itself undetected across endpoints and servers.

Android Malware Can Steal Google Authenticator 2FA Codes

Security researchers say that an Android malware strain can now extract and steal one-time passcodes (OTP) generated through Google Authenticator, a mobile app that’s used as a two-factor authentication (2FA) layer for many online accounts.

Ransomware Hits U.S. Electric Utility

The Reading Municipal Light Department (RMLD) has been infected with ransomware, revealed in a statement by the electric utility company. RMLD did not disclose the details on how their system was infected or the demands of the group behind the malware and there was no indication of plans to pay ransom to the threat actors.

Are you surprised that the number of new ransomware families detected in 2019 decreased while number of attacks increased? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: Trend Micro Detects a 10 Percent Rise in Ransomware in 2019 and New Wi-Fi Encryption Vulnerability Affects Over a Billion Devices appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: 10,000 Users Affected by Leak from Misconfigured AWS Cloud Storage and Massive U.S. Property and Demographic Database Exposes 200 Million Records

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about how the data of train commuters in the U.K. who were using the free Wi-Fi in Network Rail-managed stations was unintentionally leaked due to an unsecured Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud storage. Also, read about how more than 200 million records containing property-related information on U.S. residents were exposed.

Read on:

Security Risks in Online Coding Platforms

As DevOps and cloud computing has gained popularity, developers are coding online more and more, but this traction has also raised the questions of whether online integrated development environments (IDEs) are secure. In this blog, learn about two popular cloud-based IDEs: AWS Cloud9 and Visual Studio Online.

Legal Services Giant Epiq Global Offline After Ransomware Attack

The company, which provides legal counsel and administration that counts banks, credit giants, and governments as customers, confirmed the attack hit on February 29. A source said the ransomware hit the organization’s entire fleet of computers across its 80 global offices.

Dissecting Geost: Exposing the Anatomy of the Android Trojan Targeting Russian Banks

Trend Micro has conducted an analysis into the behavior of the Geost trojan by reverse engineering a sample of the malware. The trojan employed several layers of obfuscation, encryption, reflection, and injection of non-functional code segments that made it more difficult to reverse engineer. Read this blog for further analysis of Geost.

Trend Micro Cooperates with Japan International Cooperation Agency to Secure the Connected World

Trend Micro this week announced new initiatives designed to enhance collaboration with global law enforcement and developing nations through cybersecurity outreach, support and training. The first agreement is with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), a government agency responsible for providing overseas development aid and nurturing social economic growth in developing nations.

Data of U.K. Train Commuters Leak from Misconfigured AWS Cloud Storage

The data of train commuters in the U.K. who were using the free Wi-Fi in Network Rail-managed stations was unintentionally leaked due to an unsecured Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud storage. Approximately 10,000 users were affected, and data thought to be exposed in the leak includes commuters’ travel habits, contact information such as email addresses, and dates of birth.

Critical Netgear Bug Impacts Flagship Nighthawk Router

Netgear is warning users of a critical remote code execution bug that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to take control of its Wireless AC Router Nighthawk (R7800) hardware running firmware versions prior to 1.0.2.68. The warnings, posted Tuesday, also include two high-severity bugs impacting Nighthawk routers, 21 medium-severity flaws and one rated low.

FBI Working to ‘Burn Down’ Cyber Criminals’ Infrastructure

To thwart increasingly dangerous cyber criminals, law enforcement agents are working to “burn down their infrastructure” and take out the tools that allow them to carry out their devastating attacks, FBI Director Christopher Wray said this week. Unsophisticated cyber criminals now have the power to paralyze entire hospitals, businesses and police departments, Wray also said.

A Massive U.S. Property and Demographic Database Exposes 200 Million Records

More than 200 million records containing a wide range of property-related information on U.S. residents were left exposed on a database that was accessible on the web without requiring any password or authentication. The exposed data included personal and demographic information such as name, address, email address, age, gender, ethnicity, employment, credit rating, investment preferences, income, net worth and property-specific information.

How Human Security Investments Created a Global Culture of Accountability at ADP

Human security is what matters during a cybersecurity crisis, where skills and muscle memory can make the difference in make-or-break moments. Leaders and culture are the most important predictors of cyberattack outcomes, so it’s time to stop under-investing in human security.

Ransomware Attacks Prompt Tough Question for Local Officials: To Pay or Not to Pay?

There were at least 113 successful ransomware attacks on state and local governments last year, according to global cybersecurity company Emsisoft, and in each case, officials had to figure out how to respond. Read this article to find out how officials make the tough call.

Wondering how more than 200 million records were exposed without requiring any password or authentication? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

 

 

 

The post This Week in Security News: 10,000 Users Affected by Leak from Misconfigured AWS Cloud Storage and Massive U.S. Property and Demographic Database Exposes 200 Million Records appeared first on .

Tax Scams – Everything you need to know to keep your money and data safe

By Trend Micro

Tax season has always been a pretty nerve-wracking time for hard-working Americans. But over the years, technology advances have arrived to gradually make the process a bit easier. The bad news is that they can also introduce new cyber risks and even more stress.

There are two things that cybercriminals are always on the hunt for: people’s identity data from their accounts, and their money. And during the tax-filing season both can be unwittingly exposed. Over the years, cybercriminals have adapted multiple tools and techniques to part taxpayers with their personal information and funds.

Let’s take look at some of the main threats out there and what you can do to stay safe.

What do they want?

Cybercrime is a highly efficient money-making business. Some reports suggest this underground economy generates as much as $1.5 trillion each year. (See Into the Web of Profit, April 2018, McGuire, Bromium.) And tax-related scams are an increasingly popular way for the bad guys to drive-up profits. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) claims that “thousands of people have lost millions of dollars and their personal information” to such attacks.

The bottom line is that they’re after one of two things: to trick you into wiring funds to them, and/or to get hold of your personally identifiable information (PII), including bank account and Social Security Numbers (SSNs). This personal data can subsequently be used to defraud you or the IRS, or may be deployed in follow-on identity fraud schemes to capture illicit funds from you.

There are various ways cyber-criminals can achieve these goals. The most common is by using social engineering tactics to trick taxpayers into sending money or personal information. But they might also use malware, either delivered to you personally or targeted at your tax preparer. This means you not only have to look after your own cybersecurity but also demand that the third-party businesses you work with store and transmit your sensitive information securely.

Look out for these scams

Here’s a round-up of the most popular tactics used by tax scammers today:

Impersonation: The fraudster gets in touch pretending to be an IRS representative. This could be via email, phone, social media or even SMS. They usually claim you owe the IRS money in unpaid taxes or fines and demand a wire transfer, or funds from a prepaid debit card. Sometimes they may ask for personal and financial details—for example, by claiming you’re entitled to a large tax refund and they just need you to supply your bank account info.

These interactions are usually pushy. The scammer knows the best way of making you pay up is by creating a sense of urgency and, sometimes, shaming the individual into believing they’ve been withholding tax payments. Phishing emails may look highly convincing, right down to the logo and sender domain, while phone callers will use fake names and badge numbers. Sometimes the scammers use personal data they may have stolen previously or bought on the Dark Web to make their communications seem more convincing.

In some impersonation scams, the fraudsters may even pretend to work for charities and ask for personal details to help disaster victims with tax refund claims.

Spoofing, phishing, and malware: In some cases, a text, email or social media message spoofed to appear as if sent from the IRS or your tax preparer actually contains malware. The scammers use the same tactics as above but trick the recipient into clicking on a malicious link or opening an attachment laden with malware. The covert download that follows could result in: theft of your personal information; your computer being completely hijacked by hackers via remote control software; or a ransomware download that locks your computer until you pay a fee.

Fake tax returns: Another trick the scammers employ is to use stolen SSNs and other personal information to file tax returns on your behalf. They can then try to claim a large payment in tax refunds from the IRS. The PII they use to file in your name may have been taken from a third-party source without your knowledge, and the first you might hear of it is when you go to file a legitimate tax return. It can take months to resolve the problem.

Attacks targeting tax preparers: Over half of Americans use third-party tax preparation companies to help them with their returns. However, this offers another opportunity for scammers to get hold of your sensitive information. In one recently discovered campaign, malware deployed on tax preparers’ websites was designed to download to the visitor’s computer as soon as they loaded the page. The IRS warns that businesses large and small are potentially at risk, as scammers are keen to get hold of tax information which enables them to file highly convincing fake returns in your name.

What to do

The good news is that by taking a few simple steps you can insulate yourself from the worst of these scams. Remember: the IRS does not contact taxpayers by email, text messages or social media to request personal/financial information— so if you receive communications that do, they are definitely a scam. It’s also important to remember that scams happen all year round, not just in the run-up to the tax filing deadline. That means, unfortunately, that you need to be on your guard all the time.

Here are a few other recommendations:

  • Install anti-malware from a reputable provider to block phishing emails and websites and prevent malware downloads.
  • Be wary of any unsolicited messages purporting to come from your tax preparer or the IRS. Always contact them directly to check whether it’s a genuine communication or not.
  • Don’t click on any links in unsolicited emails, or download attachments.
  • Obtain an Identity Protection PIN from the IRS before filing your taxes. This will prevent fake returns being filed in your name.
  • Alert phishing@irs.gov about any unsolicited emails from IRS scammers.
  • Protect your log-ins with tax preparation companies. Switch on multi-factor authentication (MFA) if available, and/or use a password manager to make your logins hard to guess or crack.

It also pays to demand that your tax preparer take their own precautions to keep your data secure. They should not be sending sensitive data or documents unencrypted in emails and must take steps on their own to combat phishing emails that target employees, since these can cascade to you during your tax preparation process. Whether hosted in the cloud or running on-premises, the servers that hold your data should also have adequate protection—and you have a right (and a duty to yourself) to ask ahead of time what they’re doing to protect it.

According to the IRS tax preparers should put the following internal controls in place:

  • Install anti-malware on all web and storage servers and keep their software automatically updated.
  • Encourage the use of unique, strong passwords via a password manager for each account, and deploy multi-factor authentication technology for clients.
  • Encrypt all sensitive files and emails exchanged with strong password protections.
  • Back-up sensitive data regularly to a secure off-site source.
  • Wipe clean/destroy any old hard drives and printers containing sensitive data.
  • Limit access to taxpayer data to staff who need to know.

How Trend Micro can help

Trend Micro offers a range of security tools to help taxpayers keep their personal and financial information safe from fraudsters.

Our flagship consumer solution Trend Micro Security (TMS) provides the following protections:

  • Protects against phishing links in emails that can take you to fraudulent sites. Its Fraud Buster feature for Gmail and Hotmail extends this to webmail.
  • Blocks malicious website downloads and scans for malware hidden in attachments.
  • Protects against ransomware and theft of sensitive data via Folder Shield.
  • Protects and manages strong, unique passwords with Password Manager, which is bundled with Trend Micro Maximum Security.

To find out more, go to our Trend Micro Security website.

The post Tax Scams – Everything you need to know to keep your money and data safe appeared first on .

Trend Micro Cloud App Security Blocked 12.7 Million High-Risk Email Threats in 2019 – in addition to those detected by cloud email services’ built-in security

By Chris Taylor

On March 3, 2020, the cyber division of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a private industry notification calling out Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams through exploitation of cloud-based email services. Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite, the two largest cloud-based email services, are targeted by cyber criminals based on FBI complaint information since 2014. The scams are initiated through credential phishing attacks in order to compromise business email accounts and request or misdirect transfers of funds. Between January 2014 and October 2019, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received complaints totaling over $2.1 billion in actual losses from BEC scams targeting the two cloud services. The popularity of Office 365 and G Suite has positioned themselves as attractive targets for cybercriminals.

Trend Micro™ Cloud App Security™ is an API-based service protecting Microsoft® Office 365™, Google G Suite, Box, and Dropbox. Using multiple advanced threat protection techniques, it acts as a second layer of protection after emails and files have passed through Office 365 and G Suite’s built-in security.

In 2019, Trend Micro Cloud App Security caught 12.7 million high-risk email threats in addition to what Office 365 and Gmail security have blocked. Those threats include close to one million malware, 11.3 million phishing attempts, and 386,000 BEC attempts. The blocked threats include 4.8 million of credential phishing and 225,000 of ransomware. These are potential attacks that could result in an organization’s monetary, productivity, or even reputation losses.

Trend Micro started publishing its Cloud App Security threat report since 2018. For third year in a row, Trend Micro Cloud App Security is proven to provide effective protection for cloud email services. The following customer examples for different scenarios further show how Cloud App Security is protecting different organizations.

Customer examples: Additional detections after Office 365 built-in security (2019 data)

These five customers, ranging from 550 seats to 80K seats, are across different industries. All of them use E3, which includes basic security (Exchange Online Protection). This data shows the value of adding CAS to enhance Office 365 native security. For example, a transportation company with 80,000 Office 365 E3 users found an additional 16,000 malware, 510,000 malicious & phishing URLs and 27,000 BEC, all in 2019. With the average cost of a BEC attack at $75,000 each and the potential losses and costs to recover from credential phishing and ransomware attacks, Trend Micro Cloud App Security pays for itself very quickly.

Customer examples: Additional Detections after Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (2019 data)

Customers using Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) also need an additional layer of filtering as well. For example, an IT Services company with 10,000 users of E3 and ATP detected an additional 14,000 malware, 713,000 malicious and phishing URLs, and 6,000 BEC in 2019 with Trend Micro Cloud App Security.

Customer examples: Additional Detections after third-party email gateway (2019 data)

Many customers use a third-party email gateway to scan emails before they are delivered to their Office 365 environment. Despite these gateway deployments, many of the sneakiest and hardest to detect threats still slipped though. Plus, a gateway solution can’t detect internal email threats, which can originate from compromised devices or accounts within Office 365.

For example, a business with 120,000 Office 365 users with a third-party email gateway stopped an additional 27,000 malware, 195,000 malicious and phishing emails, and almost 6,000 BEC in 2019 with Trend Micro Cloud App Security.

Customer examples: Additional Detections after Gmail built-in security (2019 data)

*Trend Micro Cloud App Security supports Gmail starting April 2019.

For customer choosing G suite, Trend Micro Cloud App Security can provide additional protection as well. For example, a telecommunication company with 12,500 users blocked almost 8,000 high risk threats with Cloud App Security in just five months.

Email gateway or built-in security for cloud email services is no longer enough to protect organizations from email-based threats. Businesses, no matter the size, are at risk from a plethora of dangers that these kinds of threats pose. Organizations should consider a comprehensive multilayered security solution such as Trend Micro Cloud App Security. It supplements the included security features in email and collaboration platforms like Office 365 and G Suite.

Check out the Trend Micro Cloud App Security Report 2019 to get more details on the type of threats blocked by this product and common email attacks analyzed by Trend Micro Research in 2019.

The post Trend Micro Cloud App Security Blocked 12.7 Million High-Risk Email Threats in 2019 – in addition to those detected by cloud email services’ built-in security appeared first on .

Smart Check Validated for New Bottlerocket OS

By Trend Micro

Containers provide a list of benefits to organizations that use them. They’re light, flexible, add consistency across the environment and operate in isolation.

However, security concerns prevent some organizations from employing containers. This is despite containers having an extra layer of security built in – they don’t run directly on the host OS.

To make containers even easier to manage, AWS released an open-source Linux-based operating system meant for hosting containers. While Bottlerocket AMIs are provided at no cost, standard Amazon EC2 and AWS charges apply for running Amazon EC2 instances and other services.

Bottlerocket is purpose-built to run containers and improves security and resource utilization by only including the essential software to run containers, which improves resource utilization and reduces the attack surface compared to general-purpose OS’s.

At Trend Micro, we’re always focused on the security of our customers cloud environments. We’re proud to be a launch partner for AWS Bottlerocket, with our Smart Check component validated for the OS prior to the launch.

Why use additional security in cloud environments

While an OS specifically for containers that includes native security measures is a huge plus, there seems to be a larger question of why third-party security solutions are even needed in cloud environments. We often hear a misconception with cloud deployment that, since the cloud service provider has built in security, users don’t have to think about the security of their data.

That’s simply not accurate and leaves a false sense of security. (Pun intended.)

Yes – cloud providers like AWS build in security measures and have addressed common problems by adding built in security controls. BUT cloud environments operate with a shared responsibility model for security – meaning the provider secures the environment, and users are responsible for their instances and data hosted therein.

That’s for all cloud-based hosting, whether in containers, serverless or otherwise.

 

Why Smart Check in Bottlerocket matters

Smooth execution without security roadblocks

DevOps teams leverage containerized applications to deploy fast and don’t have time for separate security roadblocks. Smart Check is built for the DevOps community with real-time image scanning at any point in the pipeline to ensure insecure images aren’t deployed.

Vulnerability scanning before runtime

We have the largest vulnerability data set of any security vendor, which is used to scan images for known software flaws before they can be exploited at runtime. This not only includes known vendor vulnerabilities from the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), but also vulnerability intelligence for bugs patched outside the ZDI program and open source vulnerability intelligence built in through our partnership with Snyk.

Flexible enough to fit with your pipeline

Container security needs to be as flexible as containers themselves. Smart Check has a simple admin process to implement role-based access rules and multiple concurrent scanning scenarios to fit your specific pipeline needs.

Through our partnership with AWS, Trend Micro is excited to help ensure customers can continue to execute on their portion of the shared responsibility model through container image scanning by validating that the Smart Check solution will be available for customers to run on Bottlerocket at launch.

More information can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/bottlerocket/

If you are still interested in learning more, check out this AWS blog from Jeff Barr.

The post Smart Check Validated for New Bottlerocket OS appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: Operation Overtrap Targets Japanese Online Banking Users and Everything You Need to Know About Tax Scams

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about the number of ways Operation Overtrap can infect or trap victims with its payload. Also, read about how to protect your personal identity data and money during tax-filing season.

Read on:

AWS Launches Bottlerocket, a Linux-based OS for Container Hosting

AWS has launched Bottlerocket, its own open-source operating system for running containers on both virtual machines and bare metal hosts. The new OS is a stripped-down Linux distribution that’s akin to projects like CoreOS’s now-defunct Container Linux and Google’s container-optimized OS. The project is launching in cooperation with several partners including Alcide, Armory, CrowdStrike, Datadog, New Relic, Sysdig, Tigera, Trend Micro and Waveworks.

Tax Scams – Everything You Need to Know to Keep Your Money and Data Safe

There are two things that cybercriminals are always on the hunt for: personal identity data and money. During the tax-filing season, both can be unwittingly exposed. Over the years, cybercriminals have adapted multiple tools and techniques to part taxpayers with their personal information and funds. This blog looks at the main threats out there and what you can do to stay safe.

March 2020 Patch Tuesday: Microsoft Fixes 115 Vulnerabilities, Adobe None

This week for March 2020 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft dropped fixes for 115 CVE-numbered flaws: 26 are critical, 88 important, and one of moderate severity. The good news is that none of them are under active attack. Adobe seems to have skipped this Patch Tuesday and there’s no indication whether the customary security updates are just delayed or if there won’t be any in the coming days.

Operation Overtrap Targets Japanese Online Banking Users Via Bottle Exploit Kit and Brand-New Cinobi Banking Trojan

Trend Micro recently discovered a new campaign dubbed “Operation Overtrap” for the number of ways it can infect or trap victims with its payload. The campaign targets online users of various Japanese banks by stealing their banking credentials using a three-pronged attack. Based on Trend Micro’s telemetry, Operation Overtrap has been active since April 2019.

Hackers Are Working Harder to Make Phishing and Malware Look Legitimate

Even though the overall volume of malware dropped in 2019, phishing and business email compromise (BEC) went up sharply, according to Trend Micro’s 2019 Cloud App Security Roundup. The company blocked nearly 400,000 attempted BEC attacks in 2018, which is 271% more than the previous year and 35% more credential phishing attempts than in 2018.

Busting Ghostcat: An Analysis of the Apache Tomcat Vulnerability (CVE-2020-1938 and CNVD-2020-10487)

Discussions surrounding the Ghostcat vulnerability (CVE-2020-1938 and CNVD-2020-10487) found in Apache Tomcat puts it in the spotlight as researchers investigated its security impact– specifically, its potential use for remote code execution (RCE). Learn more about the Ghostcat vulnerability in this blog analysis.

10 Key Female Cybersecurity Leaders to Know in 2020

In celebration of Women’s History Month, the editors of Solutions Review shared the accomplishments of ten key female cybersecurity leaders in 2020. Trend Micro’s CEO Eva Chen made the list based on her numerous accomplishments in the cybersecurity industry.

Coronavirus Used in Spam, Malware, and Malicious Domains

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is being used as bait in email spam attacks on targets across the globe. As the number of cases continues to grow, campaigns using the virus as a lure will likewise increase. This has been observed by multiple entities, and researchers from Trend Micro have also seen a significant spike in the detection of the subject in email spam attacks.

Cookiethief Android Malware Uses Proxies to Hijack Your Facebook Account

A combination of new modifications to Android malware code has given rise to Trojans able to steal browser and app cookies from compromised devices. Researchers from Kaspersky said the new malware families, dubbed Cookiethief, use a combination of exploits to acquire root rights to an Android device and then to steal Facebook cookie data. 

Nemty Ransomware Spreads via Love Letter Emails

Threat actors have been found distributing Nemty ransomware through a spam campaign using emails that pose as messages from lovers, according to a report by Malwarebytes and X-Force Iris researchers. Researchers from Trend Micro have also encountered the emails.

WordPress GDPR Plugin Vulnerable to Cross-Site Scripting Attacks

GDPR Cookie Consent, a WordPress plugin, inadvertently exposed websites to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks through a vulnerability that affects versions 1.8.2 and below of the plugin. As disclosed in a report by NinTechNet, the vulnerability allowed privilege escalation. The plugin had over 700,000 active installations at the time of the exploit.

Analysis: Abuse of .NET Features for Compiling Malicious Programs

While the .NET framework is originally intended to help software engineers, cybercriminals have found a way to abuse its features to compile and execute malware on the fly. Recently, Trend Micro discovered several kinds of malware, such as LokiBot, utilizing this technique. 

OpenSMTPD Vulnerability (CVE-2020-8794) Can Lead to Root Privilege Escalation and Remote Code Execution

A root privilege escalation and remote execution vulnerability (designated as CVE-2020-8794) has been discovered in the free and open-source Unix Daemon, OpenSMTPD. The flaw originates from an out-of-bounds read, which attackers can take advantage of to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems.

Are you concerned about the security risks involved with filing your taxes online? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: Operation Overtrap Targets Japanese Online Banking Users and Everything You Need to Know About Tax Scams appeared first on .

Suddenly Teleworking, Securely

By Greg Young (Vice President for Cybersecurity)

So you suddenly have a lot of staff working remotely. Telework is not new and a good percentage of the workforce already does so. But the companies who have a distributed workforce had time to plan for it, and to plan for it securely.

A Lot of New Teleworkers All At Once

This event can’t be treated like a quick rollout of an application: there are business, infrastructure, and customer security impacts. There will be an increase of work for help desks as new teleworkers wrestle with remote working.

Additionally, don’t compound the problem. There is advice circulating to reset all passwords for remote workers. This opens the door for increased social engineering to attempt to lure overworked help desk staff into doing password resets that don’t comply with policy. Set expectations for staff that policy must be complied with, and to expect some delays while the help desk is overloaded.

Business continuity issues will arise as limited planning for remote workers could max out VPN licenses, firewall capacity, and application timeouts as many people attempt to use the same apps through a narrower network pipe.

Help Staff Make A Secure Home Office

In the best of times, remote workers are often left to their own devices (pun intended) for securing their work at home experience. Home offices are already usually much less secure than corporate offices: weak routers, unmanaged PCs, and multiple users means home offices become an easier attack path into the enterprise.

It doesn’t make sense to have workers operate in a less secure environment in this context. Give them the necessary security tools and operational tools to do their business. Teleworkers, even with a company-issued device, are likely to work on multiple home devices. Make available enterprise licensed storage and sharing tools, so employees don’t have to resort to ‘sketchy’ or weak options when they exceed the limits for free storage on Dropbox or related services.

A Secure Web Gateway as a service is a useful option considering that teleworkers using a VPN will still likely be split tunneling (i.e. not going through corporate security devices when browsing to non-corporate sites, etc.), unlike when they are in the corporate office and all connections are sanitized. That is especially important in cases where a weak home router gets compromised and any exfiltration or other ‘phone home’ traffic from malware needs to be spotted.

A simple way to get this information out to employees is to add remote working security tips to any regularly occurring executive outreach.

Operational Issues

With a large majority of businesses switching to a work-from-home model with less emphasis on in-person meetings, we also anticipate that malicious actors will start to impersonate digital tools, such as ‘free’ remote conferencing services and other cloud computing software.

Having a policy on respecting telework privacy is a good preventative step to minimize the risk of this type of attack being successful. Remote workers may be concerned about their digital privacy when working from home, so any way to inform them about likely attack methods can help.

Any steps to prevent staff trying to evade security measures out of a concern over privacy are likely a good investment.

Crisis Specific Risks

During any major event or crisis, socially engineered attacks and phishing will increase. Human engineering means using any lever to make it a little bit easier for targets to click on a link.

We’re seeing targeted email attacks taking advantage of this. Some will likely use tactics such as attachments named “attached is your Work At Home Allowance Voucher,” spoofed corporate guidelines, or HR documents.

Sadly, we expect hospitals and local governments will see increased targeting by ransomware due the expectation that payouts are likelier during an emergency.

But Hang On – It Is Not All Bad News

The good news is that none of these attacks are  new and we already have playbooks to defend against them. Give a reminder to all staff during this period to be more wary of phishing, but don’t overly depend on user education – back it up with security technology measures. Here are a few ways to do that.

  • Give your remote workers the security and productivity tools they need to protect themselves and their non-corporate IT resources.
  • Include an enterprise managed cloud storage account for work documents so employees don’t find free versions that may not be safe.
  • Enable customers and supply chain partners, who may also be teleworking, to interact with you securely.

The post Suddenly Teleworking, Securely appeared first on .

A message from our COO regarding Trend Micro’s Customer commitment during the global Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)

By Trend Micro

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has affected peoples’ lives across the globe and has quickly swept through and impacted individuals, families, communities, and businesses around the world. At Trend Micro, our number one priority is to ensure that our employees and their families are as safe as possible, and our thoughts are with those who have been affected by the virus.

Our team has spent a great deal of time reviewing options to ensure both the continued protection of our customers and partners, as well as the physical safety of our employees. We realize this situation remains very dynamic, as information continues to change day-to-day, and as such we will continue to provide updates as we learn more, but in the meantime we remain committed to providing the superior service and support that our customers, partners and suppliers have come to expect of our company throughout this situation.

We know the critical role that Trend Micro plays in your organization to keep your company and employees protected. We have taken several measures to ensure that the COVID-19 crisis does not impact your experience with Trend Micro products or services.

Listed below are several actions that the team has taken to date to not only ensure that our employees are safe, but to continue to deliver business “as usual” during this time:

Safety of Employees
Our number one priority is the health and safety of our employees around the globe. To that measure, we have:

  • Abided by local government guidelines: All of our global offices are adhering to guidelines and best practices from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), other global health organizations and local government guidelines.
  • Ability to work from remote locations: Many teams at Trend Micro have worked remotely from all corners of the globe for over a decade. This practice has enabled us to provide you with world-class products and service even in a time of social distancing. With the COVID-19 situation, we have shifted our workforce to virtual/remote wherever it is feasible, and we are maintaining critical onsite operations as needed.  At this time, we have not experienced any major impact to our business operations as a result of this temporary shift, and we will continue to closely monitor and adjust as appropriate to ensure we are continuing to deliver world class security protection and service for our customers and partners.
  • Travel restrictions: We have suspended all international travel, with only essential domestic travel permitted where still allowed (and if the employee is comfortable doing so).  As new restrictions are being placed daily, we will continue to closely monitor this situation and react appropriately.
  • Ongoing Vigilance: A cross-functional team within Trend Micro is closely monitoring all aspects of the crisis and will take prudent, agile, and swift action necessary to ensure the safety of our employees.  We are committed to doing our part to minimize the spread of COVID-19 while ensuring service continuity for you.

 

Continuity of Service
We are committed to ensuring that we continue to support the security needs of your organization, including but not limited to:

  • Product Infrastructure: All Trend products are built upon a highly reliable commercial cloud infrastructure and delivered through a variety of content delivery networks. This includes our ISO 27001-certified SaaS offerings.
  • Support Infrastructure: Our major global support centers have already shifted to remote/virtual operations and are working to ensure the customer experience is as seamless as possible.
  • Flexibility: As with any best-in-class SaaS organization, we are able to perform all systems monitoring and product development remotely.
  • Supply Chain: We are working very closely with our global suppliers and technical content providers/partners to ensure that availability and normal operations of our technology and services are not adversely impacted due to measures that they will have to put into place for combating this issue as well.
  • Resilience: Our R&D, Support and other technology teams are globally dispersed and able to provide you with around the clock access. Though geographically spread out, we are one global, highly coordinated team, dedicated to supporting your business needs. We have been operating in this model for decades, and we consider this to be one of Trend Micro’s inherent strengths for continuing to have a strong operational model in times of crisis such as this.

As an optimistic organization, we believe that because of this unfortunate situation, new ways to work together and incredible innovation will occur and will make us all stronger in the future.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to your local account representative or Trend Micro authorized support contact.   We will continue to watch this situation closely, react accordingly and communicate any substantial changes with our customers and partners.

On behalf of everyone at Trend Micro, thank you for trusting us with your business. We wish health and safety to you and your families, employees, and customers.

 

Sincerely,

Kevin Simzer

Chief Operating Officer

Trend Micro Incorporated

 

The post A message from our COO regarding Trend Micro’s Customer commitment during the global Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) appeared first on .

How to Stay Safe as Online Coronavirus Scams Spread

By Trend Micro
Here, we'll take a look at several best practices for protecting kids on the Internet, and how, as a parent or guardian, you can do your part to help safeguard young users' online activities.

Few national emergencies have the ability to strike panic into the populace quite like a virus pandemic. It’s fortunately something most of us have never had to experience, until now. At the time of writing, the number of global confirmed cases of Coronavirus infection, or COVID-19, has reached nearly 174,000 worldwide. Although the official US total currently remains a fraction of that (around 4,000), problems with testing mean many cases are likely to be going unreported here.

This is a difficult time for many Americans, as it is for citizens all over the world. But unfortunately it’s extraordinary global events like this that cyber-criminals look for in order to make their schemes more successful. True to form, they’re using mass awareness of the outbreak and a popular desire for more information on the virus, to trick users into giving away personal information and log-ins, or to unwittingly install malware on their devices.

As organizations enforce remote working to reduce the impact of the virus, many of you will be logging-on from home or your mobile computing devices, which may have fewer built-in protections from such threats. This makes it more important than ever to know how the bad guys are trying to cash in on COVID-19 and what you can do to stay safe.

Here’s a quick guide to the key online threats and security tips:

Phishing for trouble

Decades before COVID-19 burst onto the scene, a different kind of pandemic was spreading across the globe. Phishing messages have been one of the most popular tools in the hackers’ arsenal for years. In fact, Trend Micro blocked nearly 48 billion email-borne threats in 2019, 91% of the total we detected. Phishing is designed to trick the user into handing over their log-ins or personal and financial details, or persuading them to unwittingly download malware. Cyber-criminals typically achieve this by spoofing an email to make it appear as if sent from a legitimate and trustworthy source.

Once a user has been hooked, they are enticed into clicking on a malicious link or opening a malware-laden attachment. This could be anything from a banking trojan designed to steal online banking log-ins, to a piece of ransomware which will lock the user out of their PC until they pay a fee. It could even be cryptojacking malware which sits on the infected machine, quietly mining for Bitcoin while running up large energy bills and slowing down your PC.

The bad news is that phishing messages — whether sent by email, social media, text or messaging app — are getting harder to spot. Many now feature perfect English, and official logos and sender domains. They also often use current newsworthy events to trick the user into clicking. And they don’t get more high-profile than the COVID-19 pandemic.

Depending on how well protected your computing devices are, you may be more likely to receive one of these scam messages than be exposed to the virus itself. So, it pays to know what’s out there.

Watch out for these scams

The phishing landscape is evolving all the time. But here is a selection of some of the most common scams doing the rounds at the moment:

‘Official’ updates

Many of these emails purport to come from official organizations such as the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), or the World Health Organization (WHO). They claim to contain key updates on the spread of the virus and must-read recommendations on how to avoid infection. Booby-trapped links and attachments carry malware and/or could redirect users to phishing sites.

Coronavirus map

Sometimes legitimate tools can be hijacked to spread malware. Researchers have spotted a version of the interactive Coronavirus dashboard created by Johns Hopkins University which was altered to contain information-stealing malware known as AZORult. If emails arrive with links to such sites, users should exercise extreme caution.

Corporate updates

Many big brands are proactively contacting their customer base to reassure them of the steps they are taking to keep staff and customers safe from the virus. But here too, the hackers are jumping in with spoof messages of their own purporting to come from the companies you may do business with. FedEx is one such global brand that has been spoofed in this way.

Donations

Another trick is to send phishing emails calling for donations to help fund research into the virus. One, claiming to come from the “Department of Health” has a subject line, “URGENT: Coronavirus, Can we count on your support today?” A key tactic in phishing emails is to create a sense of urgency like this to rush the reader into making hasty decisions.

Click here for a cure

One scam email claims to come from a medical professional and contains details about a vaccine for COVID-19 which has been “hushed up” by global governments. Of course, clicking through to find the non-existent ‘cure’ will bring the recipient nothing but trouble.

Tax refunds

In the UK, users have received emails spoofed to appear as if sent from the government, and promising a tax refund to help citizens cope with the financial shock of the pandemic. As governments in the US and elsewhere start to take more interventionist measures to prop up their economies, we can expect more of these types of phishing email.

How to stay safe

The good news is that there’s plenty you can do to protect you and your family from phishing emails like these. A blend of the following technical and human fixes will go a long way to minimizing the threat:

  • Be cautious of any unsolicited emails/social media messages etc, even if they appear to come from a reputable organization or a known contact.
  • Don’t click through on any links/buttons in unsolicited emails, or download attachments.
  • If an email asks you for personal data, check directly with the sender rather than clicking through and entering those details.
  • Invest in cybersecurity tools from a trusted vendor like Trend Micro, to spot and block scam emails and block malicious downloads and websites.
  • Disable macros in Office files – these are often used by hackers to run malware.

How Trend Micro can help

Fortunately, Trend Micro Security can also help. Among its anti-phishing features are the following:

Antispam for Outlook: includes checks on email sender reputation, employs web threat protection to block malicious URLs in messages, and scans for threats in files attached to email messages.

Fraud Buster: uses leading-edge AI technology to detect fake emails in Gmail and Outlook webmail that don’t contain malicious URLs or attachments, but still pose a risk to the user.

To find out more about how Trend Micro can help keep your family safe from online threats and phishing, go to our Trend Micro Security homepage, or watch our video series: How to Prevent Phishing, Part 1 and Part 2.

The post How to Stay Safe as Online Coronavirus Scams Spread appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: How to Stay Safe as Online Coronavirus Scams Spread and Magecart Cyberattack Targets NutriBullet Website

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about tips you can use to secure your home office. Also, read about how Magecart Group 8 targeted the website of the blender manufacturer, NutriBullet, in an attempt to steal the payment-card data of its online customers.

 

Read on:

A Message from Our COO Regarding Trend Micro’s Customer Commitment During the Global Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)

As COVID-19 continues to impact individuals, families, communities and businesses around the world, Trend Micro has taken action to ensure that the COVID-19 crisis does not impact the customer experience of its products or services. In this blog from Trend Micro’s chief operating officer, Kevin Simzer, learn about the steps that Trend Micro is taking to not only ensure employee safety, but to continue to deliver exceptional customer service.

RDP-Capable TrickBot Targets Telecoms Sectors in U.S. and Hong Kong

A recently discovered TrickBot variant targeting organizations in telecoms, education and financial services in the United States and Hong Kong includes a module for remote desktop protocol (RDP) brute-forcing, Bitdefender reports. The malware has mostly been distributed through spam emails but was also linked to infections with other malware.

How to Stay Safe as Online Coronavirus Scams Spread

Unfortunately, it’s extraordinary global events like COVID-19 that cyber-criminals look for in order to make their schemes more successful. As organizations enforce remote working to reduce the impact of the virus, many will be logging-on from home or mobile computing devices, which may have fewer built-in protections from such threats. This makes it more important than ever to know how the bad guys are trying to cash in on COVID-19 and what you can do to stay safe.

DDoS Attack Targets German Food Delivery Service

Cybercriminals have launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against German food delivery service Takeaway.com (Liefrando.de), demanding two bitcoins (about $11,000) to stop the flood of traffic. Liefrando delivers food from more than 15,000 restaurants in Germany, where people under COVID-19 restrictions depend on the service. The attack has now stopped, according to a report from BleepingComputer. 

Suddenly Teleworking, Securely

Telework is not a new idea and a good percentage of the workforce already does so. But the companies who have a distributed workforce had time to plan for it, and to plan for it securely. This event can’t be treated like a quick rollout of an application: there are business, infrastructure, and customer security impacts. In this blog from Trend Micro’s vice president of cybersecurity, Greg Young, learn how to set yourself up for secure remote work success.

COVID-19: With Everyone Working from Home, VPN Security Has Now Become Paramount

With most employees working from home amid today’s COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak, enterprise VPN servers have now become paramount to a company’s backbone, and their security and availability must be the focus going forward for IT teams.

New Ursnif Campaign Targets Users in Japan

Trend Micro researchers recently detected a new Ursnif campaign targeting users in Japan. The malware is distributed through infected Microsoft Word documents coming from spam emails. Ursnif, also known as Gozi, is an information stealer that collects login credentials from browsers and email applications. It has capabilities for monitoring network traffic, screen capturing, and keylogging.

Trend Micro’s David Sancho on Criminals’ Favorite IoT Targets

In this video, Trend Micro Senior Researcher David Sancho speaks with CyberScoop Editor-in-Chief Greg Otto about his 2020 RSA Conference presentation, which looked at where criminals are infecting Internet of Things targets.

New Variant of Paradise Ransomware Spreads Through IQY Files

Internet Query Files (IQY) were used to deliver a new variant of Paradise ransomware, as reported by Last Line. The said file type has not been associated with this ransomware family before. In the past, IQY files were typically used in other malware campaigns, such as the Necurs botnet that distributes IQY files to deliver FlawedAmmy RAT.

Magecart Cyberattack Targets NutriBullet Website

Magecart Group 8 targeted the website of the blender manufacturer, NutriBullet, in an attempt to steal the payment-card data of its online customers. Yonathan Klijnsma, threat researcher with RiskIQ, said in a post that a JavaScript web skimmer code was first inserted on the website of the blender retailer on Feb. 20, specifically targeting the website’s checkout page.

The IIoT Threat Landscape: Securing Connected Industries

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) provides bridges of connectedness that enable seamless IT and OT convergence. However, threat actors can cross these bridges to compromise systems. As the use of IoT extends beyond the home and goes into the vast industrial landscape, the scale of threats likewise grows for smart factories, smart cities, connected cars, and other smart environments.

What are you doing to secure your home office devices? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: How to Stay Safe as Online Coronavirus Scams Spread and Magecart Cyberattack Targets NutriBullet Website appeared first on .

The Wawa Breach: 30 Million Reasons to Try Dark Web Monitoring

By Trend Micro

We’re all getting a little more worldly wise to the dangers that lurk around every corner of our digital lives. We know that the flipside of being able to shop, chat, bank and share online at the push of a button is the risk of data theft, ransomware and identity fraud. That’s why we protect our families’ PCs and mobile devices with security solutions from proven providers like Trend Micro, and take extra care each time we fire up the internet.

But what about the firms that we entrust to handle our data securely?

Unfortunately, many of these organizations still aren’t doing enough to protect our personal and financial information. It could be data we enter online to pay for an item or open an account. Or it could be payment card details that we’ve used at a local outlet which are subsequently stored online. These companies are big targets for the bad guys, who only have to get lucky once to crack open an Aladdin’s Cave of lucrative customer data.

What does this mean? That data breaches are the new normal. Last year in the US there were a reported 1,473 of these incidents, exposing nearly 165 million customer records. The latest affected customers of convenience store and gas station chain Wawa — and it could be one of the biggest ever, affecting 30 million cards.

Let’s take a look at what happened, and what consumers can do to steal a march on the bad guys.

What happened this time?

Wawa first notified its customers of a payment card breach in December 2019. But although the firm discovered malware on its payment processing servers that month, it had actually been sitting there since March, potentially siphoning card data silently from every single Wawa location. That’s more than 850 stores, across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Florida, and Washington DC.

The company itself has so far declined to put a number on how many customers have been affected. However, while cardholders were still wondering whether they’ve been impacted or not, something else happened. At the end of January, a hacker began to upload the stolen cards to a notorious dark web marketplace, known as Joker’s Stash.

They are claiming to have 30 million stolen cards in total, which if accurate could make this one of the biggest card breaches of its kind, placing it alongside other incidents at Home Depot (2014) and Target (2013).

How does it affect me?

Once the data goes on sale on a dark web market like this, it is usually bought by scammers, who use it in follow-on identity fraud attacks. In this case, the stolen data includes debit and credit card numbers, expiration dates and cardholder names, but not PINs or CVV records. That means they can’t be used at ATMs and fraudsters will find it hard to use the cards online, as most merchants require the CVV number.

However, if the cards are of the old magstripe type, they could be cloned for use in face-to-face transactions.

Although Wawa said it has informed the relevant card issuers and brands, the cardholders themselves must monitor their cards for unusual transactions and then report to their issuer “in a timely manner” if they want to be reimbursed for any fraudulent usage. This can be a distressing, time-consuming process.

What should I do next?

This is by no means the first and it won’t be the last breach of this kind. In the past, data stolen from customers of Hilton Hotels, supermarket chain Hy-Vee, retailer Bebe Stores, and restaurant chains including Krystal, Moe’s and Schlotzsky’s has turned up for sale on Joker’s Stash. It can be dispiriting for consumers to see their personal data time and again compromised in this way by cyber-criminals.

Too often in the aftermath of such incidents, the customers themselves are left in the dark. There is no information on whether they’ve definitively had their personal or card data stolen, just an ominous sense that something bad may be about to happen. If the company itself doesn’t even know how many cards have been affected, how can you act decisively?

Credit monitoring is often provided by breached firms, but this is a less-than-perfect solution. For one thing, such services only alert the user if a new line of credit is being opened in their name — not if a stolen card is being used. And second, they only raise the alarm after the incident, by which time the fraudsters may already have made a serious dent in your finances.

Monitoring your bank account for fraudulent transactions is arguably more useful in cases like the Wawa breach, but it’s still too reactive. Here’s a handy 2-step plan which could provide better results:

Step 1: Dark web monitoring works

To get more proactive, consumers need Dark Web monitoring. These tools typically scour dark web sites like Joker’s Stash to look for your personal information. The beauty of this approach is that it can raise the alarm after a breach has occurred, when the data is posted to the Dark Web, but before a fraudster has had time to monetize your stolen details. With this information, you can proactively request that your lender block a particular card and issue a new one.

This approach works for all personal data you may want to keep protected, including email addresses, driver’s license, passport numbers and passwords.

Step 2: Password protection

Once you’ve determined that your data has been part of a breach and is being sold on the dark web, one of the most important things you can do is to change your passwords to any stolen accounts, in order to minimize the potential damage that fraudsters can do.

This is where password manager tools can come in very handy. They allow users to store and recall long, strong and unique credentials for each of the websites and apps they use. This means that if one password is compromised, as in a breach scenario, your other accounts will remain secure. It also makes passwords harder for hackers to guess, which they may try to do with automated tools if they already have your email address.

Following a breach, it also makes sense to look out for follow-on phishing attacks which may try to trick you into handing over more information to the fraudsters. Here are a few tips:

  • Be wary of any unsolicited email, even if it appears to come from a reputable vendor
  • Don’t click on links in unsolicited emails, or download attachments
  • If an email asks you for personal data, check directly with the source, rather than clicking through/replying
  • Invest in AV with anti-phishing from a trusted vendor, for all desktop and mobile devices
  • Ensure all operating systems and applications are on the latest version.

How Trend Micro can help

Fortunately, Trend Micro has several products that can help you, as a potential or actual victim of a data breach, to proactively mitigate the fallout from a serious security incident, or to foil the fraudsters:

Trend Micro ID Security: checks if your personal information has been uploaded to Dark Web sites by hackers. This highly secure service, available in apps for Android and iOS mobile devices, uses data hashing and an encrypted connected to keep your details safe, alerting when it has found a match on the Dark Web so you can take action. Use it to protect your emails, credit card numbers, passwords, bank accounts, passport details and more.

Trend Micro Password Manager: provides a secure place to store, manage and update your passwords. It remembers your log-ins, so you can create secure and unique credentials for each website/app you need to sign-in to. This means if one site is breached, hackers will not be able to use that password to open your other accounts. Password Manager is available for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, synchronizing your passwords across all four platforms.

Trend Micro Fraud Buster: is a free online service you can use to check suspicious emails It uses advanced machine learning technology to identify scam emails that don’t contain malicious URLs or attachments but still pose a risk to the user, because the email (which may be extortionist) reflects the fact that the fraudster probably got your email address from the Dark Web in the first place. Users can then decide to report the scam, get more details, or proceed as before.

Fraud Buster is also now integrated into Trend Micro Security for Windows, protecting Gmail and Outlook webmail in Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox. It’s also integrated in Trend Micro Antivirus for Mac, where it does the same for Gmail webmail in Safari, Chrome and Firefox on the Mac.

In the end, only you can guard your identity credentials with vigilance.

The post The Wawa Breach: 30 Million Reasons to Try Dark Web Monitoring appeared first on .

Riding another wave of success for our multi-layered detection and response approach

By Trend Micro

 

The corporate endpoint is a constant battle between cybersecurity white hats and criminal attackers. According to one study from the Ponemon Institute, 68% of organizations were victims of an attack on the endpoint in 2019. The risks and costs associated with undetected threats are immeasurable. Organizations need to detect and respond immediately before any significant damage is done.

In order to do this, CISOs must look beyond the endpoint to also include email, servers, cloud workloads and networks. This is the value of Trend Micro’s XDR platform. We heard feedback on this strategy recently, as Trend Micro was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Detection and Response, Q1 2020.

Under fire and over-stretched

Enterprise IT security teams are under unparalleled pressure. On one hand, they’re bombarded with cyber-attacks on a massive scale. Trend Micro detected and blocked over 52 billion such threats in 2019 alone. On the other hand, they’re facing a range of continuously evolving black hat tools and techniques including fileless malware, phishing, and supply chain attacks, that could lead to data theft and service outages. The stakes couldn’t be higher, thanks to an ever-tightening regulatory regime. All of this must be done with workforce challenges: the current cyber skills shortage for North American firms stands at nearly 500,000 workers.

These are the kinds of challenges facing Trend Micro customer MedImpact Healthcare Systems, the largest privately held pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) in the US. Processing more than one million healthcare claims daily, MedImpact must protect two primary data centers, three call centers staffed 24/7, and multiple private network routing centers — all to the strict compliance requirements of HIPAA, PCI DSS and other regulations.

As Frank Bunton, VP, CISO for MedImpact knows, effective endpoint detection and response (EDR) is vital to modern organizations. “EDR accelerates the threat analysis process so we can get to the solution faster,” says Bunton. “Speed to resolution is critical because we see attacks every day on just about every network.”

But MedImpact is similar to a lot of other organizations today in that it also appreciates the need to go beyond the endpoint for critical cross-layer detection and response. “XDR gives us the added confidence that our organization is protected on all fronts. If an endpoint detects a problem, it automatically uploads the suspect object to a tool that analyzes that problem and fixes it. By the time we are aware of an issue, the issue is resolved. There is no way we could manage this much information without extended security automation,” says Bunton.

The future is XDR

This is where XDR comes in. It has been designed to look not just at endpoint detection and response, but also to collect and correlate data from across the organization, including: email, endpoint, servers, cloud workloads, and networks. With this enhanced context, and the power of our AI and expert security analytics, the platform is able to identify threats more easily and contain them more effectively.

This matters to organizations like MedImpact, whose key challenge was “finding security solutions that could communicate with each other and share valuable data in real time.” XDR has visibility across the entire IT environment to detect earlier and with more confidence. It provides a single source of the truth and delivers fewer higher-fidelity alerts to enhance protection and maximize limited IT resources.

But don’t just take our word for it. Forrester gave us a perfect score for product vision, security analytics, performance, market presence and much more. “Trend Micro has a forward-thinking approach and is an excellent choice for organizations wanting to centralize reporting and detection with XDR but have less capacity for proactively threat hunting,” the report concluded.

To find out more… check out the Forrester report on leaders in this space.

Learn more from MedImpact’s success story.

 

The post Riding another wave of success for our multi-layered detection and response approach appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: Hong Kong Users Targeted with Mobile Malware via Local News Links and Hackers Hijack Routers to Spread Malware Via Coronavirus Apps

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about Apple iOS smartphone users in Hong Kong targeted in a new campaign exploiting online news readers to distribute malware. Also, read about how hackers are hijacking routers and changing Domain Name System (DNS) settings in order to redirect victims to attacker-controlled sites promoting fake coronavirus information apps.

Read on:

Apple iOS Users Served Mobile Malware in Poisoned News Campaign

Apple iOS smartphone users in Hong Kong are being targeted in a new campaign exploiting online news readers to serve malware. This week, Trend Micro researchers said the scheme, dubbed Operation Poisoned News, uses links posted on a variety of forums popular with Hong Kong residents that claim to lead to news stories. 

The Wawa Breach: 30 Million Reasons to Try Dark Web Monitoring

Data breaches are the new normal. Last year in the US there were a reported 1,473 of these incidents, exposing nearly 165 million customer records. The latest data breach from convenience store and gas station chain Wawa could be one of the largest ever, affecting 30 million card records from customers.

Infosec Industry Shows Compassionate Side Amid #COVID19 Pandemic

As the coronavirus pandemic continues, large numbers of organizations have been forced to implement work from home measures for staff. While working from home, employees are more susceptible to cybersecurity threats, especially with a rise in tailored COVID-19 cyber-scams. In this article, read about how Trend Micro and other information security companies have taken steps to offer free resources and support to organizations and employees at this difficult time.

Nefilim Ransomware Threatens to Expose Stolen Data

A new ransomware named Nefilim has been discovered threatening to release its victims’ data to the public if they fail to pay the ransom. It is most likely distributed through exposed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), as shared by SentinelLabs’ Vitali Krimez and ID Ransomware’s Michael Gillespie.

Remember Cryptojacking from Way, Way Back (2019)? Site Infections are Down 99% – Thanks to Death of Coinhive

Cryptojacking, the theft of computing power to mine digital currency, has been around at least since 2013 – and has shrunk in use dramatically with the death of Monero-mining service Coinhive. Since Coinhive’s closure last year, cryptojacking has been almost eliminated, according to a group of researchers from the University of Cincinnati in America, and Lakehead University in Canada.

Microsoft Alerts Users About Critical Font-Related Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Windows

Microsoft released a security advisory on a zero-day remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability affecting Windows operating systems. The vulnerability is found in an unpatched library and comprises two RCE flaws found in Adobe Type Manager Library (atmfd.dll), a built-in library for the Adobe Type Manager font management tool in Windows. 

Credit Card Skimmer Found on Tupperware Website

Cybercriminals hacked Tupperware.com and planted malicious code designed to steal payment card information, Malwarebytes warned this week. The credit card skimmer was planted on the main website and some of its localized versions. The website has nearly one million visitors every month, indicating that hackers may have obtained a significant number of payment card records.

Mirai Updates: New Variant Mukashi Targets NAS Devices, New Vulnerability Exploited in GPON Routers, UPX-Packed FBot

Researchers observed a number of new developments related to the internet of things (IoT) malware Mirai, which actively searches for vulnerabilities in IoT devices. A new Mirai variant named Mukashi was found attacking network-attached storage (NAS) devices, a new vulnerability in GPON routers was exploited by Mirai, and a UPX-packed Fbot variant was detected by a Trend Micro honeypot.

Hackers Hijack Routers to Spread Malware Via Coronavirus Apps

Cybercriminals are hijacking routers and changing Domain Name System (DNS) settings, in order to redirect victims to attacker-controlled sites promoting fake coronavirus information apps. If victims download these apps, they are infected with information stealing Oski malware. This latest attack shows that hackers are becoming more creative in how they leverage the coronavirus pandemic.

Working from Home? Here’s What You Need for a Secure Setup

In response to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, many companies have rolled out work-from-home arrangements. As a result, there has been an influx of employees signing in remotely to corporate networks and using cloud-based applications, potentially opening doors to security risks. In this blog, Trend Micro shares how security teams and home office users can mitigate the risks that come with remote-working setups.

Russian Hackers Using Stolen Corporate Email Accounts to Mask their Phishing Attempts

In the last year, Russian military intelligence hackers have used previously hacked email accounts to send a wide array of phishing attempts. Feike Hacquebord, senior threat researcher at Trend Micro, explains new research regarding the group known as Fancy Bear, APT28, or Pawn Storm, and how they used hacked emails of high-profile personnel at defense firms in the Middle East to carry out an attack.

Review, Refocus, and Recalibrate: The 2019 Mobile Threat Landscape

Trend Micro analyzed 2019’s most notable mobile threats to assess the landscape and help users and enterprises reevaluate their measures and practices to defend against future threats. While there was a decrease in certain threats compared to 2018, in 2019 cybercriminals looked at the malicious mobile routines that worked in the past and adjusted these to make them more sophisticated, persistent, and profitable online and offline.

Have you seen any COVID-19 related cyber-scams? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: Hong Kong Users Targeted with Mobile Malware via Local News Links and Hackers Hijack Routers to Spread Malware Via Coronavirus Apps appeared first on .

COVID-19: How Do I Work from Home Securely?

By Trend Micro

The coronavirus pandemic—the infection officially designated as COVID-19—is causing upheaval across the globe. Aside from the serious economic and public health implications, one very practical impact of shelter-in-place dictums is to force many companies to support remote working where they can. The most recent data tells us that in 2017, eight million Americans worked from home at least some of the week — amounting to around 5% of US workers. However, the events of the past few weeks are driving what is being described in certain sectors as the biggest shift to home working since 9/11.

This will ensure that many companies can continue functioning while helping to achieve social distancing to minimise the spread of the virus. But there are challenges, particularly to smaller businesses who don’t have IT security teams to assist with the transition. Hackers are primed and ready to take advantage of home workers, whose machines and devices may not be as secure as those in the office. There’s also a risk that workers are more distracted by current events when working at home, creating more opportunities for cyber-criminals to strike.

This isn’t just about hackers stealing your personal log-ins and information to sell on the dark web. In a home-working context, corporate data and systems may also be at risk. It takes just one unsecured remote worker to let the bad guys in. The damage they end up doing may be particularly difficult for employers to weather given the extreme economic pressures already on many firms.

With that in mind, therefore, let’s take a look at some of the major threats to home workers and their organizations, and what can be done to keep the hackers at bay.

The main threats

Phishing messages are by far the number one threat to home workers. Cyber-criminals are using widespread awareness of COVID-19, and a desire for more information on the outbreak, to trick users into clicking on malicious links or opening booby-trapped attachments. Many are spoofed to appear as if sent by trusted organizations such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the World Health Organization (WHO). They may claim to offer more information on the spread of the outbreak, tips on staying safe, and even provide details of how to get a non-existent vaccine online.

If you click through on a malicious link, the next stage of the attack could:

  • Take you to a convincing-looking log-in page (e.g., for Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, or any popular cloud apps) where your username and password could be harvested by hackers. With these, they have a foothold in the organization which could provide the foundation for a serious information-stealing attack.
  • Covertly initiate a malware download. This malware could exploit unpatched vulnerabilities on your computer to infect not just your machine but the entire corporate network it’s connected to, with ransomware, cryptojacking malware, banking trojans, information-stealing threats, and much more.

Brute forcing is another way for hackers to hijack your cloud accounts. They use previously breached username/password combos and run them through automation software to try them across billions of websites and apps. Because users reuse passwords across numerous accounts, the bad guys often get lucky and are able to unlock additional accounts in this way. Home workers using Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom and other cloud platforms for collaboration and productivity may be targeted.

Malicious smartphone apps are another threat to home workers. These may be disguised to trick the user into believing they’re downloading a COVID-19 tracker, for example. In reality, it could infect the device with ransomware, info-stealers, or other malware. That device could then spread the same malware to the corporate network, if it is connected to it via the home network.

Smart device threats are also a concern for home workers. More and more of us are investing in smart home devices. From voice assistants to smart speakers, connected refrigerators to smart TVs, it’s estimated that there’ll be as many as 128 million smart homes in the US by the end of this year. However, often these consumer-grade devices don’t have strong built-in protection. They may use weak, factory default passwords and/or contain multiple software vulnerabilities which are rarely patched by the manufacturer, if at all. The risk is that hackers could hijack one or more of these devices and use them as a stepping stone into the home and then corporate network – as we’ve demonstrated in previous research.

Friends and family could also introduce new cyber-threats, as they will also be confined largely to the home. That means they’ll be logging on to the home network with their own mobile devices, which may not be as well protected from threats as they should be. Once again, such threats could spread quickly from the home network to infect the enterprise network if it’s connected without adequate security controls. Another risk is of children using unsecured remote learning platforms, which may offer cybercriminals opportunities to hijack accounts, steal information and spread malware onto the network.

What are the hackers after?

Home workers represent an attractive target in their own right. After all, personal information and log-ins (home banking, Netflix, webmail etc) can be easily sold for a profit on dark web marketplaces. However, organizations represent a much bigger, potentially more lucrative pay day for cyber-criminals. While corporate PCs and networks might be fairly well secured, the rush to support home working may have left gaps the bad guys are keen to exploit.

By first compromising the home worker, and then pivoting through unsecured channels to the corporate network, hackers could spread ransomware, steal sensitive company IPs, infect work networks with crypto-mining malware, or steal large volumes of customer data. They may also look to hijack employees’ corporate email or other accounts as the first part of a multi-stage information-stealing attack. There have even been new warnings of Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks in which employees (usually those working in the finance department) are contacted by someone posing as a senior exec and ordered to wire business funds to a new bank account.

Working safely at home

With so many techniques at their disposal, it’s easy to imagine that the bad guys have the upper hand. But by putting a few best practices in place, there are things businesses and employees can do today to reduce home working security risks.

Consider the following:

  • User awareness exercises to improve the ability of home workers to spot phishing attacks.
  • Ensure all home workers are outfitted with anti-malware for any devices used for work. Trend Micro Maximum Security is an excellent place to start for PCs and Macs, while Trend Micro Mobile Security can help secure Android and Mobile devices.
  • Require strong, unique passwords for all accounts, stored in a password manager, such as Trend Micro Password Manager.
  • Enhance the above by switching on two-factor authentication for all enterprise accounts that have it (including any cloud platforms).
  • Always use a VPN for communication between home and corporate networks.
  • Ensure staff have a clear route to report any security incidents.
  • Switch on automatic updates for all home computer systems (operating systems and software).
  • Ensure smart home devices are on latest software version and have strong passwords or 2FA.
  • Use a network security solution like Trend Micro Home Network Security to secure your home network. It not only provides a secure baseline for working at home, with its web and content threat protections; you can block your kids’ use of the internet and YouTube while you’re having conference calls or doing other bandwidth-intensive work on the remotely-accessed corporate network.
  • Tightly enforce endpoint security policies: if possible, only allow work devices to connect to the corporate network, and/or employee devices that have been previously scanned for threats.

We don’t know how long COVID-19 will last. But by adapting to the new reality as quickly as possible, businesses and their home workers can at least close down any security gaps, enabling them to be as productive as possible — while most importantly, staying safe and healthy.

The post COVID-19: How Do I Work from Home Securely? appeared first on .

The AWS Service to Focus On – Amazon EC2

By Trend Micro
cloud services

If we run a contest for Mr. Popular of Amazon Web Services (AWS), without a doubt Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) has ‘winner’ written all over it. However, what’s popular is not always what is critical for your business to focus on. There is popularity and then there is dependability. Let’s acknowledge how reliant we are on Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) as AWS infrastructure led-organizations.

We reflected upon our in-house findings for the AWS ‘Security’ pillar in our last blog, Four Reasons Your Cloud Security is Keeping You Up at Night, explicitly leaving out over caffeination and excessive screen time!

Drilling further down to the most affected AWS Services, Amazon EC2 related issues topped the list with 32% of all issues. Whereas Mr. Popular – Amazon S3 contributed to 12% of all issues. While cloud providers, like AWS, offer a secure infrastructure and best practices, many customers are unaware of their role in the shared responsibility model. The results showing the number of issues impacting Amazon EC2 customers demonstrates the security gap that can happen when the customer part of the shared responsibility model is not well understood.

While these AWS services and infrastructure are secure, customers also have a responsibility to secure their data and to configure environments according to AWS best practices. So how do we ensure that we keep our focus on this crucial service and ensure the flexibility, scalability, and security of a growing infrastructure?

Introducing Rules

If you thought you were done with rules after passing high school and moving out of your parent’s house, you would have soon realized that you were living a dream. Rules seem to be everywhere! Rules are important, they keep us safe and secure. While some may still say ‘rules are made to be broken’, you will go into a slump if your cloud infrastructure breaks the rules of the industry and gets exposed to security vulnerabilities.

It is great if you are already following the Best Practices for Amazon EC2, but if not, how do you monitor the performance of your services day in and day out to ensure their adherence to these best practices? How can you track if all your services and resources are running as per the recommended standards?

We’re here to help with that. Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity ‘Rules’ provide you with that visibility for some of the most critical services like Amazon EC2.

What is the Rule?

A ‘Rule’ is the definition of the best practice used as a basis for an assessment that is run by Conformity on a particular piece of your Cloud infrastructure. When a rule is run against the infrastructure (resources) associated with your AWS account, the result of the scan is referred to as a Check. For example, an Amazon EC2 may have 60 Rules (Checks) scanning for various risks/vulnerabilities. Checks are either a SUCCESS or a FAILURE.

Conformity has about 540 Rules and 60 of them are for monitoring your Amazon EC2 services best practices. Conformity Bot scans your cloud accounts for these Rules and presents you with the ‘Checks’ to prioritize and remediate the issues keeping your services healthy and prevent security breaches.

Amazon EC2 Best Practices and Rules

Here are just a few examples of how Conformity Rules have got you covered for some of the most critical Amazon EC2 best practices:

  1. To ensure Security, ensure IAM users and roles are used and management policies are established for access policies.
  2. For managing Storage, keep EBS volumes separate for operating systems and data, and check that the Amazon EC2 instances provisioned outside of the AWS Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) have Termination Protection safety feature enabled to protect your instances from being accidentally terminated.
  3. For efficient Resource Management, utilize custom tags to track and identify resources, and keep on top of your stated Amazon EC2 limits.
  4. For full confident Backup and Recovery, regularly test the process of recovering instances and EBS volumes should they fail, and create and use approved AMIs for easier and consistent future instance deployment.

See how Trend Micro can support your part of the shared responsibility model for cloud security: https://www.trendmicro.com/cloudconformity.

Stay Safe!

The post The AWS Service to Focus On – Amazon EC2 appeared first on .

Cloud-First but Not Cloud-Only: Why Organizations Need to Simplify Cybersecurity

By Wendy Moore

The global public cloud services market is on track to grow 17% this year, topping $266 billion. These are impressive figures, and whatever Covid-19 may do short-term to the macro-economy, they’re a sign of where the world is heading. But while many organizations may describe themselves as “cloud-first”, they’re certainly not “cloud-only.” That is, hybrid cloud is the name of the game today: a blend of multiple cloud providers and multiple datacenters.

Whilst helping to drive agility, differentiation and growth, this new reality also creates cyber risk. As IT leaders try to chart a course for success, they’re crying out for a more holistic, simpler way to manage hybrid cloud security.

Cloud for everyone

Organizations are understandably keen to embrace cloud platforms. Who wouldn’t want to empower employees to be more productive and DevOps to deliver agile, customer-centric services? But digital transformation comes with its own set of challenges. Migration often happens at different rates throughout an organization. That makes it hard to gain unified visibility across the enterprise and manage security policies in a consistent manner — especially when different business units and departments are making siloed decisions. An estimated 85% of organizations are now using multiple clouds, and 76% are using between two and 15 hybrid clouds.

To help manage this complexity, organisations are embracing containers and serverless architectures to develop new applications more efficiently. However, the DevOps teams using these technologies are focused primarily on time-to-market, sometimes at the expense of security. Their use of third-party code is a classic example: potentially exposing the organization to buggy or even malware-laden code.

A shared responsibility

The question is, how to mitigate these risks in a way that respects the Shared Responsibility model of cloud security, but in a consistent manner across the organization? It’s a problem exacerbated by two further concerns.

First, security needs to be embedded in the DevOps process to ensure that the applications delivered are secure, but not in a way that threatens the productivity of teams. They need to be able to use the tools and platforms they want to, but in a way that doesn’t expose the organization to unnecessary extra risk. Second, cloud complexity can often lead to human error: misconfigurations of cloud services that threaten to expose highly regulated customer and corporate data to possible attacks. The Capital One data breach, which affected an estimated 100 million consumers, was caused partly by a misconfigured Web Application Firewall.

Simplifying security

Fortunately, organizations are becoming more mature in their cloud security efforts. We see customers that started off tackling cyber risk with multiple security tools across the enterprise, but in time developed an operational excellence model. By launching what amount to cloud centers of excellence, they’re showing that security policies and processes can be standardized and rolled out in a repeatable way across the organization to good effect.

But what of the tools security teams are using to achieve this? Unfortunately, in too many cases they’re relying on fragmented, point products which add cost, further complexity and dangerous security gaps to the mix. It doesn’t have to be like this.

Cloud One from Trend Micro brings together workload security, container security, application security, network security, file storage security and cloud security posture management (CSPM). The latter, Cloud One – Conformity offers a simple, automated way to spot and fix misconfigurations and enhance security compliance and governance in the cloud.

Whatever stage of maturity you are at with your cloud journey, Cloud One offers simple, automated protection from a single console. It’s simply the way cloud security needs to be.

The post Cloud-First but Not Cloud-Only: Why Organizations Need to Simplify Cybersecurity appeared first on .

Using Zoom? Here’s how to keep your business and employees safe

By Bharat Mistry

Cyber-criminals are always looking for new opportunities to make money and steal data. Globally trending events are a tried-and-tested way of doing just this, and they don’t come much bigger than the current Covid-19 pandemic. It’s sparking a wave of phishing, BEC, extortion, ransomware and data breach attempts. And as increasing numbers of global workers are sent home, new opportunities are opening up to compromise video conferencing apps.

Although not alone in being targeted, Zoom has been the subject of some of the highest-profile incidents so far this year. Fortunately, there are things you can do to keep your business safe.

Under the microscope

The video conferencing app is in many ways a victim of its own success. Security concerns have been raised about it in the past, after researchers revealed zero-day flaw in the Mac Zoom client which could have allowed hackers to spy on users via their webcams. Later the same year, separate research revealed an API-targeted enumeration attack affecting the platform. Neither of these are thought to have been exploited in the wild.

However, things have changed today: with much of the world using the platform to hold business meetings and personal video calls, scrutiny of its security posture has never been greater.

From bugs to bombing

There are several risks to be aware of. The first is of several new vulnerabilities discovered in the platform: one of which could allow hackers to steal Windows passwords, and another two which could enable attackers to remotely install malware on affected Macs and eavesdrop on meetings.

Most news coverage, however, is focused on “Zoombombing” — when uninvited users crash meetings. This often happens when large-scale semi-public events are held, and meeting IDs are shared on social media. If there’s no password for the meeting and attendees aren’t screened, then Zoombombers may turn up. Once in the ‘meeting’, crashers often post offensive comments, stream adult content or do other things to disrupt the event.

The same underlying techniques could be used by hackers to eavesdrop on or disrupt business meetings. It’s all about taking advantage of unsecure settings in the app, (and possibly using brute-force tools to crack meeting IDs).

With access to a meeting, hackers could harvest highly sensitive and/or market-critical corporate information, or even spread malware via a file transfer feature.

The final threat is from phishing attacks. Hackers know users are looking en masse for ways to communicate during government lockdowns. By creating legitimate-looking Zoom links and websites, they could steal financial details, spread malware or harvest Zoom ID numbers, allowing them to infiltrate virtual meetings. One vendor discovered 2,000 new domains had been registered in March alone, over two-thirds of the total for the year so far.

What you can do

The good news is that there are several things you can do to mitigate the security risks associated with Zoom.

The most basic are:

  • Ensure Zoom is always on the latest software version
  • Build awareness of Zoom phishing scams into user training programs. Users should only download the Zoom client from a trusted site and check for anything suspicious in the meeting URL when joining a meeting
  • Ensure all home workers have anti-malware including phishing detection installed from a reputable vendor

Next, it’s important to revisit those administrative settings in the app, to reduce the opportunities for hackers and Zoombombers.

The most important revolve around the Zoom Personal Meeting ID (a 9-11 digit number every user has). If a hacker gets hold of this, and the meeting is not password protected, they could access it. A leaked email or simple brute-force/guessing techniques could enable a hacker to compromise the ID and associated URL. For reoccurring meetings, the threat persists.

Fortunately, automatically generated passwords are now switched on by default, and the use of personal meeting IDs are switched off, meaning Zoom will create a random, one-off ID for each meeting.

These setting should be kept as is. But organisations can do more, including:

  • Ensure you also generate a meeting ID automatically for recurring meetings
  • Set screen-sharing to “host only” to prevent uninvited guests from sharing disruptive content
  • Don’t share any meeting IDs online
  • Disable “file transfers” to mitigate risk of malware
  • Make sure that only authenticated users can join meetings
  • Lock the meeting once it’s started to prevent anyone new joining
  • Use waiting room feature, so the host can only allow attendees from a pre-assigned register
  • Play a sound when someone enters or leaves the room
  • Allow host to put attendees on hold, temporarily removing them from a meeting if necessary

The post Using Zoom? Here’s how to keep your business and employees safe appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: More Than 8,000 Unsecured Redis Instances Found in the Cloud and Wiper Malware Called “Coronavirus” Spreads Among Windows Victims

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about 8,000 Redis instances running unsecured in different parts of the world, even deployed in public clouds. Also, read about a new Windows malware, called “Coronavirus,” that makes disks unusable by overwriting the master boot record (MBR).

Read on:

COVID-19: How Do I Work from Home Securely?

In light of the current COVID-19 crisis, shelter-in-place orders have forced many companies to support remote work. However, hackers are primed and ready to take advantage of home workers, whose machines and devices may not be as secure as those in the office. In this blog, learn about some of the major threats to home workers and their organizations, and what can be done to keep hackers at bay.

Vulnerability Researchers Focus on Zoom App’s Security

Researchers have turned up security and privacy flaws in Zoom, which has had success during the pandemic. In late March, one red-team member found that Zoom would display universal naming convention (UNC) paths as links, which, if clicked, would send a username and password hash to an attacker-controlled system. In this article, Brian Gorenc of Trend Micro’s ZDI program shares insight into Zoom vulnerabilities.

More Than 8,000 Unsecured Redis Instances Found in the Cloud

Trend Micro discovered 8,000 Redis instances running unsecured across the globe, even deployed in public clouds. The instances have been found without Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption and are not password protected. When left unsecured and allowed to be internet-facing or integrated into IoT devices, cybercriminals can find and abuse Redis servers to launch attacks such as SQL injections, cross-site scripting, malicious file uploads, and even remote code execution, among others.

Vulnerable VPN Appliances at Healthcare Organizations Open Doors for Ransomware Gangs

The increased enterprise VPN use due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the work-from-home shift has not gone unnoticed by ransomware gangs, Microsoft warns. Microsoft has pinpointed several dozens of hospitals with vulnerable gateway and VPN appliances in their infrastructure and decided to notify them directly about it and offer advice on how to keep safe.

Cloud-First but Not Cloud-Only: Why Organizations Need to Simplify Cybersecurity

The global public cloud services market is on track to grow 17% this year, topping $266 billion. However, while many organizations may describe themselves as “cloud-first”, they’re certainly not “cloud-only.” Hybrid cloud is the name of the game today: a blend of multiple cloud providers and multiple datacenters. While driving agility, differentiation and growth, this new reality also creates cyber risk.

Magecart Hackers Inject iFrame Skimmers in 19 Sites to Steal Payment Data

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an ongoing new Magecart skimmer campaign that has successfully compromised at least 19 different e-commerce websites to steal payment card details. According to a recent report, RiskIQ researchers spotted a new digital skimmer, dubbed “MakeFrame,” that injects HTML iframes into webpages to phish payment data.

The AWS Service to Focus On – Amazon EC2

Trend Micro recently analyzed the most affected AWS Services, finding that EC2-related issues topped the list with 32% of all issues and S3 contributed to 12% of all issues. While cloud providers offer a secure infrastructure and best practices, many customers are unaware of their role in the shared responsibility model. In this blog, learn how to secure data and configure environments with AWS best practices.

Wiper Malware Called “Coronavirus” Spreads Among Windows Victims

A new Windows malware has emerged that makes disks unusable by overwriting the master boot record (MBR). It takes its cue from the COVID-19 pandemic, calling itself simply “Coronavirus.” Overwriting the MBR is the same trick that the infamous NotPetya wiper malware used in 2017 in a campaign that caused widespread, global financial damage.

Raccoon Stealer’s Abuse of Google Cloud Services and Multiple Delivery Techniques

Raccoon Malware as a Service (MaaS) can steal login credentials, credit card information, cryptocurrency wallets and browser information. It can arrive on a system through delivery techniques such as exploit kits, phishing and bundled with other malware. In this blog, Trend Micro investigates campaigns that used exploit kits Fallout and Rig, and observes its use of Google Drive as part of its evasion tactics.

Developing Story: COVID-19 Used in Malicious Campaigns

The COVID-19 pandemic is being used in a variety of malicious campaigns including email spam, BEC, malware, ransomware and malicious domains.  As the number of those afflicted continue to surge by thousands, campaigns that use the disease as a lure also increase. Trend Micro researchers are periodically sourcing for samples on COVID-19-related malicious campaigns.

Threat Actors Abuse Evernote, Other Shared Platforms for Credential Phishing

Trend Micro researchers found campaigns that abuse the note-taking platform Evernote to host credential-phishing pages. The campaigns also exploit other shared platforms for editing images, making infographics and charts, and creating brand templates. Evernote’s notebook sharing functionality that uses public links is what threat actors exploited to spread malicious PDF files via phishing emails. 

Malicious Domains and Files Related to Zoom Increase, ‘Zoom Bombing’ on the Rise

As the use of video conferencing platforms has increased with many people working from home due to the COVID-19 outbreak, cases of “Zoom Bombing” and malicious domains and files related to Zoom have also been on the rise. Registrations of domains that reference the name of Zoom has significantly increased, and other communication apps such as Google Classroom have been targeted as well.

Russian Investigators Bust Credit Card Fraud Ring

Russian federal investigators have arrested at least 25 people accused of operating a credit card fraud ring, according to a statement released by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Those charged allegedly included a card fraud kingpin and two dozen associates linked to more than 90 websites that sold stolen credit card data and operated internationally.

Microsoft Corrects Misstatement Of 775 Percent Surge in Demand for Cloud Services Amid Coronavirus Outbreak

A recent Microsoft blog reported the tech giant had seen a “775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders.” That line was wrong: the almost 8x increase only pertained to monthly users of the Microsoft’s Teams collaboration platform, and only in a one-month period in Italy, a region of the world particularly impacted by the virus.

Using Zoom? Here’s How to Keep Your Business and Employees Safe

The COVID-19 crisis has sparked a new wave of phishing, BEC, extortion, ransomware and data breach attempts, and although it’s not the only platform being targeted, Zoom has been the subject of some of the highest-profile incidents so far. Fortunately, there are things organizations can do to protect their business and their employees. In this blog, learn about best practices you can use to help secure your Zoom conferences.

Have you or your organization been a victim of “Zoom Bombing”? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: More Than 8,000 Unsecured Redis Instances Found in the Cloud and Wiper Malware Called “Coronavirus” Spreads Among Windows Victims appeared first on .

NCSA Small Business Webinar Series

By William "Bill" Malik (CISA VP Infrastructure Strategies)
virus

Working from home? How do you keep your employees cyber-safe and cyber-secure? How do you protect your reputation, profit, and cash flow when you depend on your IT infrastructure as never before?

The National Cyber Security Alliance is hosting a series of webinars for small business owners, and we’re proud to support this effort with guest speakers to share our threat intelligence and security expertise.

The topics will help small companies deal with the challenges of COVID-19. The agenda is at https://staysafeonline.org/event_category/cybersecure-my-business/.

Here’s a quick overview of each session and why it might benefit your organization to tune in.

Telework Cybersecurity Best Practices – April 7: Many small business owners rely on face-to-face meetings with their teams. But, social distancing and work-from-home directives interrupt that way of doing things. In this session, we’ll discuss how to adjust your business to deal with a remote workforce. For some managers, not seeing every member of the team can be unsettling. We’ll talk about ways to overcome that barrier. For many organizations, using remote tools can put an extra burden on your IT gear and staff. We’ll talk about alternatives to lighten that load. And for most organizations, the new way of working can expose new and different information security vulnerabilities. We’ll offer some good practices to reduce your exposure.

Guest speakers from Trend Micro will be Greg Young and Ed Cabrera.

Spring has Sprung! Time for a Digital Spring Cleaning – April 14: One way to cut down on IT resource use is to get rid of unnecessary stuff. This webcast will suggest tactics to reduce the burden on your infrastructure. You will learn about cleaning up your storage, getting off unnecessary email lists, improving your – and your customers’ – privacy, and lowering your attack profile by getting rid of stale applications and services.

E-Commerce Security During COVID-19 – April 21, 2020: Businesses that rely on foot traffic are pivoting to on-line offerings. Restaurants support demand with delivery or curbside pick-up, which both put a strain on your IT resources. Unfortunately, the bad guys are exploiting weaknesses in on-line ordering and payment systems. We’ll talk about measures small businesses should consider to protect their reputation, cash flow, and profits during this transition.

Guest speakers from Trend Micro will be myself and Mitchel Chang.

How to Avoid COVID-19 Scams – May 5, 2020: Bad guys are trying to make money off Covid-19 worries. In this session, Lesley Fair, a Senior Attorney with the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission talks about different kinds of scams and what to do about them, hopefully before anyone gets conned, and what steps you can take if you think you might have gotten stung. Ths session will be repeated on May 26.

Guest speakers from Trend Micro will be myself and Jon Clay.

What Are Phishing, Vishing and Smishing? How Can I Protect My Small Business From These Threats? – May 12, 2020: This session will discuss attacks that can arrive through email, messages, and video chats. Small businesses are targets as well as big firms and the public at large – the bad guys are going anywhere they can to make a (dishonest) buck. You’ll help your employees and customers protect themselves with some good advice, practices, and tools.

Mitchel Chang will be a guest panelist.

How to Avoid COVID-19 Scams – May 26, 2020: A second session of the May 5 discussion. This time Jon Clay and Myla Pilao will be guest speakers from Trend Micro.

Telework Cybersecurity Best Practices – June 9, 2020: A second session of the April 7 event. Greg and Ed will give a repeat performance attendees.

Each session starts at 2:00 PM Eastern time. NCSA will record each session, but you should register to listen in and ask questions live. While the information is tuned to meet the needs of small businesses, individuals at larger organizations, and the general public, will find good ideas and helpful hints an tips to stay safe and cope with this challenging time. We hope to see you soon.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below or @WilliamMalikTM

The post NCSA Small Business Webinar Series appeared first on .

Principles of a Cloud Migration – From Step One to Done

By Jason Dablow
cloud

Boiling the ocean with the subject, sous-vide deliciousness with the content.

Cloud Migrations are happening every day.  Analysts predict over 75% of mid-large enterprises will migrate a workload to the cloud by 2021 – but how can you make sure your workload is successful? There are not just factors with IT teams, operations, and security, but also with business leaders, finance, and many other organizations of your business. In this multi-part series, I’ll explore best practices, forward thinking, and use cases around creating a successful cloud migration from multiple perspectives.  Whether you’re a builder in the cloud or an executive overseeing the transformation, you’ll learn from my firsthand experience and knowledge on how to bring value into your cloud migration project.

Here are just a few advantages of a cloud migration:

  • Technology benefits like scalability, high availability, simplified infrastructure maintenance, and an environment compliant with many industry certifications
  • The ability to switch from a CapEx to an OpEx model
  • Leaving the cost of a data center behind

While there can certainly be several perils associated with your move, with careful planning and a company focus, you can make your first step into cloud a successful one.  And the focus of a company is an important step to understand. The business needs to adopt the same agility that the cloud provides by continuing to learn, grow, and adapt to this new environment. The Phoenix Project and the Unicorn Project are excellent examples that show the need and the steps for a successful business transformation.

To start us off, let’s take a look at some security concepts that will help you secure your journey into this new world. My webinar on Principles to Make Your Cloud Migration Journey Secure is a great place to start: https://resources.trendmicro.com/Cloud-One-Webinar-Series-Secure-Cloud-Migration.html

The post Principles of a Cloud Migration – From Step One to Done appeared first on .

Cloud Transformation Is The Biggest Opportunity To Fix Security

By Greg Young (Vice President for Cybersecurity)

This overview builds on the recent report from Trend Micro Research on cloud-specific security gaps, which can be found here.

Don’t be cloud-weary. Hear us out.

Recently, a major tipping point was reached in the IT world when more than half of new IT spending was on cloud over non- cloud. So rather than being the exception, cloud-based operations have become the rule.

However, too many security solutions and vendors still treat the cloud like an exception – or at least not as a primary use case. The approach remains “and cloud” rather than “cloud and.”

Attackers have made this transition. Criminals know that business security is generally behind the curve with its approach to the cloud and take advantage of the lack of security experience surrounding new cloud environments. This leads to ransomware, cryptocurrency mining and data exfiltration attacks targeting cloud environments, to name a few.

Why Cloud?

There are many reasons why companies transition to the cloud. Lower costs, improved efficiencies and faster time to market are some of the primary benefits touted by cloud providers.

These benefits come with common misconceptions. While efficiency and time to market can be greatly improved by transitioning to the cloud, this is not done overnight. It can take years to move complete data centers and operational applications to the cloud. The benefits won’t be fully realized till the majority of functional data has been transitioned.

Misconfiguration at the User Level is the Biggest Security Risk in the Cloud

Cloud providers have built in security measures that leave many system administrators, IT directors and CTOs feeling content with the security of their data. We’ve heard it many times – “My cloud provider takes care of security, why would I need to do anything additional?”

This way of thinking ignores the shared responsibility model for security in the cloud. While cloud providers secure the platform as a whole, companies are responsible for the security of their data hosted in those platforms.

Misunderstanding the shared responsibility model leads to the No. 1 security risk associated with the cloud: Misconfiguration.

You may be thinking, “But what about ransomware and cryptomining and exploits?” Other attack types are primarily possible when one of the 3 misconfigurations below are present.

You can forget about all the worst-case, overly complex attacks: Misconfigurations are the greatest risk and should be the No. 1 concern. These misconfigurations are in 3 categories:

  1. Misconfiguration of the native cloud environment
  2. Not securing equally across multi-cloud environments (i.e. different brands of cloud service providers)
  3. Not securing equally to your on-premises (non-cloud) data centers

How Big is The Misconfiguration Problem?

Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity identifies an average of 230 million misconfigurations per day.

To further understand the state of cloud misconfigurations, Trend Micro Research recently investigated cloud-specific cyber attacks. The report found a large number of websites partially hosted in world-writable cloud-based storage systems. Despite these environments being secure by default, settings can be manually changed to allow more access than actually needed.

These misconfigurations are typically put in place without knowing the potential consequences. But once in place, it is simple to scan the internet to find this type of misconfiguration, and criminals are exploiting them for profit.

Why Do Misconfigurations Happen?

The risk of misconfigurations may seem obvious in theory, but in practice, overloaded IT teams are often simply trying to streamline workflows to make internal processes easier. So, settings are changed to give read and/or write access to anyone in the organization with the necessary credentials. What is not realized is that this level of exposure can be found and exploited by criminals.

We expect this trend will increase in 2020, as more cloud-based services and applications gain popularity with companies using a DevOps workflow. Teams are likely to misconfigure more cloud-based applications, unintentionally exposing corporate data to the internet – and to criminals.

Our prediction is that through 2025, more than 75% of successful attacks on cloud environments will be caused by missing or misconfigured security by cloud customers rather than cloud providers.

How to Protect Against Misconfiguration

Nearly all data breaches involving cloud services have been caused by misconfigurations. This is easily preventable with some basic cyber hygiene and regular monitoring of your configurations.

Your data and applications in the cloud are only as secure as you make them. There are enough tools available today to make your cloud environment – and the majority of your IT spend – at least as secure as your non-cloud legacy systems.

You can secure your cloud data and applications today, especially knowing that attackers are already cloud-aware and delivering vulnerabilities as a service. Here are a few best practices for securing your cloud environment:

  • Employ the principle of least privilege: Access is only given to users who need it, rather than leaving permissions open to anyone.
  • Understand your part of the Shared Responsibility Model: While cloud service providers have built in security, the companies using their services are responsible for securing their data.
  • Monitor your cloud infrastructure for misconfigured and exposed systems: Tools are available to identify misconfigurations and exposures in your cloud environments.
  • Educate your DevOps teams about security: Security should be built in to the DevOps process.

To read the complete Trend Micro Research report, please visit: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/virtualization-and-cloud/exploring-common-threats-to-cloud-security.

For additional information on Trend Micro’s approach to cloud security, click here: https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/business/products/hybrid-cloud.html.

The post Cloud Transformation Is The Biggest Opportunity To Fix Security appeared first on .

Cloud Native Application Development Enables New Levels of Security Visibility and Control

By Trend Micro

We are in unique times and it’s important to support each other through unique ways. Snyk is providing a community effort to make a difference through AllTheTalks.online, and Trend Micro is proud to be a sponsor of their virtual fundraiser and tech conference.

In today’s threat landscape new cloud technologies can pose a significant risk. Applying traditional security techniques not designed for cloud platforms can restrict the high-volume release cycles of cloud-based applications and impact business and customer goals for digital transformation.

When organizations are moving to the cloud, security can be seen as an obstacle. Often, the focus is on replicating security controls used in existing environments, however, the cloud actually enables new levels of visibility and controls that weren’t possible before.

With today’s increased attention on cyber threats, cloud vulnerabilities provide an opportunistic climate for novice and expert hackers alike as a result of dependencies on modern application development tools, and lack of awareness of security gaps in build pipelines and deployment environments.

Public clouds are capable of auditing API calls to the cloud management layer. This gives in-depth visibility into every action taken in your account, making it easy to audit exactly what’s happening, investigate and search for known and unknown attacks and see who did what to identify unusual behavior.

Join Mike Milner, Global Director of Application Security Technology at Trend Micro on Wednesday April 15, at 11:45am EST to learn how to Use Observability for Security and Audit. This is a short but important session where we will discuss the tools to help build your own application audit system for today’s digital transformation. We’ll look at ways of extending this level of visibility to your applications and APIs, such as using new capabilities offered by cloud providers for network mirroring, storage and massive data handling.

Register for a good cause and learn more at https://www.allthetalks.org/.

The post Cloud Native Application Development Enables New Levels of Security Visibility and Control appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: Exploring Common Threats to Cloud Security and Zoom Removes Meeting IDs from App Title Bar to Improve Privacy

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about why Zoom has released an update for its Linux, Mac, and Windows apps that removes the meeting ID from the app’s title bar. Also, read about Trend Micro’s latest research on cloud-specific security, with examples of threats and risks that organizations could face when migrating to the cloud or using cloud services.

Read on:

Trend Micro Study Shows Cloud Misconfiguration as Major Threat

This week, Trend Micro released new research findings concerning cloud security, a major area of concern for enterprises of all sizes. The research confirms the role of both human errors and complex deployments in creating cloud-based cyber threats; above all, Trend Micro notes the dangers of cloud misconfiguration to cloud environments.  

NCSA Small Business Webinar Series

The National Cyber Security Alliance is hosting a series of webinars for small business owners, and Trend Micro is proud to support this effort with guest speakers sharing threat intelligence and security expertise. The topics will help small companies deal with the challenges of COVID-19, including sessions on telework, digital spring cleaning, e-commerce security, how to avoid COVID-19 scams and more.

Cisco ‘Critical Update’ Phishing Attack Steals Webex Credentials

An ongoing phishing campaign is reeling in victims with a recycled Cisco security advisory that warns of a critical vulnerability. The campaign urges victims to “update,” only to steal their credentials for Cisco’s Webex web conferencing platform instead. The campaign is looking to leverage the wave of remote workers who have come to rely on online conferencing tools like Webex and other platforms.

Principles of a Cloud Migration – From Step One to Done

Cloud migrations are happening every day and analysts predict over 75% of mid-size to large enterprises will migrate a workload to the cloud by 2021 – but how can you make sure your workload is successful? In this multi-part blog series, Trend Micro explores best practices, forward thinking, and use cases around creating a successful cloud migration from multiple perspectives.  

Zoomed In: A Look into a Coinminer Bundled with Zoom Installer

Trend Micro recently found a Coinminer bundled with the legitimate installer of video conferencing app Zoom, luring users who want to install the software but end up downloading a malicious file. The compromised files are assumed to come from fraudulent websites. Trend Micro has been working with Zoom to ensure that they are able to communicate this to their users appropriately.

Investigation into a Nefilim Attack Shows Signs of Lateral Movement, Possible Data Exfiltration

Trend Micro’s Managed XDR (MxDR) and Incident Response (IR) teams recently investigated an incident involving a company that was hit by the Nefilim ransomware, which was initially discovered in March 2020. What makes Nefilim especially devious is that the threat actors behind the attack threaten to release the victim’s stolen data on an online leak site.

Zoom Removes Meeting IDs from App Title Bar to Improve Privacy

Video conferencing service Zoom has released an update for its Linux, Mac, and Windows apps that removes the meeting ID from the app’s title bar. The update comes after the company’s users have often leaked their meeting IDs, and even meeting passwords, when sharing screenshots of their meetings on social media.

Analysis: Suspicious “Very Hidden” Formula on Excel 4.0 Macro Sheet

A malicious Microsoft Excel 4.0 Macro sheet with a suspicious formula that is set as “Very Hidden” was submitted by a customer and further analyzed by Trend Micro researchers. The sheet is not readily accessible via the Microsoft Excel User Interface (UI) due to a feature documented in the Microsoft website that allows users to hide sheets. The compromised files were commonly used as an attachment in spam.

Actively Exploited MS Exchange Flaw Present on 80% of Exposed Servers

Attackers looking to exploit CVE-2020-0688, a critical Microsoft Exchange flaw patched by Microsoft in February 2020, don’t have to look hard to find a server they can attack: according to an internet-wide scan performed by Rapid7 researchers, there are at least 315,000 and possibly as many as 350,000 vulnerable on-premise Exchange servers (out of 433,464 total) out there.

Misconfigured Docker Daemon API Ports Attacked for Kinsing Malware Campaign

A campaign that targets misconfigured Docker Daemon API ports through Kinsing malware was reported by security researchers from Aqua Security. The campaign exploited the ports to run an Ubuntu container. According to the researchers, Kinsing malware’s strings revealed that it is a Golang-based Linux agent.

Threat Actors Deliver Courier-Themed Spam Campaign with Attached ACE Files

Trend Micro researchers detected a new courier service-themed malicious spam campaign that uses ACE files as attachments. The samples were gathered from Trend Micro’s honeypot. The email poses as a shipment arrival notification with a fake receipt attached. It then convinces receivers to download the attachment by asking them to check if the address on the receipt is correct.blo

Exploring Common Threats to Cloud Security

Trend Micro’s recent cloud research provides examples of threats and risks organizations could face when migrating to the cloud or using cloud services. No matter the cloud service or platform, the common theme is that misconfiguration continues to be one of the major pitfalls of cloud security, affecting both companies who subscribe to cloud services and users of software that are hosted on the cloud.

PowerPoint ‘Weakness’ Opens Door to Malicious Mouse-Over Attack

A researcher is sounding the alarm over what he believes could be a novel attack vector which allows a hacker to manipulate a PowerPoint file to download and begin the installation of malware, simply by hovering over a hypertext link. The technique does require a victim to accept one pop-up dialogue box to run or install a program. For those reasons, Microsoft does not consider this a vulnerability.

Cloud Transformation Is the Biggest Opportunity to Fix Security

Lower costs, improved efficiencies and faster time to market are some of the primary benefits of transitioning to the cloud. However, it’s not done overnight. It can take years to move complete data centers and operational applications to the cloud and the benefits won’t be fully realized until most functional data have been transitioned.

Who is World Wired Labs and Why Are They Selling an Android Trojan?

A company advertising a remote access tool frequently used by criminals and nation-state hackers may be serving as a front for a Chinese hacking group, according to research published by BlackBerry Cylance. In a report on remote access trojans (RAT), researchers detail an Android malware variant, which they call PWNDROID4, that can be used to monitor targets’ phone calls, record audio, send and receive text messages, and track victims’ GPS location.

Is your organization looking to migrate to the cloud? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: Exploring Common Threats to Cloud Security and Zoom Removes Meeting IDs from App Title Bar to Improve Privacy appeared first on .

What do serverless compute platforms mean for security?

By Trend Micro

By Kyle Klassen Product Manager – Cloud Native Application Security at Trend Micro

Containers provide many great benefits to organizations – they’re lightweight, flexible, add consistency across different environments and scale easily.

One of the characteristics of containers is that they run in dedicated namespaces with isolated resource requirements. General purpose OS’s deployed to run containers might be viewed as overkill since many of their features and interfaces aren’t needed.

A key tenant in the cybersecurity doctrine is to harden platforms by exposing only the fewest number of interfaces and applying the tightest configurations required to run only the required operations.

Developers deploying containers to restricted platforms or “serverless” containers to the likes of AWS Fargate for example, should think about security differently – by looking upward, looking left and also looking all-around your cloud domain for opportunities to properly security your cloud native applications. Oh, and don’t forget to look outside. Let me explain…

Looking Upward

As infrastructure, OS, container orchestration and runtimes become the domain of the cloud provider, the user’s primary responsibility becomes securing the containers and applications themselves. This is where Trend Micro Cloud One™, a security services platform for cloud builders, can help Dev and Ops teams better implement build pipeline and runtime security requirements.  Cloud One – Application Security embeds a security library within the application itself to provide defense against web application attacks and to detect malicious activity.

One of the greatest benefits of this technology is that once an application is secured in this manner, it can be deployed anywhere and the protection comes along for the ride. Users can be confident their applications are secure whether deployed in a container on traditional hosts, into EKS on AWS Bottlerocket, serverless on AWS Fargate, or even as an AWS Lambda function!

Looking Left

It’s great that cloud providers are taking security seriously and providing increasingly secure environments within which to deploy your containers. But you need to make sure your containers themselves are not introducing security risks. This can be accomplished with container image scanning to identify security issues before these images ever make it to the production environment.

Enter Deep Security Smart Check – Container Image Scanning part of the Cloud One offering. Scans must be able to detect more than just vulnerabilities. Developer reliance on code re-use, public images, and 3rd party contributions mean that malware injection into private images is a real concern. Sensitive objects like secrets, keys and certificates must be found and removed and assurance against regulatory requirements like PCI, HIPAA or NIST should be a requirement before a container image is allowed to run.

Looking All-Around

Imagine taking the effort to ensure your applications, containers and functions are built securely, comply with strict security regulations and are deployed into container optimized cloud environments only to find out that you’ve still become a victim of an attack! How could this be? Well, one common oversight is recognizing the importance of disciplined configuration and management of the cloud resources themselves – you can’t assume they’re secure just because they’re working.

But, making sure your cloud services are secure can be a daunting task – likely comprised of dozens of cloud services, each with as many configuration options – these environments are complex. Cloud One – Conformity is your cloud security companion and gives you assurance that any hidden security issues with your cloud configurations are detected and prioritized. Disabled security options, weak keys, open permissions, encryption options, high-risk exposures and many, many more best practice security rules make it easy to conform to security best practices and get the most from your cloud provider services.

Look Outside

All done? Not quite. You also need to think about how the business workflows of your cloud applications ingest files (or malware?).  Cloud storage like S3 Buckets are often used to accept files from external customers and partners.  Blindly accepting uploads and pulling them into your workflows is an open door for attack.

Cloud One – File Storage Security incorporates Trend Micro’s best-in-class malware detection technology to identify and remove files infected with malware. As a cloud native application itself, the service deploys easily with deployment templates and runs as a ‘set and forget’ service – automatically scanning new files of any type, any size and automatically removing malware so you can be confident that all of your downstream workflows are protected.

It’s still about Shared Responsibility

Cloud providers will continue to offer security features for deploying cloud native applications – and you should embrace all of this capability.  However, you can’t assume your cloud environment is optimally secure without validating your configurations. And once you have a secure environment, you need to secure all of the components within your control – your functions, applications, containers and workflows. With this practical approach, Trend Micro Cloud One™ perfectly complements your cloud services with Network Security, Workload Security, Application Security, Container Security, File Storage Security and Conformity for cloud posture management, so you can be confident that you’ve got security covered no matter which way you look.

To learn more visit Trendmicro.com/CloudOne and join our webinar on cloud native application threats https://resources.trendmicro.com/Cloud-One-Webinar-Series-Cloud-Native-Application-Threats.html

 

 

 

 

The post What do serverless compute platforms mean for security? appeared first on .

Shift Well-Architecture Left. By Extension, Security Will Follow

By Raphael Bottino, Solutions Architect

A story on how Infrastructure as Code can be your ally on Well-Architecting and securing your Cloud environment

By Raphael Bottino, Solutions Architect — first posted as a medium article
Using Infrastructure as Code(IaC for short) is the norm in the Cloud. CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform, Serverless Framework, ARM… the options are endless! And they are so many just because IaC makes total sense! It allows Architects and DevOps engineers to version the application infrastructure as much as the developers are already versioning the code. So any bad change, no matter if on the application code or infrastructure, can be easily inspected or, even better, rolled back.

For the rest of this article, let’s use CloudFormation as reference. And, if you are new to IaC, check how to create a new S3 bucket on AWS as code:

Pretty simple, right? And you can easily create as many buckets as you need using the above template (if you plan to do so, remove the BucketName line, since names are globally unique on S3!). For sure, way simpler and less prone to human error than clicking a bunch of buttons on AWS console or running commands on CLI.

Pretty simple, right? And you can easily create as many buckets as you need using the above template (if you plan to do so, remove the BucketName line, since names are globally unique on S3!). For sure, way simpler and less prone to human error than clicking a bunch of buttons on AWS console or running commands on CLI.

Well, it’s not that simple…

Although this is a functional and useful CloudFormation template, following correctly all its rules, it doesn’t follow the rules of something bigger and more important: The AWS Well-Architected Framework. This amazing tool is a set of whitepapers describing how to architect on top of AWS, from 5 different views, called Pillars: Security, Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, Reliability and Performance Efficiency. As you can see from the pillar names, an architecture that follows it will be more secure, cheaper, easier to operate, more reliable and with better performance.

Among others, this template will generate a S3 bucket that doesn’t have encryption enabled, doesn’t enforce said encryption and doesn’t log any kind of access to it–all recommended by the Well-Architected Framework. Even worse, these misconfigurations are really hard to catch in production and not visibly alerted by AWS. Even the great security tools provided by them such as Trusted Advisor or Security Hub won’t give an easy-to-spot list of buckets with those misconfigurations. Not for nothing Gartner states that 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault¹.

The DevOps movement brought to the masses a methodology of failing fast, which is not exactly compatible with the above scenario where a failure many times is just found out whenever unencrypted data is leaked or the access log is required. The question is, then, how to improve it? Spoiler alert: the answer lies on the IaC itself 🙂

Shifting Left

Even before making sure a CloudFormation template is following AWS’ own best practices, the first obvious requirement is to make sure that the template is valid. A fantastic open-source tool called cfn-lint is made available by AWS on GitHub² and can be easily adopted on any CI/CD pipeline, failing the build if the template is not valid, saving precious time. To shorten the feedback loop even further and fail even faster, the same tool can be adopted on the developer IDE³ as an extension so the template can be validated as it is coded. Pretty cool, right? But it still doesn’t help us with the misconfiguration problem that we created with that really simple template in the beginning of this post.

Conformity⁴ provides, among other capabilities, an API endpoint to scan CloudFormation templates against the Well-Architected Framework, and that’s exactly how I know that template is not adhering to its best practices. This API can be implemented on your pipeline, just like the cfn-lint. However, I wanted to move this check further left, just like the cfn-lint extension I mentioned before.

The Cloud Conformity Template Scanner Extension

With that challenge in mind, but also with the need for scanning my templates for misconfigurations fast myself, I came up with a Visual Studio Code extension that, leveraging Conformity’s API, allows the developer to scan the template as it is coded. The Extension can be found here⁵ or searching for “Conformity” on your IDE.

After installing it, scanning a template is as easy as running a command on VS Code. Below it is running for our template example:

This tool allows anyone to shift misconfiguration and compliance checking as left as possible, right on developers’ hands. To use the extension, you’ll need a Conformity API key. If you don’t have one and want to try it out, Conformity provides a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. If you like it but feels that this time period is not enough for you, let me know and I’ll try to make it available to you.

But… What about my bucket template?

Oh, by the way, if you are wondering how a S3 bucket CloudFormation template looks like when following the best practices, take a look:

   
A Well-Architected bucket template

Not as simple, right? That’s exactly why this kind of tool is really powerful, allowing developers to learn as they code and organizations to fail the deployment of any resource that goes against the AWS recommendations.

References

[1] https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/why-cloud-security-is-everyones-business

[2] https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/cfn-python-lint

[3] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=kddejong.vscode-cfn-lint

[4] https://www.cloudconformity.com/

[5] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=raphaelbottino.cc-template-scanner

The post Shift Well-Architecture Left. By Extension, Security Will Follow appeared first on .

Letter from the CEO: A time of kindness and compassion

By Trend Micro

Dear Customers,

Together, we are facing a truly unprecedented situation and we have all had to adapt to the new reality. The global coronavirus pandemic is affecting our families, our communities, our organizations – indeed, it affects our perspective and way of life. As you certainly have too, at Trend Micro we have been busy over the past few weeks ensuring our employees are safe while also delivering uninterrupted service and protection for our customers. We have made it a priority to help organizations around the globe strengthen their security and ensure business continuity while so many of their employees work remotely.

As a global company with headquarters in Japan, we have been exposed to COVID-19 from the very early days when it first erupted in Asia. We have seen the massive impact this novel coronavirus has had on all of us: from social distancing, to families being separated, illness and even death. Our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone who has been impacted by the virus, directly or indirectly.

The safety of our employees is our first priority and for the last few weeks the vast majority of our employees are all working from home – all 7,000 across 60 countries. It is heartwarming to see the different activities teams have launched to stay connected while being apart: virtual happy hours or morning coffee meetings, online sports classes to stay fit together, movie watching nights and even remote karaoke. I sometimes feel that we are more connected now than ever before.

In the midst of these difficult times, we have also seen the amazing power of positivity and kindness around the world. I am very touched and proud of how our employees, our Trenders, are stepping up even more than usual to engage in acts of generosity and community support. A few examples include:

  • Employee-initiated neighborhood help services such as shopping for the elderly
  • Tools developed to help our medical heroes, for example a 3D printed clip that allows medical staff to wear face masks more comfortably
  • New content for students and parents who are now working from home, developed by our Internet Safety for Kids & Families team
  • Over 60,000 masks donated to our communities
  • Give & Match activities supporting underserved neighborhoods in India and the Philippines, with the company matching each employee donation.

We have also seen Trenders donating some of their accrued paid vacation days to colleagues who might need additional time off to take care of family. There have been thousands of such acts of kindness – likely many more that I’m not even aware of. Knowing the passion of our employees, I know that there are new activities being organized and happening at this exact moment.

In this same spirit, it is very important to me – as well as the entire executive team – that we do the right thing for our employees and our customers during these difficult times, rather than focusing solely on what’s best for our bottom line. We intend to retain all of our employees, and are working to ensure that our teams that work on commission will continue to have a steady income, no matter how business goes. We know that not every company is as fortunate as we are, and many family members of our employees are out of jobs, so our executives have also committed to reducing their salaries if necessary, to ensure that every employee will receive company bonuses for the first half of 2020. If we protect our Trend Micro family, our Trend Micro family can protect and care for their communities.

I understand these times are difficult and while we are celebrating acts of kindness and positivity, many of our friends and families are struggling with health issues and other concerns. Our hearts go out to all those who are affected, to our healthcare workers and all essential employees who help keep our lives going. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Please stay safe – and stay at home!

Kind regards,

Eva Chen

 

The post Letter from the CEO: A time of kindness and compassion appeared first on .

Why CISOs Are Demanding Detection and Response Everywhere

By Leah MacMillan

Over the past three decades, we’ve had time at Trend Micro to observe the industry trends that have the biggest impact on our customers. And one of the big things we’ve seen is that threats move largely in tandem with changes to IT infrastructure. This matters today because most organizations are transforming the way they run and manage their infrastructure—a daunting task on its own.

But with digital transformation also comes an expanded corporate attack surface, driving security leaders to demand enhanced visibility, detection & response across the entire enterprise — this is not just about the endpoint.

Transforming business

Over the past five years, there has been a major shift in the way IT infrastructure is delivered, and with that shift, increasing complexity. A big part of this change has been the use of the cloud, reflected in Gartner’s prediction that the market will grow to over $266 billion in 2020. Organizations everywhere are leveraging the cloud and DevOps to rapidly deliver new and differentiated applications and services for their customers, partners and employees. And the use of containers and microservices across a multi-cloud and hybrid environment is increasingly common.

In addition to leveraging public cloud services like IaaS, organizations are also rapidly adopting SaaS applications like Office 365, and expanding their use of mobile and collaborative applications to support remote working. Some are even arguing that working patterns may never be the same again, following the changes forced on many employers by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Combine these changes with networks that continue to extend to include branch offices and add new areas to protect like operational technology including industrial systems, and we can certainly see that the challenges facing the modern enterprise look nothing like they did a few years ago.

Under fire, under pressure

All of these infrastructure changes make for a broader attack surface that the bad guys can take advantage of, and they’re doing so with an increasingly wide range of tools and techniques. In the cloud there is a new class of vulnerabilities introduced through a greater use of open source, containers, orchestration platforms, supply chain applications and more. For all organizations, the majority of threats still prey upon the user, arriving via email (over 90% of the 52.3 billion we blocked in 2019), and they’re no longer just basic phishing attempts. There’s been an uptick in fileless events designed to bypass traditional security filters (we blocked 1.4 million last year). And Business Email Compromise (BEC) and ransomware continue to evolve, the latter causing major outages across local government, healthcare and other vulnerable sectors.

Organizations are often left flat-footed because they don’t have the in-house skills to secure a rapidly evolving IT environment. Mistakes get made, and configuration errors can allow the hackers to sneak in.

Against this backdrop, CISOs need visibility, detection and response capabilities across the extended enterprise. But in too many cases, teams are struggling because they have:

  • Too many security tools, in silos. Security leaders want to consolidate the 10, 20 or even 50+ security technologies currently in use across their organizations. And ideally, they need capabilities that work seamlessly together, sharing threat intelligence across security layers, and delivering a fully connected threat defense.
  • Too few people. Global cybersecurity skills shortages have now exceeded four million, with existing teams often overwhelmed by alerts, allowing serious threats to fly under the radar
  • Increased compliance pressures. CISOs are under pressure to comply with a number of regulations, and the impacts of non-compliance are increasingly strict. While newer, more demanding compliance requirements like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act aim to protect data, they also present operational challenges for cloud teams with complex, manual and time consuming audits. Not to mention new regulations have teeth, with fines that can have a serious impact on the bottom line.  For example, as of March 2020, 227 GDPR fines had been levied, totalling over 466 million euros.

Beyond the endpoint

While endpoint detection and response (EDR) has become a popular response to some of these problems over recent years, the reality is that cyber-attacks are rarely straightforward and limited to the endpoint (as noted in the email statistic above). Security teams actually need visibility, detection, and response across the entire IT environment, so they can better contextualize and deal with threats.

This is what Trend Micro XDR offers. It provides visibility across not just endpoints but also email, servers, cloud workloads and networks, applying AI and expert security analytics to correlate and identify potential threats. The result is fewer, higher fidelity alerts for stretched IT security teams to deal with. Recognizing the skills shortage reality, we also offer a managed XDR service that augments in-house SOC activities with the power of Trend Micro security experts.

Detection and response is too important to be limited to the endpoint. Today’s CISOs need visibility, detection, and response everywhere.

The post Why CISOs Are Demanding Detection and Response Everywhere appeared first on .

Monitoring and Maintaining Trend Micro Home Network Security – Part 4: Best Practices

By Trend Micro

We continue our four-part series on protecting your home and family. See the links to the previous parts at the end of this blog.

We’re now done with familiarizing ourselves with the features of Trend Micro Home Network Security (HNS) It’s now time for you to get a bit more adept at regular monitoring and maintenance, to ensure you’re getting the best protection HNS can provide your connected home.

Keeping Tabs on Your Home Network

Once you’re tracking the various internet-capable devices in your home within HNS, as with any security-related device it’s essential to monitor the activities captured by it. In the same way that we need to periodically review the videos taken by our security cameras, to check for any unusual events in or around the home that need our attention; so too, do you need to keep abreast of the goings on in your home network, particularly those of an unusual or suspect nature, as revealed by HNS. This can easily be done in two ways: via Voice Control and Reports.

Voice Control. When you want just a quick overview of the status of your network, you can use HNS’s Voice Control. Voice Control is available as a skill for both Amazon Alexa and Google Home.

Once the skill has been enabled, you can ask Alexa or Google Assistant to control your Home Network Security (HNS) using the following voice commands:

  • Start a Check Devices Scan – To check your network and devices, say: “Alexa (or Ok, Google), tell Trend Micro to scan my network.”
  • Get Your Security Status – To get a network security status update, say: “Alexa (Ok, Google), ask Trend Micro if my network is ok.”
  • Get An Online Activity Summary – To get a summary of a profile’s online activity, say: “Alexa (Ok, Google), ask Trend Micro what Tom (or any member of your household) did today.”
  • Pause the Internet for a Profile – To disconnect the devices assigned to a profile from the internet, say: “Alexa (Ok, Google), ask Trend Micro to pause the Internet for Tom (or any member of your household).”
  • Pause YouTube for a Profile – To prevent the devices assigned to a profile from accessing YouTube, say: “Alexa (Ok, Google), ask Trend Micro to turn off YouTube for Tom (or any member of your household).”
  • Use the Dashboard – Lastly, though not a voice command, checking out the Dashboard of the HNS app will give you a brief summary of the state of security of your home network, and will let you know if anything triggered any Parental Control rules that you’ve set.

Reports. On the other hand, if you have more time to spare, you can peruse the Reports for your devices, user profiles, and network usage.

  • Devices. On your HNS app, Tap Menu > Devices and select a device. Then, tap Report and choose the report you want to view in order to see more details.
  • User Profiles. From your HNS app, Tap Menu > Family and select a user profile. Then, tap Report and choose an event card from the list to see more details.
  • Network Usage. Besides knowing the status of your devices and users, it’s also necessary to know your network usage, especially when your home network relies on a metered connection. Having an idea which devices are hogs on the network will allow you to make proper adjustments, either to rules you implement for your youngsters and other members of your household; or to let you know that maybe you need to upgrade your internet plan to address the more intensive internet needs of your family. Network usage can be viewed by scrolling down to the bottom of the Dashboard and tapping the Network Usage graph; or you can just simply tap Menu > Network. Both will display more detailed network usage information.

Responding to Network Events

Now that you’re more acquainted with your home network through HNS, it’s vital that you know what to do when, for instance, you received a Smart Alert notification indicating an unusually high network activity detected on one of your connected devices.

A Range of Network Events. In brief, you’ll need to review the recent activities and perform the required actions to eliminate risks such as the following:

  • Check if there are any important security-related issues you need to resolve by checking if the ball at the top of the Dashboard says “Action Required”. Tap the ball to find out what you need to do to make sure your network and device security are optimal.
  • Check detected network activities.
  • Check if the device where the unusually high network activity was detected.
  • Select the device where the unusual activity was detected to view the Summary Report for the past 7 days.
  • You will see the unusual network traffic details, including the time range of the traffic and the amount of data used.
  • Check if the top 3 activity destinations were done by you or your family member.
  • If you are aware of the activities and not concerned about these events, tap Report > Not Unusual.
  • If these unusually high traffic activities were not caused by you or your family member, you need to double-check that the Network and Security settings are still enabled, to keep your connected devices protected. Moreover, you should fix any vulnerabilities on your devices, usually resolved by a software or firmware update.

For more specific information regarding these types of incidents, you may refer to this Technical Support article.

Monitoring the Health of Your Home Network Security Station

The Home Network Security Station takes care of your home and your family’s security and safety. In return, you should know how to check if it’s in good working condition.

Physical Status. Check whether the physical components (LED, Reset button, Power, and Ethernet ports) of your Station are intact.

Power. Ensure that the Station is powered on. To check if the Station has power supply, just follow these simple steps:

  • Connect the adapter to the outlet and the Station.
  • Make sure power on the outlet is turned on.
  • Change outlets to ensure power is on.

Offline Notifications. When the HNS Station is offline the user will receive a notification about it. In addition, the HNS app will indicate the Station is offline. This situation can be attributed to loss of either the internet or LAN connections.

Internet Connection. Make sure you have stable internet connection. Checking your internet connection is easy:

  • Disconnect your Home Network Security Station from the router.
  • Check if internet line is connected to the router’s WAN port.
  • If there is no internet connection, do the following:
  • Reboot your router
  • Check the network status from your Internet Service Provider
  • Check your router settings

If you are able to connect to the internet, just reconnect your Home Network Security Station to the router.

LAN Connection. Check the connection between the router and the HNS Station.

  • Ensure that the Ethernet cable provided is used to connect the HNS Station to any available LAN port of your router.
  • Check if the two LED lights of the LAN port are turned on.
  • The port on the right should be blinking green, while the other port should be a steady green or yellow.
  • If the LED lights don’t light up as mentioned, move the Ethernet cable to another router LAN port. Once the LED lights become normal, your HNS Station should be connected to the network.

Updates. Make sure that you update the HNS App if you receive a notification that indicates, “Update Needed. Please click the button below to get the latest version.” This will guarantee that your HNS is up-to-date with app improvements.

Getting Help. Always remember, if you encounter any questions, issues or concerns that you’re unable to resolve, Help is just a click away.

Final Thoughts

Home networks are everywhere these days. However, the user knowledge required to secure and maintain our home networks spans from tech newbies to gurus and often seems to be a rather complicated or even confusing task.

To help you maintain and monitor your home network, Trend Micro offers a simple plug-and-protect home network device to protect your smart home and connected devices from being hacked, while keeping the internet safe for your kids on any device. But plug-and-protect doesn’t mean plug-and-forget. As with any security device, ongoing monitoring and maintenance is needed to provide the best protection your home network and family members need and deserve.

For more information, go to Trend Micro Home Network Security.

To read the rest of our series on HNS, go to

You’re in Safe Hands with Trend Micro Home Network Security – Part 1: Setup and Configuration

Trend Micro Home Network Security Has Got You Covered – Part 2: Parental Controls

In Safe Hands with Trend Micro Home Network Security – Part 3: Testing Its Functions

The post Monitoring and Maintaining Trend Micro Home Network Security – Part 4: Best Practices appeared first on .

5 reasons to move your endpoint security to the cloud now

By Chris Taylor

As the world has adopts work from home initiatives, we’ve seen many organizations accelerate their plans to move from on-premises endpoint security and Detection and Response (EDR/XDR) solutions to Software as a Service versions. And several customers who switched to the SaaS version last year, recently wrote us to tell how glad to have done so as they transitioned to working remote. Here are 5 reasons to consider moving to a cloud managed solution:

 

  1. No internal infrastructure management = less risk

If you haven’t found the time to update your endpoint security software and are one or two versions behind, you are putting your organization at risk of attack. Older versions do not have the same level of protection against ransomware and file-less attacks. Just as the threats are always evolving, the same is true for the technology built to protect against them.

With Apex One as a Service, you always have the latest version. There are no software patches to apply or Apex One servers to manage – we take care of it for you. If you are working remote, this is one less task to worry about and less servers in your environment which might need your attention.

  1. High availability, reliability

With redundant processes and continuous service monitoring, Apex One as a Services delivers the uptime you need with 99.9% availability. The operations team also proactively monitors for potential issues on your endpoints and with your prior approval, can fix minor issues with an endpoint agent before they need your attention.

  1. Faster Detection and Response (EDR/XDR)

By transferring endpoint telemetry to a cloud data lake, detection and response activities like investigations and sweeping can be processed much faster. For example, creating a root cause analysis diagram in cloud takes a fraction of the time since the data is readily available and can be quickly processed with the compute power of the cloud.

  1. Increased MITRE mapping

The unmatched power of cloud computing also enables analytics across a high volume of events and telemetry to identify a suspicious series of activities. This allows for innovative detection methods but also additional mapping of techniques and tactics to the MITRE framework.  Building the equivalent compute power in an on- premises architecture would be cost prohibitive.

  1. XDR – Combined Endpoint + Email Detection and Response

According to Verizon, 94% of malware incidents start with email.  When an endpoint incident occurs, chances are it came from an email message and you want to know what other users have messages with the same email or email attachment in their inbox? You can ask your email admin to run these searches for you which takes time and coordination. As Forrester recognized in the recently published report: The Forrester Wave™ Enterprise Detection and Response, Q1 2020:

“Trend Micro delivers XDR functionality that can be impactful today. Phishing may be the single most effective way for an adversary to deliver targeted payloads deep into an infrastructure. Trend Micro recognized this and made its first entrance into XDR by integrating Microsoft office 365 and Google G suite management capabilities into its EDR workflows.”

This XDR capability is available today by combining alerts, logs and activity data of Apex One as a Service and Trend Micro Cloud App Security. Endpoint data is linked with Office 365 or G Suite email information from Cloud App Security to quickly assess the email impact without having to use another tool or coordinate with other groups.

Moving endpoint protection and detection and response to the cloud, has enormous savings in customer time while increasing their protection and capabilities. If you are licensed with our Smart Protection Suites, you already have access to Apex One as a Service and our support team is ready to help you with your migration. If you are an older suite, talk to your Trend Micro sales rep about moving to a license which includes SaaS.

 

The post 5 reasons to move your endpoint security to the cloud now appeared first on .

Principles of a Cloud Migration – Security, The W5H

By Jason Dablow
cloud

Whosawhatsit?! –  WHO is responsible for this anyways?

For as long as cloud providers have been in business, we’ve been discussing the Shared Responsibility Model when it comes to customer operation teams. It defines the different aspects of control, and with that control, comes the need to secure, manage, and maintain.

While I often make an assumption that everyone is already familiar with this model, let’s highlight some of the requirements as well as go a bit deeper into your organization’s layout for responsibility.

During your cloud migration, you’ll no doubt come across a variety of cloud services that fits into each of these configurations. From running cloud instances (IaaS) to cloud storage (SaaS), there’s a need to apply operational oversight (including security) to each of these based on your level of control of the service.  For example, in a cloud instance, since you’re still responsible for the Operating System and Applications, you’ll still need a patch management process in place, whereas with file object storage in the cloud, only oversight of permissions and data management is required. I think Mark Nunnikhoven does a great job in going into greater detail of the model here: https://blog.trendmicro.com/the-shared-responsibility-model/.

shared responsibility model

I’d like to zero in on some of the other “WHO”s that should be involved in security of your cloud migration.

InfoSec – I think this is the obvious mention here. Responsible for all information security within an organization. Since your cloud migration is working with “information”, InfoSec needs to be involved with how they get access to monitoring the security and risk associated to an organization. 

Cloud Architect – Another no-brainer in my eyes but worth a mention; if you’re not building a secure framework with a look beyond a “lift-and-shift” initial migration, you’ll be doomed with archaic principles leftover from the old way of doing things. An agile platform built for automating every operation including security should be the focus to achieving success.

IT / Cloud Ops – This may be the same or different teams. As more and more resources move to the cloud, an IT team will have less responsibilities for the physical infrastructure since it’s now operated by a cloud provider. They will need to go through a “migration” themselves to learn new skills to operate and secure a hybrid environment. This adaptation of new skills needs to be lead by…

Leadership – Yes, leadership plays an important role in operations and security even if they aren’t part of the CIO / CISO / COO branch. While I’m going to cringe while I type it, business transformation is a necessary step as you move along your cloud migration journey. The acceleration that the cloud provides can not be stifled by legacy operation and security ideologies. Every piece of the business needs to be involved in accelerating the value you’re delivering your customer base by implementing the agile processes including automation into the operations and security of your cloud.

With all of your key players focused on a successful cloud migration, regardless of what stage you’re in, you’ll reach the ultimate stage: the reinvention of your business where operational and security automation drives the acceleration of value delivered to your customers.

This blog is part of a multi-part series dealing with the principles of a successful cloud migration.  For more information, start at the first post here: https://blog.trendmicro.com/principles-of-a-cloud-migration-from-step-one-to-done/

The post Principles of a Cloud Migration – Security, The W5H appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: 5 Reasons to Move Your Endpoint Security to the Cloud Now and ICEBUCKET Group Mimics Smart TVs to Steal Ad Money

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about 5 reasons your organization should consider moving to a cloud managed solution. Also, read about a massive online fraud operation that has been mimicking smart TVs to fool online advertisers and gain unearned profits from online ads.

 

Read on:

Letter from the CEO: A Time of Kindness and Compassion

As a global company with headquarters in Japan, Trend Micro has been exposed to COVID-19 from the very early days when it first erupted in Asia. During these difficult times, Trend Micro has also witnessed the amazing power of positivity and kindness around the world. In this blog, read more about the importance of compassion during these unprecedented times from Trend Micro’s CEO, Eva Chen.

What Do Serverless Compute Platforms Mean for Security?

Developers deploying containers to restricted platforms or “serverless” containers to the likes of AWS Fargate, for example, should think about security differently – by looking upward, looking left and also looking all-around your cloud domain for opportunities to properly security your cloud native applications. 

April Patch Tuesday: Microsoft Battles 4 Bugs Under Active Exploit

Microsoft released its April 2020 Patch Tuesday security updates, its first big patch update released since the work-from-home era began, with a whopping 113 vulnerabilities. Microsoft has seen a 44% increase in the number of CVEs patched between January to April 2020 compared to the same time period in 2019, according to Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative – a likely result of an increasing number of researchers looking for bugs and an expanding portfolio of supported products.

5 Reasons to Move Your Endpoint Security to the Cloud Now

As the world adopts work from home initiatives, we’ve seen many organizations accelerate their plans to move from on-premises endpoint security and detection and response (EDR/XDR) solutions to SaaS versions. In this blog, learn about 5 reasons you should consider moving to a cloud managed solution.

Why Running a Privileged Container is Not a Good Idea

Containers are not, by any means, new. They have been consistently and increasingly adopted in the past few years, with security being a popular related topic. It is well-established that giving administrative powers to server users is not a good security practice. In the world of containers, we have the same paradigm. In this article, Trend Micro’s Fernando Cardoso explains why running a privileged container is a bad idea.

Why CISOs Are Demanding Detection and Response Everywhere

Over the past three decades, Trend Micro has observed the industry trends that have the biggest impact on its customers. One of the big things we’ve noticed is that threats move largely in tandem with changes to IT infrastructure. As digital transformation continues to remain a priority, it also comes with an expanded corporate attack surface, driving security leaders to demand enhanced visibility, detection and response across the entire enterprise — not just the endpoint.

Shift Well-Architecture Left. By Extension, Security Will Follow

Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the norm in the cloud. From CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform, Serverless Framework and ARM, the options are nearly endless. IaC allows architects and DevOps engineers to version the application infrastructure as much as the developers are already versioning the code. So, any bad change, no matter if on the application code or infrastructure, can be easily inspected or, even better, rolled back.

Work from Home Presents a Data Security Challenge for Banks

The mass relocation of financial services employees from the office to their couch, dining table or spare room to stop the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus is a significant data security concern, according to several industry experts. In this article, learn how managers can support security efforts from Trend Micro’s Bill Malik.

Principles of a Cloud Migration – Security, The W5H

For as long as cloud providers have been in business, discussing the Shared Responsibility Model has been priority when it comes to customer operation teams. It defines the different aspects of control, and with that control, comes the need to secure, manage, and maintain. In this blog, Trend Micro highlights some of the requirements and discusses the organization’s layout for responsibility.

Coronavirus Update App Leads to Project Spy Android and iOS Spyware

Trend Micro discovered a potential cyberespionage campaign, dubbed Project Spy, that infects Android and iOS devices with spyware. Project Spy uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a lure, posing as an app called ‘Coronavirus Updates’. Trend Micro also found similarities in two older samples disguised as a Google service and, subsequently, as a music app. Trend Micro noted a small number of downloads of the app in Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Austria, Romania, Grenada and Russia.

Exposing Modular Adware: How DealPly, IsErIk, and ManageX Persist in Systems

Trend Micro has observed suspicious activities caused by adware, with common behaviors that include access to random domains with alternating consonant and vowel names, scheduled tasks, and in-memory execution via WScript that has proven to be an effective method to hide its operations. In this blog, Trend Micro walks through its analysis of three adware events linked to and named as Dealply, IsErIk and ManageX. 

ICEBUCKET Group Mimicked Smart TVs to Steal Ad Money

Cybersecurity firm and bot detection platform White Ops has discovered a massive online fraud operation that for the past few months has been mimicking smart TVs to fool online advertisers and gain unearned profits from online ads. White Ops has named this operation ICEBUCKET and has described it as “the largest case of SSAI spoofing” known to date.

Fake Messaging App Installers Promoted on Fraudulent Download Sites, Target Russian Users

Fake installers of popular messaging apps are being propagated via fraudulent download sites, as disclosed in a series of tweets by a security researcher from CronUp. Trend Micro has also encountered samples of the files. The sites and the apps are in Russian and are aiming to bait Russian users.

“Twin Flower” Campaign Jacks Up Network Traffic, Downloads Files, Steals Data

A campaign dubbed “Twin Flower” has been detected by Jinshan security researchers in a report published in Chinese and analyzed by Trend Micro. The files are believed to be downloaded unknowingly when visiting malicious sites or dropped into the system by another malware. The potentially unwanted application (PUA) PUA.Win32.BoxMini.A files are either a component or the main executable itself of a music downloader that automatically downloads music files without user consent.

Undertaking Security Challenges in Hybrid Cloud Environments

Businesses are now turning to hybrid cloud environments to make the most of the cloud’s dependability and dynamicity. The hybrid cloud gives organizations the speed and scalability of the public cloud, as well as the control and reliability of the private cloud. A 2019 Nutanix survey shows that 85% of its respondents regard the hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model.

How to Secure Video Conferencing Apps

What do businesses have to be wary of when it comes to their video conferencing software? Vulnerabilities, for one. Threat actors are not shy about using everything they have in their toolbox and are always on the lookout for any flaw or vulnerability they can exploit to pull off malicious attacks. In this blog, learn about securing your video conferencing apps and best practices for strengthening the security of work-from-home setups.

Monitoring and Maintaining Trend Micro Home Network Security – Part 4: Best Practices

In the last blog of this four-part series, Trend Micro delves deeper into regular monitoring and maintenance of home network security, to ensure you’re getting the best protection that Trend Micro Home Network Security can provide your connected home.

Surprised by the ICEBUCKET operation that has described as “the largest case of SSAI spoofing” known to date? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: 5 Reasons to Move Your Endpoint Security to the Cloud Now and ICEBUCKET Group Mimics Smart TVs to Steal Ad Money appeared first on .

❌