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Identity Fraud: How to Protect Your Identity Data, Accounts and Money During the Coronavirus Crisis

By Trend Micro

We’ve all been spending more of our time online since the crisis hit. Whether it’s ordering food for delivery, livestreaming concerts, holding virtual parties, or engaging in a little retail therapy, the digital interactions of many Americans are on the rise. This means we’re also sharing more of our personal and financial information online, with each other and the organizations we interact with. Unfortunately, as ever, there are bad guys around every digital corner looking for a piece of the action.

The bottom line is that personally identifiable information (PII) is the currency of internet crime. And cyber-criminals will do whatever they can to get their hands on it. When they commit identity theft with this data, it can be a messy business, potentially taking months for banks and businesses to investigate before you get your money and credit rating back. At a time of extreme financial hardship, this is the last thing anyone needs.

It therefore pays to be careful about how you use your data and how you protect it. Even more: it’s time to get proactive and monitor it—to try and spot early on if it has been stolen. Here’s what you need to know to protect your identity data.

How identity theft works

First, some data on the scope of the problem. In the second quarter of 2020 alone 349,641 identity theft reports were filed with the FTC. To put that in perspective, it’s over half of the number for the whole of 2019 (650,572), when consumers reported losing more than $1.9 billion to fraud. What’s driving this huge industry? A cybercrime economy estimated to be worth as much as $1.5 trillion annually.

Specialized online marketplaces and private forums provide a user-friendly way for cyber-criminals and fraudsters to easily buy and sell stolen identity data. Many are on the so-called dark web, which is hidden from search engines and requires a specialized anonymizing browser like Tor to access. However, plenty of this criminal activity also happens in plain sight, on social media sites and messaging platforms. This underground industry is an unstoppable force: as avenues are closed down by law enforcement or criminal in-fighting, other ones appear.

At-risk personal data could be anything from email and account log-ins to medical info, SSNs, card and bank details, insurance details and much more. It all has a value on the cybercrime underground and the price fraudsters are prepared to pay will depend on supply and demand, just like in the ‘real’ world.

There are various ways for attackers to get your data. The main ones are:

  • Phishing: usually aimed at stealing your log-ins or tricking you into downloading keylogging or other info-stealing malware. Phishing mainly happens via email but could also occur via web, text, or phone. Around $667m was lost in imposter scams last year, according to the FTC.
  • Malicious mobile apps disguised as legitimate software.
  • Eavesdropping on social media: If you overshare even innocuous personal data (pet names, birth dates, etc.,) it could be used by fraudsters to access your accounts.
  • Public Wi-Fi eavesdropping: If you’re using it, the bad guys may be too.
  • Dumpster diving and shoulder surfing: Sometimes the old ways are still popular.
  • Stealing devices or finding lost/misplaced devices in public places.
  • Attacking the organizations you interact with: Unfortunately this is out of your control somewhat, but it’s no less serious. There were 1,473 reported corporate breaches in 2019, up 17% year-on-year.
  • Harvesting card details covertly from the sites you shop with. Incidents involving this kind of “web skimming” increased 26% in March as more users flocked to e-commerce sites during lockdown.

 

The COVID-19 challenge

As if this weren’t enough, consumers are especially exposed to risk during the current pandemic. Hackers are using the COVID-19 threat as a lure to infect your PC or steal identity data via the phishing tactics described above. They often impersonate trustworthy institutions/officials and emails may claim to include new information on outbreaks, or vaccines. Clicking through or divulging your personal info will land you in trouble. Other fraud attempts will try to sell counterfeit or non-existent medical or other products to help combat infection, harvesting your card details in the process. In March, Interpol seized 34,000 counterfeit COVID goods like surgical masks and $14m worth of potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals.

Phone-based attacks are also on the rise, especially those impersonating government officials. The aim here is to steal your identity data and apply for government emergency stimulus funds in your name. Of the 349,641 identity theft reports filed with the FTC in Q2 2020, 77,684 were specific to government documents or benefits fraud.

What do cybercriminals do with my identity data?

Once your PII is stolen, it’s typically sold on the dark web to those who use it for malicious purposes. It could be used to:

  • Crack open other accounts that share the same log-ins (via credential stuffing). There were 30 billion such attempts in 2018.
  • Log-in to your online bank accounts to drain it of funds.
  • Open bank accounts/credit lines in your name (this can affect your credit rating).
  • Order phones in your name or port your SIM to a new device (this impacts 7,000 Verizon customers per month).
  • Purchase expensive items in your name, such as a new watch or television, for criminal resale. This is often done by hijacking your online accounts with e-tailers. E-commerce fraud is said to be worth around $12 billion per year.
  • File fraudulent tax returns to collect refunds on your behalf.
  • Claim medical care using your insurance details.
  • Potentially crack work accounts to attack your employer.

How do I protect my identity online?

The good news among all this bad is that if you remain skeptical about what you see online, are cautious about what you share, and follow some other simple rules, you’ll stand a greater chance of keeping your PII under lock and key. Best practices include:

  • Using strong, long and unique passwords for all accounts, managed with a password manager.
  • Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) if possible on all accounts.
  • Don’t overshare on social media.
  • Freeze credit immediately if you suspect data has been misused.
  • Remember that if something looks too good to be true online it usually is.
  • Don’t use public Wi-Fi when out-and-about, especially not for sensitive log-ins, without a VPN.
  • Change your password immediately if a provider tells you your data may have been breached.
  • Only visit/enter payment details into HTTPS sites.
  • Don’t click on links or open attachments in unsolicited emails.
  • Only download apps from official app stores.
  • Invest in AV from a reputable vendor for all your desktop and mobile devices.
  • Ensure all operating systems and applications are on the latest version (i.e., patch frequently).
  • Keep an eye on your bank account/credit card for any unusual spending activity.
  • Consider investing in a service to monitor the dark web for your personal data.

How Trend Micro can help

Trend Micro offers solutions that can help to protect your digital identity.

Trend Micro ID Security is the best way to get proactive about data protection. It works 24/7 to monitor dark web sites for your PII and will sound the alarm immediately if it finds any sign your accounts or personal data have been stolen. It features

  • Dark Web Personal Data Manager to scour underground sites and alert if it finds personal info like bank account numbers, driver’s license numbers, SSNs and passport information.
  • Credit Card Checker will do the same as the above but for your credit card information.
  • Email Checker will alert you if any email accounts have been compromised and end up for sale on the dark web, allowing you to immediately change the password.
  • Password Checker will tell you if any passwords you’re using have appeared for sale on the dark web, enabling you to improve password security.

Trend Micro Password Manager enables you to manage all your website and app log-ins from one secure location. Because Password Manager remembers and recalls your credentials on-demand, you can create long, strong and unique passwords for each account. As you’re not sharing easy-to-remember passwords across multiple accounts, you’ll be protected from popular credential stuffing and similar attacks.

Finally, Trend Micro WiFi Protection will protect you if you’re out and about connecting to WiFi hotspots. It automatically detects when a WiFi connection isn’t secure and enables a VPN—making your connection safer and helping keep your identity data private.

In short, it’s time to take an active part in protecting your personal identity data—as if your digital life depended on it. In large part, it does.

 

The post Identity Fraud: How to Protect Your Identity Data, Accounts and Money During the Coronavirus Crisis appeared first on .

Ransom from Home – How to close the cyber front door to remote working ransomware attacks

By Trend Micro

Coronavirus has caused a major shift to our working patterns. In many cases these will long outlast the pandemic. But working from home has its own risks. One is that you may invite ransomware attacks from a new breed of cyber-criminal who has previously confined his efforts to directly targeting the corporate network. Why? Because as a remote worker, you’re increasingly viewed as a soft target—the open doorway to extorting money from your employer.

So how does ransomware land up on your front doorstep? And what can a home worker do to shut that door?

The new ransomware trends

Last year, Trend Micro detected over 61 million ransomware-related threats, a 10% increase from 2018 figures. But things have only gotten worse from there. There has been a 20% spike in ransomware detections globally in the first half of 2020, rising to 109% in the US. And why is that?

At a basic level, ransomware searches for and encrypts most of the files on a targeted computer, so as to make them unusable. Victims are then asked to pay a ransom within a set time frame in order to receive the decryption key they need to unlock their data. If they don’t, and they haven’t backed-up this data, it could be lost forever.

The trend of late, however, has been to focus on public and private sector organizations whose staff are working from home (WFH). The rationale is that remote workers are less likely to be able to defend themselves from ransomware attacks, while they also provide a useful stepping-stone into high-value corporate networks. Moreover, cybercriminals are increasingly looking to steal sensitive data before they encrypt it, even as they’re more likely to fetch a higher ransom for their efforts than they do from a typical consumer, especially if the remote employee’s data is covered by cyber-insurance.

Home workers are also being more targeted for a number of reasons:

  • They may be more distracted than those in the office.
  • Home network and endpoint security may not be up to company levels.
  • Home systems (routers, smart home devices, PCs, etc.,) may not be up-to-date and therefore are more easily exposed to exploits.
  • Remote workers are more likely to visit insecure sites, download risky apps, or share machines/networks with those who do.
  • Corporate IT security teams may be overwhelmed with other tasks and unable to provide prompt support to a remote worker.
  • Security awareness programs may have been lacking in the past, perpetuating bad practice for workers at home.

What’s the attack profile of the remote working threat?

In short, the bad guys are now looking to gain entry to the corporate network you may be accessing from home via a VPN, or to the cloud-hosted systems you use for work or sharing files, in order to first steal and then encrypt company data with ransomware as far and wide as possible into your organization. But the methods are familiar. They’ll

  • Try to trick you into dangerous behavior through email phishing—the usual strategy of getting you to click links that redirect you to bad websites that house malware, or getting you to download a bad file, to start the infection process.
  • Steal or guess your log-ins to work email accounts, remote desktop tools (i.e., Microsoft Remote Desktop or RDP), and cloud-based storage/networks, etc., before they deliver the full ransomware payload. This may happen via a phishing email spoofed to appear as if sent from a legitimate source, or they may scan for your use of specific tools and then try to guess the password (known as brute forcing). One new Mac ransomware, called EvilQuest, has a keylogger built into it, which could capture your company passwords as you type them in. It’s a one-two punch: steal the data first, then encrypt it.
  • Target malware at your VPN or remote desktop software, if it’s vulnerable. Phishing is again a popular way to do this, or they may hide it in software on torrent sites or in app stores. This gives them a foothold into your employer’s systems and network.
  • Target smart home devices/routers via vulnerabilities or their easy-to-guess/crack passwords, in order to use home networks as a stepping-stone into your corporate network.

How can I prevent ransomware when working from home?

The good news is that you, the remote worker, can take some relatively straightforward steps up front to help mitigate the cascading risks to your company posed by the new ransomware. Try the following:

  • Be cautious of phishing emails. Take advantage of company training and awareness courses if offered.
  • Keep your home router firmware, PCs, Macs, mobile devices, software, browsers and operating systems up to date on the latest versions – including remote access tools and VPNs (your IT department may do some of this remotely).
  • Ensure your home network, PCs, and mobile devices are protected with up-to-date with network and endpoint AV from a reputable vendor. (The solutions should include anti-intrusion, anti-web threat, anti-spam, anti-phishing, and of course, anti-ransomware features.)
  • Ensure remote access tools and user accounts are protected with multi-factor authentication (MFA) if used and disable remote access to your home router.
  • Disable Microsoft macros where possible. They’re a typical attack vector.
  • Back-up important files regularly, according to 3-2-1 rule.

How Trend Micro can help

In short, to close the cyber front door to ransomware, you need to protect your home network and all your endpoints (laptops, PCs, mobile devices) to be safe. Trend Micro can help via

  • The Home Network: Home Network Security (HNS) connects to your router to protect any devices connected to the home network — including IoT gadgets, smartphones and laptops — from ransomware and other threats.
  • Desktop endpoints: Trend Micro Security (TMS) offers advanced protection from ransomware-related threats. It includes Folder Shield to safeguard valuable files from ransomware encryption, which may be stored locally or synched to cloud services like Dropbox®, Google Drive® and Microsoft® OneDrive/OneDrive for Business.
  • Mobile endpoints: Trend Micro Mobile Security (also included in TMS) protects Android and iOS devices from ransomware.
  • Secure passwords: Trend Micro Password Manager enables users to securely store and recall strong, unique passwords for all their apps, websites and online accounts, across multiple devices.
  • VPN Protection at home and on-the-go: Trend Micro’s VPN Proxy One (Mac | iOS) solution will help ensure your data privacy on Apple devices when working from home, while its cross-platform WiFi Protection solution will do the same across PCs, Macs, Android and iOS devices when working from home or when connecting to public/unsecured WiFi hotspots, as you venture out and about as the coronavirus lockdown eases in your area.

With these tools, you, the remote worker, can help shut the front door to ransomware, protecting your work, devices, and company from data theft and encryption for ransom.

The post Ransom from Home – How to close the cyber front door to remote working ransomware attacks appeared first on .

1H 2020 Cyber Security Defined by Covid-19 Pandemic

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

When we published our 2020 Predictions report in December, we didn’t realize there was a global pandemic brewing that would give cybercriminals an almost daily news cycle to take advantage of in their attacks against people and organizations around the world. Malicious actors have always taken advantage of big news to use as lures for socially engineered threats, but these events tend to be fairly short news cycles.

When Covid-19 started making headlines in early 2020, we started seeing new threats using this in the attacks. As you see below, April was the peak month for email-based Covid-19 related threats.

The same was true for phishing URLs related to Covid-19, but for files using Covid-19 in their naming convention, the peak month in the first half was June.

Impact on Cybercrime

The constant 24×7 news around cases, cures and vaccines makes this pandemic unique for cybercriminals. Also, the shift to remote working and the challenges posed to supply chains all gave cybercriminals new content they could use as lures to entice victims into infecting themselves.

As we’ve seen for many years now, email-based threats were the most used threat vector by malicious actors, which makes sense as the number one infection vector to penetrate an organization’s network is to use a socially engineered email against an employee.

We even saw malicious mobile apps being developed using Covid-19 as a lure, as you see below.

In this case it was supporting potential cures for the virus, which many people would have wanted.

Other Highlights in 1H 2020

While Covid-19 dominated the threat landscape in the 1H 2020, it wasn’t the only thing that defined it. Ransomware actors continued their attacks against organizations, but as we’ve been seeing over the past year, they’ve become much more selective in their victims. The spray and pray model using spam has been shifted to a more targeted approach, similar to how nation-state actors and APT groups perform their attacks. Two things showcase this trend:

  1. The number of ransomware detections has dropped significantly from 1H 2019 to 1H 2020, showing that ransomware actors are not looking for broad infection numbers.
  2. The ransom amounts have increased significantly over the years, showing ransomware actors are selecting their victims around how much they feel they can extort them for and whether they are more likely to pay a ransom.

Home network attacks are another interesting aspect of the threat landscape in the first half of this year. We have millions of home routers around the world that give us threat data on events coming into and out of home networks.

Threat actors are taking advantage of more remote workers by launching more attacks against these home networks. As you see below, the first half of 2020 saw a marked increase in attacks.

Many of these attacks are brute force login attempts as actors try to obtain login credentials for routers and devices within the home network, which can allow them to do further damage.

The above are only a small number of security events and trends we saw in just six months of 2020. Our full roundup of the security landscape so far this year is detailed out in our security roundup report – Securing the Pandemic-Disrupted Workplace. You can read about all we found to help prepare for many of the threats we will continue to see for the rest of the year.

The post 1H 2020 Cyber Security Defined by Covid-19 Pandemic appeared first on .

The Life Cycle of a Compromised (Cloud) Server

By Bob McArdle

Trend Micro Research has developed a go-to resource for all things related to cybercriminal underground hosting and infrastructure. Today we released the second in this three-part series of reports which detail the what, how, and why of cybercriminal hosting (see the first part here).

As part of this report, we dive into the common life cycle of a compromised server from initial compromise to the different stages of monetization preferred by criminals. It’s also important to note that regardless of whether a company’s server is on-premise or cloud-based, criminals don’t care what kind of server they compromise.

To a criminal, any server that is exposed or vulnerable is fair game.

Cloud vs. On-Premise Servers

Cybercriminals don’t care where servers are located. They can leverage the storage space, computation resources, or steal data no matter what type of server they access. Whatever is most exposed will most likely be abused.

As digital transformation continues and potentially picks up to allow for continued remote working, cloud servers are more likely to be exposed. Many enterprise IT teams, unfortunately, are not arranged to provide the same protection for cloud as on-premise servers.

As a side note, we want to emphasize that this scenario applies only to cloud instances replicating the storage or processing power of an on-premise server. Containers or serverless functions won’t fall victim to this same type of compromise. Additionally, if the attacker compromises the cloud account, as opposed to a single running instance, then there is an entirely different attack life cycle as they can spin up computing resources at will. Although this is possible, however, it is not our focus here.

Attack Red Flags

Many IT and security teams might not look for earlier stages of abuse. Before getting hit by ransomware, however, there are other red flags that could alert teams to the breach.

If a server is compromised and used for cryptocurrency mining (also known as cryptomining), this can be one of the biggest red flags for a security team. The discovery of cryptomining malware running on any server should result in the company taking immediate action and initiating an incident response to lock down that server.

This indicator of compromise (IOC) is significant because while cryptomining malware is often seen as less serious compared to other malware types, it is also used as a monetization tactic that can run in the background while server access is being sold for further malicious activity. For example, access could be sold for use as a server for underground hosting. Meanwhile, the data could be exfiltrated and sold as personally identifiable information (PII) or for industrial espionage, or it could be sold for a targeted ransomware attack. It’s possible to think of the presence of cryptomining malware as the proverbial canary in a coal mine: This is the case, at least, for several access-as-a-service (AaaS) criminals who use this as part of their business model.

Attack Life Cycle

Attacks on compromised servers follow a common path:

  1. Initial compromise: At this stage, whether a cloud-based instance or an on-premise server, it is clear that a criminal has taken over.
  2. Asset categorization: This is the inventory stage. Here a criminal makes their assessment based on questions such as, what data is on that server? Is there an opportunity for lateral movement to something more lucrative? Who is the victim?
  3. Sensitive data exfiltration: At this stage, the criminal steals corporate emails, client databases, and confidential documents, among others. This stage can happen any time after asset categorization if criminals managed to find something valuable.
  4. Cryptocurrency mining: While the attacker looks for a customer for the server space, a target attack, or other means of monetization, cryptomining is used to covertly make money.
  5. Resale or use for targeted attack or further monetization: Based on what the criminal finds during asset categorization, they might plan their own targeted ransomware attack, sell server access for industrial espionage, or sell the access for someone else to monetize further.

 

lifecycle compromised server

The monetization lifecycle of a compromised server

Often, targeted ransomware is the final stage. In most cases, asset categorization reveals data that is valuable to the business but not necessarily valuable for espionage.

A deep understanding of the servers and network allows criminals behind a targeted ransomware attack to hit the company where it hurts the most. These criminals would know the dataset, where they live, whether there are backups of the data, and more. With such a detailed blueprint of the organization in their hands, cybercriminals can lock down critical systems and demand higher ransom, as we saw in our 2020 midyear security roundup report.

In addition, while a ransomware attack would be the visible urgent issue for the defender to solve in such an incident, the same attack could also indicate that something far more serious has likely already taken place: the theft of company data, which should be factored into the company’s response planning. More importantly, it should be noted that once a company finds an IOC for cryptocurrency, stopping the attacker right then and there could save them considerable time and money in the future.

Ultimately, no matter where a company’s data is stored, hybrid cloud security is critical to preventing this life cycle.

 

The post The Life Cycle of a Compromised (Cloud) Server appeared first on .

What is a VPN and How Does it Increase Your Online Security and Privacy?

By Trend Micro

The number of VPN users has grown considerably over the past few years. According to the report of Go-Globe, 25% of netizens worldwide have used a VPN at least once in the last 30 days. Recently, VPN usage has surged in many countries and its popularity may see VPN usage surpass the estimated profit of USD$27.10 billion by the end of 2020. The VPN global market only seems to increase as time goes by. So, why is that? What do VPNs provide that make them so attractive?

What is a VPN?

A VPN, or a Virtual Private Network, creates a secure communication “tunnel” from your computer to the internet. It encrypts your connection and prevents others from seeing the data you’re transferring. This keeps your data secure from any spying attempts—including from home over your wired connection, but particularly on public Wi-Fi networks, when you’re out and about in places such as coffee shops, restaurants, airports and hotels. It helps ensure that no one can steal your personal details, passwords, or credit card information.

How does a VPN work and why you need a VPN service?

Among other things, a VPN can conceal your IP address to make your online actions virtually untraceable and anonymous, providing greater privacy for everything you do. In fact, there are so many ways a VPN can protect your privacy and security, we need to take a deeper look at what other benefits a VPN can provide.

    1. Safeguard personal information

    This is the era of mobility and most transactions are being done by people on-the-go using their mobile devices to exchange data over public networks. From online shopping, to mobile banking or simply checking emails and social media accounts, these activities can expose your personal information and sensitive data to hackers and cybercriminals. This particularly applies to users relying on public Wi-Fi. Using a VPN will help to mitigate unwanted leakage or theft by securing data in transit to and from the systems that typically try to collect and store your private data.

      1. Access better streaming contents from other locations

      One of the main drivers for using a VPN is to access better streaming content and restricted websites from the region you’re accessing the internet from. This may be true in your own country, but when traveling abroad, there are also chances that you cannot visit a popular website or a social media platform from the country you’re visiting. While using a VPN, you can connect to an IP address in your country and have full access to your favorite media contents and avoid wasting membership fees that you will likely pay for this streaming service.

        1. Enhance browsing privacy

        Some retail apps, social media platforms, and search engines continuously collect and analyze results of your search history. They keep track of all your browsing activities such as items you viewed, contents you liked, and things you tapped and clicked, so they can provide you with more targeted contents and monetize these by showing the same information in your feed through ads.

        Note that, simply clearing your browsing history does not completely remove traces of these searches, and targeted ads can get annoying. This is where a VPN can help enhance your browsing privacy. The VPN hides your browser cached data and location from advertisers, which prevents them from serving up content based on your searches and location.

          1. Save cost on communicating with family and friends abroad

          Another motivating factor for the use of a VPN is to save on the cost of communicating with families and friends abroad. There are countries implementing restrictions on the use of certain messaging apps, banning their services. If you are planning to visit a country with such a restriction, a VPN can bypass this constraint, which allows you to make use of your trusted messaging app, eliminate the cost of long-distance calls to family and friends while abroad—and at the same time, maintain the level of security and encryption the messaging app provides.

            1. Escape content-based bandwidth-throttling

            The internet has evolved into streaming more content—videos, music, and more—and ISPs have responded by making higher data usage and higher throughput (bandwidth) pay-as-you-use-more services. But content is still at issue, particularly after the December 2017 FCC ruling. Potential ISP throttling based on content type, source, or destination (e.g., BitTorrent traffic), which could give priority to business over personal usage, is one of the reasons why everyday people are using VPN services, because a VPN provides more usage anonymity, preventing ISPs from potentially tracking your activities and limiting your bandwidth usage accordingly.

            Choosing the right VPN for you

            Now that you have some understanding of what a VPN is, and what benefits it can give you, it is also important to choose the right VPN for you.

            Due to regulatory requirements and laws governing data privacy and securing personal information online, the demand for VPNs is growing. In response, there are a large number of VPN providers in the market today. So how do you choose a reliable VPN? Here are some criteria to help you pick one that best suits your needs:

            • Faster and more data is better. Using a VPN can often decrease the speed of your internet connection, so you should pick a provider that has a good number of servers and locations and doesn’t pre-throttle your bandwidth. Some also have data limits, so you should opt for those with a higher data limit per month
            • Provides the best encryption. Look for a VPN providing sophisticated ciphers such as 256-bit AES end-to-end encryption.
            • Ensures safe browsing. Look for VPN that can filter and block malicious websites, online fraud, and internet scams and automatically safeguard your internet connection.
            • Provides full anonymity. It is crucial that a VPN vendor has a clear privacy policy. Trusted VPNs will not track the user’s websites, payment information, or online transactions, and do not keep logs.
            • Supports simultaneous devices. Select a VPN that is compatible with your devices and operating systems and can provide you a good number of simultaneous connections on your devices.
            • Cost versus use case. Heavier business usage should be contrasted with everyday consumer use. To pay less for the service (VPNs typically cost from $5 to $12 per month per device, though multi-device bundles are less), you might accept some data limits, if your use case is lighter; sacrifice some speed, if you’re not streaming movies when you’re out and about, (unlikely during the coronavirus lockdown); or some cross-regional server-selection capability, if you’re not travelling in content-restricted regions (since out-of-country travel is also being hampered by the pandemic).

            Trend Micro’s Home Division provides two low-cost, safety-focused VPN solutions for everyday users: Trend Micro VPN Proxy One and Trend Micro Wi-Fi Protection, both of which can address light-to-medium VPN needs and meet most of the checklist criteria above.

            Trend Micro VPN Proxy One offers fast, secure, stable and anonymous proxy connections for you to access various websites and applications. It connects to the best Trend Micro VPN server intelligently, without you having to do it, and does not limit bandwidth consumption. Trend Micro VPNs do not track your online activities, ensuring you a secure digital life and protecting your online privacy. Trend Micro VPN Proxy One is targeted to Mac and iOS devices.

            Trend Micro Wi-Fi Protection turns any public hotspot into a secure Wi-Fi network and VPN with bank-grade data encryption to keep your information safe from hackers. While your VPN is active, Trend Micro Wi-Fi Protection provides exceptional web threat protection and checks websites you visit to safeguard your browsing from online fraud and internet scam. The VPN automatically kicks in when connecting to a Wi-Fi network with low security, such as one with no encryption. Trend Micro Wi-Fi Protection is available for all platforms (PC, Mac, Android, and iOS). Bundles can be purchased for multiple devices and platforms and some bundles can include other Trend Micro products, depending on the region.

            Go to the Apple App Store for more details on Trend Micro VPN Proxy One; or for a 30-day trial or to buy, go here: Mac | iOS.

            Or visit Trend Micro Wi-Fi Protection for more information, or to buy the multi-platform solution.

            The post What is a VPN and How Does it Increase Your Online Security and Privacy? appeared first on .

            Removing Open Source Visibility Challenges for Security Operations Teams

            By Trend Micro

             

            Identifying security threats early can be difficult, especially when you’re running multiple security tools across disparate business units and cloud projects. When it comes to protecting cloud-native applications, separating legitimate risks from noise and distractions is often a real challenge.

             

            That’s why forward-thinking organizations look at things a little differently. They want to help their application developers and security operations (SecOps) teams implement unified strategies for optimal protection. This is where a newly expanded partnership from Trend Micro and Snyk can help.

             

            Dependencies create risk

             

            In today’s cloud-native development streams, the insatiable need for faster iterations and time-to-market can impact both downstream and upstream workflows. As a result, code reuse and dependence on third-party libraries has grown, and with it the potential security, compliance and reputational risk organizations are exposing themselves to.

             

            Just how much risk is associated with open source software today? According to Snyk research, vulnerabilities in open source software have increased 2.5x in the past three years. https://info.snyk.io/sooss-report-2020. What’s more, a recent report claimed to have detected a 430% year-on-year increase in attacks targeting open source components, with the end goal of infecting the software supply chain. While open source code is therefore being used to accelerate time-to-market, security teams are often unaware of the scope and impact this can have on their environments.

             

            Managing open source risk

             

            This is why cloud security leader Trend Micro, and Snyk, a specialist in developer-first open source security, have extended their partnership with a new joint solution. It’s designed to help security teams manage the risk of open source vulnerabilities from the moment code is introduced, without interrupting the software delivery process.

             

            This ambitious achievement helps improve security for your operations teams without changing the way your developer teams work. Trend Micro and Snyk are addressing open source risks by simplifying a bottom-up approach to risk mitigation that brings together developer and SecOps teams under one unified solution. It combines state-of-the-art security technology with collaborative features and processes to eliminate the security blind spots that can impact development lifecycles and business outcomes.

             

            Available as part of Trend Micro Cloud One, the new solution being currently co-developed with Snyk will:

            • Scan all code repositories for vulnerabilities using Snyk’s world-class vulnerability scanning and database
            • Bridge the organizational gap between DevOps & SecOps, to help influence secure DevOps practices
            • Deliver continuous visibility of code vulnerabilities, from the earliest code to code running in production
            • Integrate seamlessly into the complete Trend Micro Cloud One security platform

            CloudOne

             

             

            This unified solution closes the gap between security teams and developers, providing immediate visibility across modern cloud architectures. Trend Micro and Snyk continue to deliver world class protection that fits the cloud-native development and security requirements of today’s application-focused organizations.

             

             

             

            The post Removing Open Source Visibility Challenges for Security Operations Teams appeared first on .

            Black Hat Trip Report – Trend Micro

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

            At Black Hat USA 2020, Trend Micro presented two important talks on vulnerabilities in Industrial IoT (IIoT). The first discussed weaknesses in proprietary languages used by industrial robots, and the second talked about vulnerabilities in protocol gateways. Any organization using robots, and any organization running a multi-vendor OT environment, should be aware of these attack surfaces. Here is a summary of the key points from each talk.

            Rogue Automation

            Presented at Black Hat, Wednesday, August 5. https://www.blackhat.com/us-20/briefings/schedule/index.html#otrazor-static-code-analysis-for-vulnerability-discovery-in-industrial-automation-scripts-19523 and the corresponding research paper is available at https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/internet-of-things/unveiling-the-hidden-risks-of-industrial-automation-programming

            Industrial robots contain powerful, fully capable computers. Unlike most contemporary computers, though, industrial robots lack basic information security capabilities. First, at the architectural level, they lack any mechanism to isolate certain instructions or memory. That is, any program can alter any piece of storage, or run any instruction. In traditional mainframes, no application could access, change, or run any code in another application or in the operating system. Even smartphone operating systems have privilege separation. An application cannot access a smartphone’s camera, for instance, without being specifically permitted to do so. Industrial robots allow any code to read, access, modify, or run any device connected to the system, including the clock. That eliminates data integrity in industrial robots and invalidates any audit of malfunctions; debugging becomes exceptionally difficult.

            Industrial robots do not use conventional programming languages, like C or Python. Instead, each manufacturer provides its own proprietary programming language. That means a specialist using one industrial robot cannot use another vendor’s machine without training. There are no common information security tools for code validation, since vendors do not develop products for fragmented markets. These languages describe programs telling the robot how to move. They also support reading and writing data, analyzing and modifying files, opening and closing input/output devices, getting and sending information over a network, and accessing and changing status indicators on connected sensors. Once a program starts to run on an industrial robot, it can do anything any fully functional computer can do, without any security controls at all. Contemporary industrial robots do not have any countermeasures against this threat.

            Most industrial robot owners do not write their own programs. The supply chain for industrial robot programs involves many third-party actors. See Figure 1 below for a simplified diagram. In each community, users of a particular vendor’s languages share code informally, and rely on user’s groups for hints and tips to solve common tasks. These forums rarely discuss security measures. Many organizations hire third-party contractors to implement particular processes, but there are no security certifications relevant to these proprietary languages. Most programmers learned their trade in an air-gapped world, and still rely on a perimeter which separates the safe users and code inside from the untrusted users and code outside. The languages offer no code scanners to identify potential weaknesses, such as not validating inputs, modifying system services, altering device state, or replacing system functions. The machines do not have a software asset management capability, so knowing where the components of a running program originated from is uncertain.

            Figure 1: The Supply Chain for Industrial Robot Programming

            All is not lost – not quite. In the short term, Trend Micro Research has developed a static code analysis tool called OTRazor, which examines robotic code for unsafe code patterns. This was demonstrated during our session at Black Hat.

            Over time, vendors will have to introduce basic security checks, such as authentication, authorization, data integrity, and data confidentiality. The vendors will also have to introduce architectural restrictions – for instance, an application should be able to read the clock but not change it.. Applications should not be able to modify system files, programs, or data, nor should they be able to modify other applications. These changes will take years to arrive in the market, however. Until then, CISOs should audit industrial robot programs for vulnerabilities, and segment networks including industrial robots, and apply baseline security programs, as they do now, for both internally developed and procured software.

            Protocol Gateway Vulnerabilities

            Presented at Black Hat, Wednesday, August 5, https://www.blackhat.com/us-20/briefings/schedule/index.html#industrial-protocol-gateways-under-analysis-20632, with the corresponding research paper available here: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/internet-of-things/lost-in-translation-when-industrial-protocol-translation-goes-wrong.

            Industry 4.0 leverages the power of automation alongside the rich layer of software process control tools, particularly Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and its bigger cousin, Supply Chain Management (SCM). By bringing together dynamic industrial process control with hyper-efficient “just-in-time” resource scheduling, manufacturers can achieve minimum cost, minimum delay, and optimal production. But these integration projects require that IIoT devices speak with other technology, including IIoT from other manufacturers and legacy equipment. Since each equipment or device may have their own communication protocol, Industry 4.0 relies heavily on protocol converters.

            Protocol converters are simple, highly efficient, low-cost devices that translate one protocol into another. Protocol converters are ubiquitous, but they lack any basic security capabilities – authentication, authorization, data integrity or data confidentiality – and they sit right in the middle of the OT network. Attackers can subvert protocol converters to hijack the communication or change configuration. An attacker can disable a safety thresholds, generate a denial of service attack, and misdirect an attached piece of equipment.

            In the course of this research, we found nine vulnerabilities and are working with vendors to remediate the issues. Through our TXOne subsidiary, we are developing rules and intelligence specifically for IIoT message traffic, which are then embedded in our current network security offerings, providing administrators with better visibility and the ability to enforce security policies in their OT networks.

            Protocol converters present a broad attack surface, as they have limited native information security capabilities. They don’t validate senders or receivers, nor do they scan or verify message contents. Due to their crucial position in the middle of the OT network, they are an exceptionally appealing target for malicious actors. Organizations using protocol converters – especially those on the way to Industry 4.0 – must address these weak but critical components of their evolving infrastructure.

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

            The post Black Hat Trip Report – Trend Micro appeared first on .

            Top Tips For Home Cybersecurity And Privacy In A Coronavirus-Impacted World (Part 1)

            By Trend Micro

            Welcome to the new normal. We’re all now living in a post-COVID-19 world characterized by uncertainty, mass home working and remote learning. The lines demarcating normal life have shifted abruptly – perhaps never to return. That’s not the worst that can happen, as we all know, but it does mean we all need to get used to new ways of living, working and studying from home. This has major implications for the online safety, security and privacy of our families.

            To help you adapt to these new conditions while protecting what matters most, Trend Micro has developed a two-part blog series on “The New Normal.” Part 1 identifies the scope and specific cyber-threats of the new normal. Part 2 provides security tips and products to help address those threats.

            What’s going on?

            In April, nearly 300 million Americans were estimated to be in government-mandated lockdown. Even as some businesses, municipalities and states begin to relax these rules, experts have warned of subsequent waves of the virus, which could result in new localized lockdowns. In short, a lot of people will continue to work from home, while their children, also at home, attempt to study remotely from their mobile devices.

            This has considerable implications for how we spend our time. Without that morning commute to work or school, more of it than ever will involve sitting in front of a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone screen. Even the smart TV is enlisted. Dangers include

            • Use of potentially insecure video conferencing applications. The number of daily meeting participants on Zoom surged from 10 million in December 2019 to roughly 200 million in March.
            • Visits to P2P/torrent sites or platforms for adult content. In search of entertainment, bored kids or teens in your household may have more time and inclination to do this.
            • Downloads of potentially malicious applications disguised as legitimate entertainment or gaming content.
            • More online shopping and banking. June alone generated $73.2 billion in online spend, up 76.2% year-on-year. Whenever you shop or bank online, financial data is potentially exposed.
            • Use of potentially insecure remote learning platforms. Educational mobile app downloads increased by a massive 1087% between March 2 and 16. The trend continues.
            • Logging on to corporate cloud-based services. This includes Office 365, to do your job remotely, or using a VPN to connect directly into the office.
            • For recreation, streaming and browsing on your smart TV. But even your smart TV is vulnerable to threats, as the FBI has warned.

            Risky behavior

            Unfortunately, the increase in working from home (WFH), especially for those not used to it, may lead to an increase in risky behavior, such as: using non-approved apps for work; visiting non work-related sites on work devices; and using personal devices to access work resources. Recent global Trend Micro research found that:

            • 80% have used their work laptop for personal browsing, with only 36% fully restricting the sites they visit.
            • 56% of employees have used a non-work app on a corporate device, and 66% have uploaded corporate data to it.
            • 39% often or always access corporate data from a personal device.
            • 8% admit to watching adult content on their work laptop, and 7% access the dark web.

            This is not about restricting your freedom to visit the sites you want to visit while at home. It’s about reducing the risk of exposing corporate data and systems to possible malware.

            What are the bad guys doing?

            Unsurprisingly, there has also been a major uptick in the volume of cyber-threats targeting home users. With a captive audience to aim at, it’s a huge opportunity for cyber-criminals to steal your log-ins and personal data to sell to fraudsters, or even to steal corporate passwords and information for a potentially bigger pay-off. They are helped by the fact that many home workers may be more distracted than they usually would be at the office, especially if they have young children. Your kids may even share the same laptops or PCs as you, potentially visiting risky sites and/or downloading unapproved apps.

            There’s also a chance that, unless you have a corporate machine at home, your personal computing equipment is less secure than the kit you had in the office. Add to that the fact that support from the IT department may be less forthcoming than usual, given that stretched teams are overwhelmed with requests, while themselves struggling to WFH. One recent report claimed that nearly half (47%) of IT security pros have been taken off some or all of their typical security tasks to support other IT-related jobs. In another, only 59% of respondents said they believe their cybersecurity team has the right tools and resources at home to perform their job effectively.

            It’s time to step up and take security into your own hands. Stay on the lookout for the following threats.

            • Unsecured home routers and smart devices might be hijacked in more sophisticated attacks designed to steal data from corporate networks via the home worker.
            • Phishing attacks spoofing well-known brands or using COVID-19 information/news as a lure. Google is blocking 18 million malicious pandemic-themed emails every day. The end goal may be to hijack your online consumer accounts (Netflix, banking, email, online shopping) or work accounts. Other phishing emails are designed to install data-stealing malware, ransomware and other threats.
            • Attackers may target vulnerabilities in your home PCs and the apps you’re using (video conferencing etc) to gain remote access.
            • Business Email Compromise (BEC) attackers may try to leverage the lack of internal communications between remote workers to impersonate senior execs via email, and trick finance team members into wiring corporate funds abroad.
            • Kids exposing home networks and devices to malware on torrent sites, in mobile apps, on social media, and via phishing attacks potentially imitating remote learning/video conferencing platforms.
            • Kids searching for adult/inappropriate content, and/or those that are bored and over-share on social media. Unicef has warned that millions of children are at increased of online harm as lockdown means they spend more of their days online.
            • Mobile apps represent a potential source of malware, especially those found on unofficial app stores. There has also been a reported 51% rise in stalkerware – covert surveillance apps used by domestic abusers and stalkers to target victims.
            • The pandemic has led to a surge in e-commerce fraud where consumers are tricked into buying non-existent products or counterfeit goods including medical items.

            So what’s a remote worker/concerned parent to do to protect themselves and the family in the midst of the “new normal?”

            Read Part 2 in this mini-series, which we’re publishing simultaneously with Part 1, where we share some best practice advice on how to keep your digital lives and work systems safe from online threats during lockdown—and where we provide tools to help you do just that.

            The post Top Tips For Home Cybersecurity And Privacy In A Coronavirus-Impacted World (Part 1) appeared first on .

            Top Tips For Home Cybersecurity And Privacy In A Coronavirus-Impacted World (Part 2)

            By Trend Micro

            The past few months have seen radical changes to our work and home life under the Coronavirus threat, upending norms and confining millions of American families within just four walls. In this context, it’s not surprising that more of us are spending an increasing portion of our lives online. But this brings with it some familiar cyber-risks. In Part 1 of this mini-series, we explained how cyber-criminals are looking to capitalize on these sweeping changes to society to further their own ends.

            Now let’s take a look at what you can do to protect your family, your data, and access to your corporate accounts.

            How you can stay safe online

            The bad guys are laser-focused on stealing your personal data and log-ins and increasingly see the remote worker as an easy target for leapfrogging into corporate networks. That’s not to mention the potential internet safety risks inherent in bored kids spending more time in front of their screens. To respond, you’ll need to create an equally focused “home security plan” governed by sensible policies and best practices. Here are some of the key areas to consider.

            Protect your smart home and router

            Increasingly, unprotected smart home devices are being targeted by cyber-criminals to turn into botnets to attack others. They might also provide sophisticated attackers with a stepping-stone into your corporate systems, via the home network. The home router, with its known flaws, is (after the modem) the digital front door to the smart home and the basis for your networking, so it should be first in any security strategy. Consider the following when tackling home network security:

            • Regularly check for router firmware updates and apply as soon as they’re available. (If you’re using a home gateway (modem + router) firmware updates are done by your ISP, so you won’t have the option to do this.)
            • Change factory default admin passwords and switch on two-factor authentication if available.
            • Disable UPnP and any remote management features.
            • Use WPA2 on your router for encrypted Wi-Fi. Pick passwords for access that aren’t easily guessed.
            • Put the router in middle of house if possible, so the signal is not overly exposed to strangers outside. Likewise for extenders.
            • Invest in security for the entire home network from a reputable provider like Trend Micro.

            Secure your home office

            Cyber-criminals are primed to take advantage of distracted home workers and potentially less secure PCs/devices. Secure this environment by doing the following:

            • Again, apply a home network security solution. This protects your work devices, while also protecting the devices you use for recreation.
            • Apply any security updates to OS/software.
            • Install/maintain endpoint security software on all machines/devices.
            • Never use work laptops for personal use.
            • Switch on 2FA for any work accounts.
            • Use a VPN if applicable whenever connecting to the office.
            • Stay alert to phishing/BEC attempts.
            • Take advantage of any training courses to stay up-to-speed on the latest scams.
            • Disable macros in Office files – these are often used by hackers to run malware.

            Stay safe from phishing

            Phishing is the number one tactic used by attackers to trick you into installing malware or handing over your log-ins. Emails, text messages, social media messages and more are spoofed to appear as if sent by a legitimate company or contact. In response:

            • Be cautious of any unsolicited emails/texts/messages even if they appear legitimate.
            • Don’t click on any links/buttons in unsolicited messages, or download attachments.
            • Check directly with the sender rather than clicking through links or buttons provided or entering any confidential details.
            • Invest in cybersecurity tools from a trusted vendor like Trend Micro, to spot and block scam emails and malicious downloads/websites.

            Use video conferencing safely

            New videoconferencing platforms can introduce risk, especially if you’re not familiar with the default settings. Here’s how to stay safe when video conferencing:

            • Check first for end-to-end encryption.
            • Only download videoconferencing apps from official iOS/Android stores and manufacturer websites.
            • Get familiar with privacy settings. Switch off camera access if you don’t want to appear on-screen.
            • Ensure you’re always on the latest software version.
            • Never click on links/open attachments in messages from unknown contacts.
            • Use a password manager to store long and strong log-ins, and switch on two-factor authentication (2FA) if available.

            Stay safe shopping and banking

            Next, protect your financial information and stay safe from e-commerce fraud by doing the following:

            • Install AV on all PCs and devices.
            • Always use the latest browser versions and HTTPS sites.
            • Never click through on sensational promos or ads on social media/in emails. Always visit the site directly.
            • Always be cautious: if special offers seem too good to be true, they usually are.
            • Use a secure browser, password manager, and 2FA in your online accounts.
            • Use a VPN app on any device you use to shop or bank.

            Think about online safety for kids

            They may be under your roof for more hours of the day than usual, but your children are also likely to be spending more time online. That means you need to have a measured conversation with them about internet safety, backed up with parental controls. Consider the following:

            • Urge your kids to think before clicking, and before sharing on social media.
            • Make sure you have installed anti-malware from a reputable vendor on all their devices.
            • Look for security products that check/update their social media privacy settings.
            • Discourage or block downloads from P2P sites.
            • Set up parental controls to block inappropriate content and/or to regulate screen time and time on certain sites or with certain apps. Then set up admin protections, so they can’t change the settings.
            • Share your concerns around sexting.

            Mobile security best practices
            Finally, sheltering at home has limits, particularly for restless kids. When they go to the store or out to the park, facemasks notwithstanding, they’re likely going to use their mobile devices, just as they’ll continue to do at home. Of course, you’re not exempt either from mobile threats. Ensure mobile security by

            • Sticking to the official Google Play and App Store marketplaces. Enforce this through smart settings on your children’s phones.
            • Running anti-malware on your mobile device, from a reputable company like Trend Micro.
            • Ensuring your family’s devices are using the latest OS version.
            • Ensuring your family devices have remote lock and wipe feature switched on, in case they’re lost or stolen.
            • Never brick or jailbreak the device, as this can expose it to security risks.

            How Trend Micro can help

            When it comes to protecting the home from security and privacy threats during lockdown, leave no stone unturned. Cyber-criminals will always look for the weak link in the chain and focus their efforts there. Network security is important, but it doesn’t replace the need for protection on each individual device. You’ll need to cover your router, network, smart devices, and all endpoints (PCs, laptops, mobiles and other devices). Here’s how Trend Micro can help:

            Trend Micro Home Network Security

            Trend Micro Home Network Security provides industry-leading protection against any threats to internet-connected devices in the home. The solution

            • Blocks dangerous file downloads during web browsing to stop ransomware, data theft, phishing, and other malware. Blocks remote access applications.
            • Protects all smart devices, such as smart TVs, thermostats, security cameras, etc., that don’t have their own security solutions.
            • Parental Controls and Guardian allow parents to track and restrict their children’s internet usage at home and on-the-go, which could free-up bandwidth for important conference calls.

            Trend Micro Security (PC and Mac)

            Trend Micro Security, available in various editions (led by Trend Micro Maximum Security), is Trend’s flagship endpoint security product for consumers. Available for both PCs and Macs, it features AI learning to stop advanced threats. Among a wide range of protections, it includes:

            • Web Threat Protection when browsing the internet, defending you against bad websites that can steal your data or download malicious files.
            • Machine Learning, to protect you from new and unknown threats.
            • Ransomware protection via Folder Shield, to stop unauthorized changes and back-up files encrypted by suspicious programs.
            • Anti-phishing and anti-spam protection for Outlook clients, as well as Gmail and Outlook webmail on the PC, and Gmail webmail on the Mac.
            • Privacy Scanner (for Facebook and Twitter), Social Networking Protection for protection against malicious links in social networks, Pay Guard for protecting your online banking and buying.
            • Parental Controls to limit which software and websites you kids may use.

            Trend Micro Mobile Security:

            Trend Micro Mobile Security provides endpoint security for all your mobile devices, whether Android or iOS-based.

            • Blocks dangerous websites and app downloads.
            • Helps protects your privacy on Twitter and Facebook.
            • Protects your kids’ devices.
            • Guards against identity theft.
            • Optimizes your device’s performance.

            Additional Trend Micro Tools:

            Network and endpoint security should be supplemented with tools that accomplish specific tasks, such as protecting your internet connections, your passwords, and your identity data. Trend Micro provides

            • Wi-Fi Protection/VPN Proxy One Mac | iOS. VPNs with an emphasis on web threat protection or privacy, respectively. The first is available on all four platforms; the second is targeted for Apple devices.
            • Password Manager. Manages and encrypts your passwords, and automates your logins, while ensuring you use unique, strong passwords across all of your online accounts.
            • ID Security. Tracks your credentials, particularly the ones you use for buying and banking, to see if breaches of any of your identity data have led to their sale on the Dark Web. Notifies you when it has, so you can take steps to protect it.
            • Premium Services. Parents working from home are not expected to be IT or Security experts, so now’s the time to ensure professional help is around when you need it by signing up for one of Trend Micro’s premium service packages for help configuring, troubleshooting, optimizing, and disinfecting your devices if they get infected.

            Maintaining your family’s security and privacy on all their devices during the coronavirus lockdown above all means changing your mindset, to take into account the mix of work and play in the household during the “new normal.” Use these tips and tools during lockdown and you’ll be well on your way to ensuring you and your family’s safety from malicious viruses—both digital and natural.

            The post Top Tips For Home Cybersecurity And Privacy In A Coronavirus-Impacted World (Part 2) appeared first on .

            Ransomware is Still a Blight on Business

            By Ed Cabrera (Chief Cybersecurity Officer)

            Ransomware is Still a Blight on Business

            Trends come and go with alarming regularity in cybersecurity. Yet a persistent menace over the past few years has been ransomware. Now mainly targeting organizations rather than consumers, and with increasingly sophisticated tools and tactics at their disposal, the cybercriminals behind these campaigns have been turning up the heat during the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s why we need industry partnerships like No More Ransom.

            Celebrating its fourth anniversary this week, the initiative has helped over four million victims fight the scourge of ransomware, saving hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. At Trend Micro, we’re proud to have played a major part, helping to decrypt over 77 million files for victims.

            Not going anywhere

            Ransomware has been with us for years, but only really hit the mainstream after the global WannaCry and NotPetya incidents of 2017. Unfortunately, that was just the start. Today, no sector is safe. We saw attacks rage across US municipalities, school districts and hospitals in 2019. Most recently, a major outage at a connected technology giant impacted everything from consumer fitness trackers to on-board flight systems.

            Such attacks can hit victim organizations hard. There are serious reputational and financial repercussions from major service outages, and the stakes have been raised even further as attackers now often steal data before encrypting victims’ files. A recent incident at a US cloud computing provider has led to data compromise at over 20 universities and charities in the UK and North America, for example. A separate ransomware attack on a managed service provider earlier this year may cost it up to $70m.

            The bad guys have shown no sign of slowing down during the pandemic — quite the reverse. Even as hospitals have been battling to save the lives of patients battling COVID-19, they’ve been targeted by ransomware designed to lock mission-critical systems.

            No More Ransom

            That’s why we need to celebrate public-private partnerships like No More Ransom, which provides helpful advice for victims and a free decryption tool repository. Over the past four years it has helped 4.2 million visitors from 188 countries, preventing an estimated $632 million in ransom demands finding its way into the pockets of cyber-criminals.

            At Trend Micro, we’re proud to have been an associate partner from the very start, contributing our own decryption tools to the scores available today to unlock 140 separate ransomware types. Since the start of No More Ransom, Trend Micro tools have been downloaded nearly half a million times, helping over 50,000 victims globally to decrypt more than 77 million files. We simply can’t put a price on this kind of intervention.

            https://www.europol.europa.eu/publications-documents/infographic-4th-anniversary-no-more-ransom

            Yet while the initiative is a vital response to the continued threat posed by ransomware, it is not all we can do. To truly beat this menace, we need to educate organizations all over the planet to improve their resilience to such malware threats. That means taking simple steps such as:

            • Backing up regularly, according to best practice 3-2-1 policy
            • Installing effective AV from a trusted vendor, featuring behavior monitoring, app whitelisting and web reputation
            • Training staff how to better spot phishing attacks
            • Ensuring software and systems are always on the latest version
            • Protecting the enterprise across endpoint, hybrid cloud, network and email/web gateways

            I’m also speaking on a panel today hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on NotPetya and general ransomware attack trends related to the pandemic. Join us to learn more about ransomware from law enforcement agencies, policy makers and businesses.

            If your organization has been impacted by ransomware, check the resources available on https://www.nomoreransom.org/ for advice and access to the free decryption tool repository.

            The post Ransomware is Still a Blight on Business appeared first on .

            Cleaner One Pro Speeds Up Your Mac: Part 2

            By Trend Micro

            In Part 1 of this blog, we introduced Trend Micro Cleaner One Pro, a one-stop shop to help you speed up your Mac, highlighting the Quick Optimizer, the Main Console, and the Cleaning Tools. In Part 2, we resume the discussion of how to make your Mac run faster with the remaining Cleaner One Pro features: System and Application Management, Privacy Protection, and Other Options.

            System and Application Management

            Startup Manager

            Your Mac may get sluggish after a year or two of usage and you may find that booting up takes a lot longer. Doing a Startup Manager scan can help you reduce slowdown due to unwanted startup programs and services, to help your Mac boot faster.

            Upon completing the scan, Startup Manager will identify apps under two categories: Login Items and Launch Agents.

            Login Items are apps that run automatically upon login. You can manage these apps by enabling them to run automatically or disabling them to make your Mac more efficient. If you don’t need autorun, you can remove the apps from the list.

            Launch Agents are background services that run automatically on System startup for the extension features of apps. You can manage these services by letting them run automatically or by disabling them to make your Mac boot faster. Similarly, you can remove these agents if you don’t need them or they’re broken.

             

            App Manager

            When a user installs an app that doesn’t meet their expectations, they’ll never use it again. In many cases, they remove the app by simply dragging it into the trash, assuming the action completely removes the app, but this is not always true. When you uninstall an app, there are often associated files left on your Mac, even after you have emptied the Trash. They’re known as leftovers.

            Leftovers are an app’s associated files and folders that can include different languages, log files, agents, or processes that might try to start an application. App Manager aims to resolve this and helps you clean up your Mac by completely removing app leftovers. App Manager detects all app leftovers automatically so you can remove them with just one click.

             

            Privacy Protection

            File Shredder

            Data security and privacy are especially important and managing these applies to anyone collecting and keeping data. Data that has reached its retention limit needs to be permanently removed from your file system and to be sure it can’t be recovered you need to overwrite the file with random series of binary data multiple times. This process is often referred to as shredding. With File Shredder, you can remove sensitive files from your hard disk without worrying that they can be recovered.

             

            Other Options

            Preferences

            Preferences allows you to manage how the Cleaner One Pro app performs. In Preferences, you’ll see General, Notifications, Memory, Duplicates, Whitelists and Auto Select.

            On the General tab, you can choose Auto start at login and other options according to how you would like Cleaner One Pro to behave during startup.

             

            On the Notifications tab, you can disable the notification about smart memory optimization.

             

            Cleaner One Pro is also equipped with a Smart Memory Optimization feature on the Memory tab. This feature uses artificial intelligence. You can set auto clean when your available memory is low or when an app is closed.

             

            The Duplicates, Whitelists and Auto Select tabs work when you use the Duplicate Files feature on the main console. When there are too many duplicate files on your Mac, you can set the rules on the minimum file size, as well as which files to exempt or prioritize during deletion.

             

            Air Support One

            If you need technical assistance about Cleaner One Pro, click the robot icon either in the Apple Menu window or on the Main Console.

            A chat support person will attend to your concerns or suggestions when using Cleaner One Pro. In case there is no available support engineer, you can send an email by clicking Send Email. Make sure to provide the correct email address.

            More Tools

            Aside from Cleaner One Pro for Mac, we offer Antivirus One for Mac—as well as Cleaner One for iPhone, which you can download by scanning the QR Code. You can also submit your ideas for Other Tools by clicking the panel.

             

            An Optimized Mac

            As you use your Mac over time, you need to maintain it to keep it running smoothly. Trend Micro Cleaner One Pro can clean up your disk space, help boost performance, and solve other Mac issues you might encounter during your daily work. As you consider it for your Mac, you may have remaining questions:

            What’s the difference between the Free version and the Paid version? The Free version of Cleaner One Pro includes the Memory Optimizer, basic CPU and Network Monitoring, a Junk Files Cleaner, a Big Files Scanner, a Disk Map, and the Startup Manager. The Paid upgrade of Cleaner One Pro unlocks more features, including more Advanced CPU/Network Monitoring, a Duplicate Finder, a Similar Photos Scanner, an App Manager, and a File Shredder.

            Is it safe to use Cleaner One Pro? Cleaner One Pro is notarized by Apple, which assures its users both security and privacy.

            How can I download Cleaner One Pro? Cleaner One Pro is distributed via the official Trend Micro website and other authorized channels. Note that Cleaner One Pro is also available for Windows. To make it easy for the readers of this blog series, we’ve provided the download links here: Download Mac Version – Download Windows Version

            Go to Cleaner One Windows or to Cleaner One Mac for more information or to purchase the apps.

            The post Cleaner One Pro Speeds Up Your Mac: Part 2 appeared first on .

            Twitter Hacked in Bitcoin Scam

            By Mark Nunnikhoven (Vice President, Cloud Research)
            Computer monitor with a bitcoin displayed on the screen being lifted out of the display by a fishing line indicated a scam or phishing attack

            It started with one weird tweet. Then another. Quickly, some of the most prominent accounts on Twitter were all sending out the same message;

            I am giving back to the community.

            All Bitcoin sent to the address below will be sent back double! If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000. Only doing this for 30 minutes.

            [- BITCOIN WALLET ADDRESS -]

            Are Apple, Elon Musk, Barrack Obama, Uber, Joe Biden, and a host of others participating in a very transparent bitcoin scheme?

            No. Of course, not. The question was whether or not individual accounts were compromised or if something deeper was going on.

            User Account Protection

            These high profile accounts are prime targets for cybercriminals. They have a broad reach, and even a brief compromise of one of these accounts would significantly increase a hacker’s reputation in the underground.

            That is why these accounts leverage the protections made available by Twitter in order to keep their accounts safe.

            This means;

            While it’s believed that one or two of these accounts failed to take these measures, it’s highly unlikely that dozens and dozens of them did. So what happened?

            Rumours Swirl

            As with any public attack, the Twitter-verse (ironically) was abuzz with speculation. That speculation ramped up when Twitter took the reasonable step of preventing any verified account from tweeting for about three hours.

            This step helped prevent any additional scam tweets from being published and further raised the profile of this attack.

            While some might shy away from raising the profile of an attack, this was a reasonable trade-off to prevent further damage to affected accounts and to help prevent the attack from taking more ground.

            This move also provided a hint as to what was going on. If individual accounts were being attacked, it’s unlikely that this type of movement would’ve done much to prevent the attacker from gaining access. However, if the attacker was accessing a backend system, this mitigation would be effective.

            Had Twitter itself been hacked?

            Occam’s Razor

            When imagining attack scenarios, a direct breach of the main service is a scenario that is often examined in-depth, which is also why it is one of the most planned for scenarios.

            Twitter — like any company — has challenges with its systems, but they center primarily around content moderation…their backend security is top-notch.

            An example of this an incident in 2018. Twitter engineers made a mistake that meant anyone’s password could have been exposed in their internal logs. Just in case, Twitter urged everyone to reset their password.

            While possible, it’s unlikely that Twitter’s backend systems were directly breached. There is a much simpler potential explanation: insider access.

            Internal Screenshot

            Quickly after the attack, some in the security community noticed a screenshot of an internal support tool from Twitter surfacing in underground discussion forums. This rare inside view showed what appeared to be what a Twitter support team member would see.

            This type of access is dangerous. Very dangerous.

            Joseph Cox’s article detailing the hack has a key quote,

            “We used a rep that literally done all the work for us.”

            Anonymous Source

            What remains unclear is whether this is a case of social engineering (tricking a privileged insider into taking action) or a malicious insider (someone internally motivated to attack the system).

            The difference is important for other defenders out there.

            The investigation is ongoing, and Twitter continues to provide updates via @TwitterSupport;

            Our investigation is still ongoing but here’s what we know so far:

            — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020

            Social Engineering

            Donnie Sullivan from CNN has a fantastic interview with the legendary Rachel Tobac showing how simple social engineering can be and the dangerous impact it can have;

            What is “social engineering,” you ask? @RachelTobac showed me. pic.twitter.com/TAw7FB1QPQ

            — Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) July 16, 2020

            If this attack was conducted through social engineering, the security team at Twitter would need to implement additional processes and controls to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

            Such a situation is what your team also needs to look at. While password resets, account closures, data transfers, and other critical processes are at particular risk of social engineering, financial transactions are atop the cybercriminal’s target list.

            BEC—business email compromise—attacks accounted for USD 1.7 billion in losses in 2019 alone.

            Adding additional side-channel confirmations, additional steps for verifications, firm and clear approvals and other process steps can help organizations mitigate these types of social engineering attacks.

            Malicious Insider

            If the attack turns out to be from a malicious insider. Defenders need to take a different approach.

            Malicious insiders are both a security problem and human resource one.

            From the security perspective, two key principles help mitigate the potential of these attacks;

            Making sure that individuals only have the technical access needed to complete their assigned tasks, and only that access is key to limiting this potential attack. Combined with the smart separation of duties (one person to request a change, another to approval it), this significantly reduces the possibility of these attacks causing harm.

            The other—and not often spoken of—side of these attacks is the reason behind the malicious intent. Some people are just malicious, and when presented with an opportunity, they will take it.

            Other times, it’s an employee that feels neglected, passed over, or is disgruntled in some other way. A strong internal community, regular communication, and a strong HR program can help address these issues before they escalate to the point where aiding a cybercriminal becomes an enticing choice.

            Support Risks

            Underlying this whole situation is a more challenging issue; the level of access that support has to any given system.

            It’s easy to think of a Twitter account as “yours.” It’s not. It’s part of a system run by a company that needs to monitor the health of the system, respond to support issues, and aid law enforcement when legally required.

            All of these requirements necessitate a level of access that most don’t think about.

            How often are you sharing sensitive information via direct message? Those messages are most likely accessible by support.

            What’s to prevent them from accessing any given account or message at any time? We don’t know.

            Hopefully, Twitter—and others—have clear guardrails (technical and policy-based) in place to prevent abuse of support access, and they regularly audit them.

            It’s a hard balance to strike. User trust is at stake but also the viability of running a service.

            Clear, transparent policies and controls are the keys to success here.

            Abuse can be internal or external. Support teams typically have privileged access but are also among the lowest paid in the organization. Support—outside of the SRE community—is usually seen as entry-level.

            These teams have highly sensitive access, and when things go south, can do a lot of harm. Again, the principles of least privilege, separation of duties, and a strong set of policies can help.

            What’s Next?

            In the coming days, more details of the attack will surface. In the meantime, the community is still struggling to reconcile the level of access gained and how it was used.

            Getting access to some of the world’s most prominent accounts and then conducting a bitcoin scam? Based on the bitcoin transactions, it appears the cybercriminals made off with a little over USD 100,000. Not insignificant, but surely there were other opportunities?

            Occam’s razor can help here again. Bitcoin scams and coin miners are the most direct method fo cybercriminals to capitalized on their efforts. Given the high profile nature of the attack, the time before the discovery was always going to be sure. This may have been the “safest” bet for the criminal(s) to profit from this hack.

            In the end, it’s a lesson for users of social networks and other services; even if you take all of the reasonable security precautions, you are relying on the service itself to help protect you. That might not always hold true.

            It’s a harsh reminder that the very tooling you put in place to run your service may be its biggest risk for service providers and defenders…a risk that’s often overlooked and underestimated.

            In the end, Marques Brownlee sums it up succinctly;

            Don't send Bitcoin to strangers.

            — Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) July 15, 2020

             

            What do you think of this entire episode? Let’s talk about it—un-ironically—on Twitter, where I’m @marknca.

            The post Twitter Hacked in Bitcoin Scam appeared first on .

            Fixing cloud migration: What goes wrong and why?

            By Trend Micro

             

            The cloud space has been evolving for almost a decade. As a company we’re a major cloud user ourselves. That means we’ve built up a huge amount of in-house expertise over the years around cloud migration — including common challenges and perspectives on how organizations can best approach projects to improve success rates.

            As part of our #LetsTalkCloud series, we’ve focused on sharing some of this expertise through conversations with our own experts and folks from the industry. To kick off the series, we discussed some of the security challenges solution architects and security engineers face with customers when discussing cloud migrations. Spoiler…these challenges may not be what you expect.

             

            Drag and drop

             

            This lack of strategy and planning from the start is symptomatic of a broader challenge in many organizations: There’s no big-picture thinking around cloud, only short-term tactical efforts. Sometimes we get the impression that a senior exec has just seen a ‘cool’ demo at a cloud vendor’s conference and now wants to migrate a host of apps onto that platform. There’s no consideration of how difficult or otherwise this would be, or even whether it’s necessary and desirable.

             

            These issues are compounded by organizational siloes. The larger the customer, the larger and more established their individual teams are likely to be, which can make communication a major challenge. Even if you have a dedicated cloud team to work on a project, they may not be talking to other key stakeholders in DevOps or security, for example.

             

            The result is that, in many cases, tools, applications, policies, and more are forklifted over from on-premises environments to the cloud. This ends up becoming incredibly expensive. as these organizations are not really changing anything. All they are doing is adding an extra middleman, without taking advantage of the benefits of cloud-native tools like microservices, containers, and serverless.

             

            There’s often no visibility or control. Organizations don’t understand they need to lockdown all their containers and sanitize APIs, for example. Plus, there’s no authority given to cloud teams around governance, cost management, and policy assignment, so things just run out of control. Often, shared responsibility isn’t well understood, especially in the new world of DevOps pipelines, so security isn’t applied to the right areas.

             

            Getting it right

             

            These aren’t easy problems to solve. From a security perspective, it seems we still have a job to do in educating the market about shared responsibility in the cloud, especially when it comes to newer technologies, like serverless and containers. Every time there’s a new way of deploying an app, it seems like people make the same mistakes all over again — presuming the vendors are in charge of security.

             

            Automation is a key ingredient of successful migrations. Organizations should be automating everywhere, including policies and governance, to bring more consistency to projects and keep costs under control. In doing so, they must realize that this may require a redesign of apps, and a change in the tools they use to deploy and manage those apps.

             

            Ultimately, you can migrate apps to the cloud in a couple of clicks. But the governance, policy, and management that must go along with this is often forgotten. That’s why you need clear strategic objectives and careful planning to secure more successful outcomes. It may not be very sexy, but it’s the best way forward.

             

            To learn more about cloud migration, check out our blog series. And catch up on all of the latest trends in DevOps to learn more about securing your cloud environment.

            The post Fixing cloud migration: What goes wrong and why? appeared first on .

            Are You Promoting Security Fluency in your Organization?

            By Trend Micro

             

            Migrating to the cloud is hard. The PowerPoint deck and pretty architectures are drawn up quickly but the work required to make the move will take months and possibly years.

             

            The early stages require significant effort by teams to learn new technologies (the cloud services themselves) and new ways of the working (the shared responsibility model).

             

            In the early days of your cloud efforts, the cloud center of expertise is a logical model to follow.

             

            Center of Excellence

             

            A cloud center of excellence is exactly what it sounds like. Your organization forms a new team—or an existing team grows into the role—that focuses on setting cloud standards and architectures.

             

            They are often the “go-to” team for any cloud questions. From the simple (“What’s an Amazon S3 bucket?”), to the nuanced (“What are the advantages of Amazon Aurora over RDS?”), to the complex (“What’s the optimum index/sort keying for this DynamoDB table?”).

             

            The cloud center of excellence is the one-stop shop for cloud in your organization. At the beginning, this organizational design choice can greatly accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies.

             

            Too Central

             

            The problem is that accelerated adoption doesn’t necessarily correlate with accelerated understanding and learning.

             

            In fact, as the center of excellent continues to grow its success, there is an inverse failure in organizational learning which create a general lack of cloud fluency.

             

            Cloud fluency is an idea introduced by Forrest Brazeal at A Cloud Guru that describes the general ability of all teams within the organization to discuss cloud technologies and solutions. Forrest’s blog post shines a light on this situation and is summed up nicely in this cartoon;

             

            Our own Mark Nunnikhoven also spoke to Forrest on episode 2 of season 2 for #LetsTalkCloud.

             

            Even though the cloud center of excellence team sets out to teach everyone and raise the bar, the work soon piles up and the team quickly shifts away from an educational mandate to a “fix everything” one.

             

            What was once a cloud accelerator is now a place of burnout for your top, hard-to-replace cloud talent.

             

            Security’s Past

             

            If you’ve paid attention to how cybersecurity teams operate within organizations, you have probably spotted a number of very concerning similarities.

             

            Cybersecurity teams are also considered a center of excellence and the central team within the organization for security knowledge.

             

            Most requests for security architecture, advice, operations, and generally anything that includes the prefix “cyber”, word “risk”, or hints of “hacking” get routed to this team.

             

            This isn’t the security team’s fault. Over the years, systems have increased in complexity, more and more incidents occur, and security teams rarely get the opportunity to look ahead. They are too busy stuck in “firefighting mode” to take as step back and re-evaluate the organizational design structure they work within.

             

            According to Gartner, for every 750 employees in an organization, one of those is dedicated to cybersecurity. Those are impossible odds that have lead to the massive security skills gap.

             

            Fluency Is The Way Forward

             

            Security needs to follow the example of cloud fluency. We need “security fluency” in order to import the security posture of the systems we built and to reduce the risk our organizations face.

             

            This is the reason that security teams need to turn their efforts to educating development teams. DevSecOps is a term chock full of misconceptions and it lacks context to drive the needed changes but it is handy for raising awareness of the lack of security fluency.

             

            Successful adoption of a DevOps philosophy is all about removing barriers to customer success. Providing teams with the tools and autonomy they require is a critical factor in their success.

             

            Security is just one aspect of the development team’s toolkit. It’s up to the current security team to help educate them on the principles driving modern cybersecurity and how to ensure that the systems they build work as intended…and only as intended.

            The post Are You Promoting Security Fluency in your Organization? appeared first on .

            Ask Me Anything – Celebrating The Fifth Anniversary Of My Monthly Threat Webinar

            By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

            In July 2015, I did my first threat webinar. I had planned to do it on a monthly basis, and never imagined I would still be doing it five years later, but here I am, still creating monthly webinars. I still do. I started the webinar series to help people understand the different threats targeting our customers and I have always tried to focus on three areas:

            • Share information on what threats our customers deal with regularly
            • Talk about an actual threat and explain how it works
            • Discuss technologies versus solutions

            This last point, discussing technologies versus solutions, has been one of the key items I try to follow as much as possible – after all, the goal of my webinars is to be educational, not a sales pitch.

            Coming from a technical background, BS in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University (Go Spartans!!), I enjoy learning about the new technologies being used to detect the latest threats and to ensure you know what to look for when selecting a vendor and/or a security solution. Over the years, I’ve discussed everything from APTs, coinminers, exploits, messaging threats, ransomware, underground activity and lots in between. It is pretty easy to find topics to discuss, as there is so much going on in our industry, and with the malicious actors regularly shifting their tactics, techniques and procedures, I can keep the content fairly fresh.

            I really enjoy having guest speakers on my webinars to mix things up a bit for the viewers as well, as I know my limitations – there are just too many threats out there to keep up with all of them. The main reason I love doing the threat webinars is that I enjoy sharing information and teaching others about our industry and the threats affecting them.  If you want to check out any of my previous five years of webinars you can watch them here.

            For my fifth year anniversary I wanted to try something different and I would like to do an open Q&A session. As I’ve never done this before, it will certainly be an interesting experience for me, but hopefully for you as well. I hope I can answer a majority of your questions, but I know some of you are way too smart for me, so please bear with me.

            Our registration page for this webinar allows you to submit any pre-session questions that I’ll answer throughout the webinar. You can ask me anything that is on your mind and if I cannot get to your question, I’ll do my best to answer you afterwards in an email.

            I hope to continue to do these webinars for the foreseeable future and I would like to end my post by thanking each and every one of you who has participated in my webinars over the years. It has been a pleasure, and I look forward to answering your questions.

            Take care, stay healthy, and keep on smiling!

            Jon

            The post Ask Me Anything – Celebrating The Fifth Anniversary Of My Monthly Threat Webinar appeared first on .

            Cleaner One Pro Speeds Up Your Mac: Part 1

            By Trend Micro
            Mac users have to be wary of malware.

            The Mac has always been pretty easy to use, but even the most ardent Mac supporters know there comes a time when their Mac is no longer new and they notice slowdowns in its performance, particularly after intensive use. They’d like a handy one-stop tool to help them optimize memory and CPU performance, free up disk space, and generally speed up their Mac, since they don’t want to dig around in the MacOS for buried utilities they don’t know how to use. Fortunately, Trend Micro has a solution for that.

            Trend Micro Cleaner One Pro is an easy-to-use, all-in-one disk cleaning and optimization utility that can help you boost your Mac’s performance. Cleaner One Pro includes a number of Mac housecleaning tools such as a Memory Optimizer, a Junk Files cleaner, a Big Files scanner, a Duplicate Files finder, an App Manager, a File Shredder, and a Disk Map. These functions are all rolled into an easy-to-use interface that helps you visualize your Mac’s usage, while freeing up memory and storage on your Mac.

            In this two-part blog, we will show you how you can use Cleaner One Pro to make your Mac run faster, walking you through its features. In Part 1, we focus on Quick Optimizer, the Main Console, and the Cleaning Tools. In Part 2, we’ll focus on System and Application Management, Privacy Protection, and some Other Options.

            Quick Optimizer

            Once you’ve installed Cleaner One Pro, its Quick Optimizer appears in the Apple Menu, with handy tools to speed up your Mac. Click the icon and it displays a Console that monitors your Memory, Junk Files, CPU, and Network Usage, while letting you Optimize your Memory Usage and Clean your Junk Files with just one click. System Optimizer opens a Window onto the contents of your Mac for more detailed management.

            Memory Optimizer

            There are applications running in the background of your Mac that take up physical memory and affect its performance. The Memory Optimizer gives you control over how your computer consumes its memory resources—and you can free up your Mac’s memory in seconds with just one click on the Optimize button. If you want to see which apps are taking up significant memory, you can click the three-dot icon next to Memory Usage. It will show your Mac’s memory usage by app, in descending order. Click the Information (i) icon in the Memory Usage window for a breakdown of the types of memory being used.

            Junk Files Cleaner

            Junk files, temporary files, system files and other non-essential items will accumulate on your Mac over time. These files take up a lot of space on your hard drive and may degrade the performance of your Mac as you reach higher disk usage. Click the Clean button and the Junk Files cleaner quickly removes application cache, system log files, update files, temporary files and hidden leftover files. You can also see the details of the identified Junk Files by clicking the three-dot icon next to Junk Files.

            CPU Usage Monitor

            When your computer starts to run slowly it’s helpful to have a snapshot of its CPU usage. With this feature, you can see which apps are using significant CPU resources and how much percentage they’re using. It also let you know how long your computer has been up and running, since system reliability can degrade if it’s been awhile since you restarted your Mac.

            Network Usage Monitor

            If you want to keep an eye on your bandwidth consumption and avoid exceeding data caps, it’s useful to know the real-time download and upload speeds on your Mac. The Network Usage Monitor also provides a view of other network related information such as your Wi-Fi signal quality.

            The Main Console

            The Main Console is the core workplace in Trend Micro Cleaner One Pro and provides the following features, which are presented here grouped by purpose:

            • Cleaning Tools (Junk Files, Big Files, Duplicate Files, Similar Photos and Disk Map)
            • Application Management (Startup Manager and App Manager)
            • Privacy Protection (File Shredder)

            To access the Main Console, click System Optimizer in the Cleaner One Pro Apple Menu. The first time you do, you’ll need to authorize full access to your disk, so Cleaner One Pro can access more junk files. Simply click Grant Access in the System Optimizer window and watch the video or follow the written instructions. Complete the steps by closing Cleaner One Pro, then reload it. You’re now ready to begin optimizing.

            Cleaning Tools

            Junk Files

            The hard drive on your Mac holds the entire Mac operating system and important files including your data. As you use your Mac, over time its hard drive will accumulate junk files. These junk files are generated by the system and other programs. Cleaner One Pro is equipped with advanced and efficient algorithms that scan and remove junk files within seconds. Click Scan to scan for Junk Files and when the scan is done, either check a whole category or individual items in the category, then click Remove.

            Big Files

            You may have a lot of clutter on your Mac in the form of big or old files that you probably no longer need and may have just forgotten about. Removing big unused files can recover a lot of disk space, but it could be time-consuming to delete them if done manually. Also, it is hard to select files for deletion if you don’t know the proper context— where the files are stored or how important they may be.

            Big Files scanner provides a big file collector where you can easily spot and remove these files if you don’t need them anymore. Additionally, if you hover your mouse on a file, you’ll see a magnifier and a lock icon. Once you click the magnifier icon, you’ll locate the actual file. If you click the lock icon, the file will be added to the Ignore List, which will be locked.

            Disk Map

            Disk Map is a significant tool that helps you analyze the usage of your storage in a visual and interactive map. It quickly scans your drive and builds a visualization of files on the target folder of your Mac, allowing you to easily navigate the system. With Disk Map, you can find out the date when the file/folder was created, modified, and last opened. Furthermore, hovering your mouse on a folder then clicking the magnifier icon will direct you to the file’s location.

            Duplicate Files

            Another practice that you are probably comfortable doing is backing-up important files, photos, program installation files and apps on your hard drive. While this is a good practice, it creates duplicate files on your Mac that eventually add clutter and consume disk space. It’s also hard to find files in name searches when you have too many of them.

            The Duplicate Files function lets you select a source folder where it will inspect and identify duplicate files on your Mac. In the scan results, an option called “Auto Select” helps you automatically select duplicate files. The information provided by “Auto Select” is listed below:

            • Folder where duplicate files are located
            • Dates modified
            • Similar file names
            • Other qualifications

            You can choose Remove to Trash or Delete Permanently on the confirmation page.

            Similar Photos

            Often, you organize pictures of travels and life events, and also keep a copy to ensure you don’t lose those captured moments. But as digital photos pile up, often similar to others on your drive, they take up a lot of space. To assist you cleaning these up, use Similar Photos, and then choose your photo library to scan the photos on your Mac.

            The result will display similar photos and you can choose the ones you don’t need, and the files will be added in the selected list. Click the Remove button to completely delete them from your hard drive.

            That’s it for now! The second part of this blog will take up the remaining toolsets of Trend Micro Cleaner One Pro.

             Go to Cleaner One Mac for more information or to purchase the app.

             

             

            The post Cleaner One Pro Speeds Up Your Mac: Part 1 appeared first on .

            Cloud Security Is Simple, Absolutely Simple.

            By Mark Nunnikhoven (Vice President, Cloud Research)

            “Cloud security is simple, absolutely simple. Stop over complicating it.”

            This is how I kicked off a presentation I gave at the CyberRisk Alliance, Cloud Security Summit on Apr 17 of this year. And I truly believe that cloud security is simple, but that does not mean easy. You need the right strategy.

            As I am often asked about strategies for the cloud, and the complexities that come with it, I decided to share my recent talk with you all. Depending on your preference, you can either watch the video below or read the transcript of my talk that’s posted just below the video. I hope you find it useful and will enjoy it. And, as always, I’d love to hear from you, find me @marknca.

            For those of you who prefer to read rather than watch a video, here’s the transcript of my talk:

            Cloud security is simple, absolutely simple. Stop over complicating it.

            Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “Wait a minute, what is this guy talking about? He is just off his rocker.”

            Remember, simple doesn’t mean easy. I think we make things way more complicated than they need to be when it comes to securing the cloud, and this makes our lives a lot harder than they need to be. There’s some massive advantages when it comes to security in the cloud. Primarily, I think we can simplify our security approach because of three major reasons.

            The first is integrated identity and access management. All three major cloud providers, AWS, Google and Microsoft offer fantastic identity, and access management systems. These are things that security, and [inaudible 00:00:48] professionals have been clamouring for, for decades.

            We finally have this ability, we need to take advantage of it.

            The second main area is the shared responsibility model. We’ll cover that more in a minute, but it’s an absolutely wonderful tool to understand your mental model, to realize where you need to focus your security efforts, and the third area that simplifies security for us is the universal application of APIs or application programming interfaces.

            These give us as security professionals the ability to orchestrate. and automate a huge amount of the grunt work away. These three things add up to, uh, the ability for us to execute a very sophisticated, uh, or very difficult to pull off, uh, security practice, but one that ultimately is actually pretty simple in its approach.

            It’s just all the details are hard and we’re going to use these three advantages to make those details simpler. So, let’s take a step back for a second and look at what our goal is.

            What is the goal of cybersecurity? That’s not something you hear quite often as a question.

            A lot of the time you’ll hear the definition of cybersecurity is, uh, about, uh, securing the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information or data. The CIA triad, different CIA, but I like to phrase this in a different way. I think the goal is much clearer, and the goal’s much simpler.

            It is to make sure that whatever you’re building works as intended and only as intended. Now, you’ll realize you can’t accomplish this goal just as a security team. You need to work with your, uh, developers, you need to work with operations, you need to work with the business units, with the end users of your application as well.

            This is a wonderful way of phrasing our goal, and realizing that we’re all in this together to make sure whatever you’re building works as intended, and only as intended.

            Now, if we move forward, and we look at who are we up against, who’s preventing our stuff from working, uh, well?

            You look at normally, you think of, uh, who’s attacking our systems? Who are the risks? Is it nation states? Is it maybe insider threats? While these are valid threats, they’re really overblown. You’re… don’t have to worry about nation state attacks.

            If you’re a nation state, worry about it. If you’re not a nation state, you don’t have to worry about it because frankly, there’s nothing you can do to stop them. You can slow them down a little bit, but by definition, they’re going to get through your resources.

            As far as insider attacks, this is an HR problem. Treat your people well. Um, check in with them, and have a strong information management policy in place, and you’re going to reduce this threat naturally. If you go hunting for people, you’re going to create the very threats that you’re looking at.

            So, it brings us to the next set. What about cyber criminals? You know, we do have to worry about cyber criminals.

            Cyber criminals are targeting systems simply because these systems are online, these are profit motivated criminals who are organized, and have a good set of tools, so we absolutely need to worry about them, but there’s a more insidious or more commonplace, maybe a simpler threat that we need to worry about, and that’s one of mistakes.

            The vast majority of issues that happen around data breaches around security vulnerabilities in the cloud are mistake driven. In fact, to the point where I would not even worry about cyber criminals simply because all the work we’re going to do to focus on, uh, preventing mistakes.

            And catching, and rectifying the stakes really, really quickly is going to uh, you a cover all the stuff that we would have done to block out cyber criminals as well, so mistakes are very common because people are using a lot more services in the cloud.

            You have a lot more, um, parts and moving, uh, complexity in your deployment, um, and you’re going to make a mistake, which is why you need to put automated systems in place to make sure that those mistakes don’t happen, or if they do happen that they’re caught very, very quickly.

            This applies to standard DevOps, the philosophies for building. It also applies to security very, very wonderfully, so this is the main thing we’re going to focus on.

            So, if we look at that sum up together, we have our goal of making sure whatever we’re building works as intended, and only as intended, and our major issue here, the biggest risk to this is simple mistakes and misconfigurations.

            Okay, so we’re not starting from ground zero here. We can learn from others, and the first place we’re going to learn is the shared responsibility model. The shared responsibility applies to all cloud service providers.

            If you look on the left hand side of the slide here, you’ll see the traditional on premise model. We roughly have six areas where something has to be done roughly daily, whether it’s patching, maintenance, uh, just operational visibility, monitoring, that kind of thing, and in a traditional on premise environment, you’re responsible for all of it, whether it’s your team, or a team underneath your organization.

            Somewhere within your tree, people are on the hook for doing stuff daily. Here when we move into an infrastructure, so getting a virtual machine from a cloud provider right off the bat, half of the responsibilities are pushed away.

            That’s a huge, huge win.

            And, as we move further and further to the right to more managed service, or staff level services, we have less and less daily responsibilities.

            Now, of course, you always still have to verify that the cloud service provider’s doing what they, uh, say they’re doing, which is why certifications and compliance frameworks come into play, uh, but the bottom line is you’re doing less work, so you can focus on fewer areas.

            Um, that is, or I should say not less work, but you’re doing, uh, less broad of a work.

            So you can have that deeper focus, and of course, you always have to worry about service configuration. You are given knobs and dials to turn to lock things down. You should use them like things like encrypting, uh, all your data at rest.

            Most of the time it’s an easy check box, but it’s up to you to check it ‘cause it’s your responsibility.

            We also have the idea of an adoption framework, and this applies for Azure, for AWS and for Google, uh, and what they do is they help you map out your business processes.

            This is important to security, because it gives you the understanding of where your data is, what’s important to the business, where does it lie, who needs to touch it, and access it and process it.

            That also gives us the idea, uh, or the ability to identify the stakeholders, so that we know, uh, you know, who’s concerned about this data, who is, has an investment in this data, and finally it helps to, to deliver an action plan.

            The output of all of these frameworks is to deliver an action plan to help you migrate into the cloud and help you to continuously evolve. Well, it’s also a phenomenal map for your security efforts.

            You want to prioritize security, this is how you do it. You get it through the adoption framework, understanding what’s important to the business, and that lets you identify critical systems and areas for your security.

            Again, we want to keep things simple, right? And, the third, uh, the o- other things we want to look at is the CIS foundations. They have them for AWS, Azure and GCP, um, and these provide a prescriptive guidance.

            They’re really, um, a strong baseline, and a checklist of tasks that you can accomplish, um, or take on, on your, uh, take on, on your own, excuse me, uh, in order to, um, you know, basically cover off the really basics is encryption at rest on, um, you know, do I make sure that I don’t have, uh, things needlessly exposed to the internet, that type of thing.

            Really fantastic reference point and a starting point for your security practice.

            Again, with this idea of keeping things as simple as possible, so when it comes to looking at our security policy, we’ve used the frameworks, um, and the baseline to kind of set up a strong, uh, start to understand, uh, where the business is concerned, and to prioritize.

            And, the first question we need to ask ourselves as security practitioners, what happened? If we, if something happens, and we ask what happened?

            Do we have the ability to answer this question? So, that starts us off with logging and auditing. This needs to be in place before something happened. Let me just say that again, before something happened, you need [laughs] to be able to have this information in place.

            Now, uh, this is really, uh, to ask these key questions of what happened in my account, and who, or what made that thing happen?

            So, this starts in the cloud with some basic services. Uh, for AWS it’s cloud trail, for Azure, it’s monitor, and for Google Cloud it used to be called Stackdriver, it is now the Google Cloud operations suite, so these need to be enabled on at full volume.

            Don’t worry, you can use some lifecycle rules on the data source to keep your costs low.

            But, this gives you that layer, that basic auditing and logging layer, so that you can answer that question of what happened?

            So, the next question you want to ask yourself or have the ability to answer is who’s there, right? Who’s doing what in my account? And, that comes down to identity.

            We’ve already mentioned this is one of the key pillars of keeping security simple, and getting that highly effective security in your cloud.

            [00:09:00] So here you’re answering the questions of who are you, and what are you allowed to do? This is where we get a very simple privilege, uh, or principle in security, which is the principle of least privilege.

            You want to give an identity, so whether that’s a user, or a role, or a service, uh, only the privileges they, uh, require that are essential to perform the task that, uh, they are intended to do.

            Okay?

            So, basically if I need to write a file into a storage, um, folder or a bucket, I should only have the ability to write that file. I don’t need to read it, I don’t need to delete it, I just need to write to it, so only give me that ability.

            Remember, that comes back to the other pillar of simple security here of, of key cloud security, is integrated identity.

            This is where it really takes off, is that we start to assign very granular access permissions, and don’t worry, we’re going to use the APIs to automate all this stuff, so that it’s not a management headache, but the principle of these privilege is absolutely critical here.

            The services you’re going to be using, amazingly, all three cloud providers got in line, and named them the same thing. It’s IAM, identity access management, whether that’s AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.

            Now, the next question we’re going to a- ask ourselves are the areas where we’re going to be looking at is really where should I be focusing security controls? Where should I be putting stuff in place?

            Because up until now we’ve really talked about leveraging what’s available from the cloud service providers, and you absolutely should available, uh, maximize your usage of their, um, native and primitive, uh, structures primitive as far as base concepts, not as, um, refined.

            They’re very advanced controls and, but there are times where you’re going to need to put in your own controls, and these are the areas you’re going to focus on, so you’re going to start with networking, right?

            So, in your networking, you’re going to maximize the native structures that are available in the cloud that you’re in, so whether that’s a project structure in Google Cloud, whether that’s a service like transit gateway in AWS, um, and all of them have this idea of a VPC or virtual private cloud or virtual network that is a very strong boundary for you to use.

            Remember, most of the time you’re not charged for the creation of those. You have limits in your accounts, but accounts are free, and you can keep adding more, uh, virtual networks. You may be saying, wait a minute, I’m trying to simplify things.

            Actually, having multiple virtual networks or virtual private clouds ends up being far simpler because each of them has a task. You go, this application runs in this virtual private cloud, not a big shared one in this specific VPC, and that gives you this wonderfully strong security boundaries, and a very simple way of looking at one VPC, one action, very much the Unix philosophy in play.

            Key here though is understanding that while all of the security controls in place for your service provider, um, give you, so, you know, whether it’s VPCs, routing tables, um, uh, access control lists, security groups, all the SDN features that they’ve got in place.

            These really help you figure out whether service A or system A is allowed to talk to B, but they don’t tell you what they’re saying.

            And, that’s where additional controls called an IPS, or intrusion prevention system come into play, and you may want to look at getting a third party control in to do that, because none of the th- big three cloud providers offer an IPS at this point.

            [00:12:00] But that gives you the ability to not just say, “Hey, you’re allowed to talk to each other.” But, to monitor that conversation, to ensure that there’s not malicious code being passed back and forth between systems that nobody’s trying a denial of service attack.

            A whole bunch of extra things on there have, so that’s where IPS comes into play in your network defense. Now, we look at compute, right?

            We can have compute in various forms, whether that’s in serverless functions, whether that’s in containers, manage containers, whether that’s in traditional virtual machines, but all the principles are the same.

            You want to understand where the shared responsibility line is, how much is on your plate, how much is on the CSPs?

            You want to understand that you need to harden the EOS, or the service, or both in some cases, make sure that, that’s locked down, so have administrator passwords. Very, very complicated.

            Don’t log into these systems, uh, you know, because you want to be fixing things upstream. You want to be fixing things in the build pipeline, not logging into these systems directly, and that’s a huge thing for, uh, systems people to get over, but it’s absolutely essential for security, and you know what?

            It’s going to take a while, but there’s some tricks there you can follow with me. You can see, uh, on the slides, uh, at Mark, that is my social everywhere, uh, happy to walk you through the next steps.

            This idea of this presentation’s really just the simple basics to start with, to give you that overview of where to focus your time, and, dispel that myth that cloud security is complicating things.

            It is a huge path is simplicity, which is a massive lens, or for security.

            So, the last area you want to focus here is in data and storage. Whether this is databases, whether this is big blob storage, or, uh, buckets in AWS, it doesn’t really matter the principles, again, all the same.

            You want to encrypt your data at rest using the native cloud provided, uh, cloud service provider, uh, features functionality, because most of the time it’s just give it a key address, and give it a checkbox, and you’re good to go.

            It’s never been easier to encrypt things, and there is no excuse for it and none of the providers charge extra for, uh, encryption, which is amazing, and you absolutely want to be taking advantage of that, and you want to be as granular as possible with your IAM, uh, and as reasonable, okay?

            So, there’s a line here, and a lot of the data stores that are native to the cloud service providers, you can go right down to the data cell level and say, Mark has access, or Mark doesn’t have access to this cell.

            That can be highly effective, and maybe right for your use case. It might be too much as well.

            But, the nice thing is that you have that option. It’s integrated, it’s pretty straightforward to implement, and then, uh, when we look here, uh, sorry. and then, finally you want to be looking at lifecycle strategies to keep your costs under control.

            Um, data really spins out of control when you don’t have to worry about capacity. All of the cloud service providers have some fantastic automations in place.

            Basically, just giving you, uh, very simple rules to say, “Okay, after 90 days, move this over to cheaper storage. After 180 days, you know, get rid of it completely, or put it in cold storage.”

            Take advantage of those or your bill’s going to spiral out of control, and, and that relates to availability ‘cause uh, uh, and reliability, ‘cause the more you’re spending on that kind of stuff, the less you have to spend on other areas like security and operational efficiency.

            So, that brings us to our next big security question. Is this working?

            [00:15:00] How do you know if any of this stuff is working? Well, you want to talk about the concept of traceability. Traceability is a, you know, somewhat formal definition, but for me it really comes down to where did this come from, who can access it, and when did they access it?

            That ties very closely with the concept of observability. Basically, the ability to look at, uh, closed systems and to infer what’s going on inside based on what’s coming into that system, and what’s leaving that system, really what’s going on.

            There’s some great tools here from the service providers. Again, you want to look at, uh, Amazon CloudWatch, uh, Azure Monitor and the Google Cloud operations, uh, suite. Um, and here this leads us to the key, okay?

            This is the key to simplifying everything, and I know we’ve covered a ton in this presentation, but I really want you to take a good look at this slide, and again, hit me up, uh, @marknca, happy to answer any questions with, questions afterwards as well here, um, that this will really, really make this simple, and this will really take your security practice to the next level.

            If the idea of something happened in your, cloud system, right? In your deployment, there’s a trigger, and then, it either is generating an event or a log.

            If you go the bottom row here, you’ve got a log, which you can then react to in a function to deliver some sort of result. That’s the slow-lane on the bottom.

            We’re talking minutes here. You also have the top lane where your trigger fires off an event, and then, you react to that with a function, and then, you get a result in the fast lane.

            These things happen in seconds, sub-second time. You start to build out your security practice based on this model.

            You start automating more and more in these functions, whether it’s, uh, Lambda, whether it’s Cloud Functions, whether it’s Azure Functions, it doesn’t matter.

            The CSPs all offer the same core functionality here. This is the critical, critical success metric, is that when you start reacting in the fast lane automatically to things, so if you see that a security event is triggered from like your malware, uh, on your, uh, virtual machine, you can lock that off, and have a new one spin up automatically.

            Um, if you’re looking for compliance stuff, the slow lane is the place to go, because it takes minutes.

            Reactions happen up top, more, um, stately or more sedate things, so somebody logging into a system is both up top and down low, so up top, if you logged into a VPC or into, um, an instance, or a virtual machine, you’d have a trigger fire off and maybe ask me immediately, “Mark, did you log into the system? Uh, ‘cause you’re, you know, you’re not supposed to be.”

            But then I’d respond and say, “Yeah, I, I did log in.” So, immediately you don’t have to respond. It’s not an incident response scenario, but on the bottom track, maybe you’re tracking how many times I’ve logged in.

            And after the three or fourth time maybe someone comes by, and has a chat with me, and says, “Hey, do you keep logging into these systems? Can’t you fix it upstream in the deployment, uh, and build a pipeline ‘cause that’s where we need to be moving?”

            So, you’ll find this balance, and this concept, I just wanted to get into your heads right now of automating your security practice. If you have a checklist, it should be sitting in a model like this, because it’ll help you, uh, reduce your workload, right?

            The idea is to get as much automated possible, and keep things in very clear, and simple boundaries, and what’s more simple than having every security action listed as an automated function, uh, sitting in a code repository somewhere?

            [00:18:00] Fantastic approach to modern security practice in the cloud. Very simple, very clear. Yes, difficult to implement. It can be, but it’s an awesome, simple mental model to keep in your head that everything gets automated as a function based on a trigger somewhere.

            So, what are the keys to success? What are the keys to keeping this cloud security thing simple? And, hopefully you’ve realized the difference between a simple mental model, and the challenges, uh, in, uh, implementation.

            It can be difficult. It’s not easy to implement, but the mental model needs to be kept simple, right? Keep things in their own VPCs, and their own accounts, automate everything. Very, very simple approach. Everything fits into this s- into this structure, so the keys here are remembering the goal.

            Make sure that cybersecurity, uh, is making sure that whatever you build works as intended and only as intended. It’s understanding the shared responsibility model, and it’s really looking at, uh, having a plan through cloud adoption frameworks, how to build well, which is a, uh, a concept called the Well-Architected Framework.

            It’s specific to AWS, but it’s generic, um, its principles, it can be applied everywhere. We didn’t cover it here, but I’ll put the links, um, in the materials for you, uh, as well as remembering systems over people, right?

            Adding the right controls at the right time, uh, and then, finally observing and react. Be vigilant, practice. You’re not going to get this right out of the gates, uh, perfect.

            You’re going to have to refine, iterate, and then it’s extremely cloud friendly. That is the cloud model is, get it out there, iterate quickly, but putting the structures in place, you’re not going to make sure that you’re not doing that in an insecure manner.

            Thank you very much, uh, here’s a couple of links that’ll help you out before we take some Q&A here, um, trendmicro.com/cloud will get you to the products to learn more. We’re also doing this really cool streaming.

            Uh, I host a show called Let’s Talk Cloud. Um, we uh, interview experts, uh, and have a great conversation around, um, what they’re talking about, uh, in the cloud, what they’re working on, and not just around security, but just in building in general.

            You can hit that up at trendtalks.fyi. Um, and again, hit me up on social @marknca.

            So, we have a couple of questions to kick this off, and you can put more questions in the webinar here, and they will send them along, or answer them in kind if they can.

            Um, and that’s really what these are about, is the interaction is getting that, um, to and from. So, the first question that I wanted to tackle is an interesting one, and it’s really that systems over people.

            Um, you heard me mention it in the, uh, in the end and the question is really what does that mean systems over people? Isn’t security really about people’s expertise?

            And, yes and no, so if you are a SOC analyst, if you are working in a security, uh, role right now, I am really confident saying that 80%, 90% of what you do right now could be delegated out to a system.

            So, if you were looking at log lines, and stuff that should be done by systems and bubble up, just the goal for you to investigate to do what people are good at in systems are bad at, so systems mean, uh, you know, putting in, uh, to build pipeline, putting in container scanning in the build pipeline, so that you have to manually scan stuff, right to get rid of the basics. Is that a pen test? 100% no.

            Um, but it gets rid of that, hey, you didn’t upgrade to, um, you know, this version of this library.

            [00:21:00] That’s all automated, and those, the more systems you get in place, the more you as a security professional, or your security team will be able to focus on where they can really deliver value and frankly, where it’s more interesting work, so that’s what systems over people mean, is basically automate as much as you can to get people doing what people are really good at, and to make sure that the systems catch what we make as mistakes all the time.

            If you accidentally try to push an old build out, you know that systems should stop that, if you push a build that hasn’t been checked by that container scanning or by, um, you know, it doesn’t have the appropriate security policy in place.

            Systems should catch all that humans shouldn’t have to worry about it at all. That’s systems over processing. You saw that on the, uh, keys to success slide here. I’ll just pull it up. Um, you know, is that, that’s absolutely key.

            Another question that we had, uh, was what we didn’t get into here, which was around the Well-Architected Framework. Now, this is a document that was published by AWS, uh, a number of years back, and they’ve kept it going.

            They’ve evolved it and essentially it has five pillars. Um, performance, efficiency, uh, op- reliability, security, cost optimization, and operational excellence. Hey, I’ve got all five.

            Um, and really [laughs] what that is, is it’s about how to take advantage of these cloud tools.

            Now, AWS publishes it, but honestly it applies to Azure, it applies to Google Cloud as well. It’s not service specific. It teaches you how to build in the cloud, and obviously security is one of those big pillars, but it’s… so talking about teaching you how to make those trade offs, how to build an innovation flywheel, so that you have an idea, test it, uh, get the feedback from it, and move forward.

            Um, and that’s really, really key. Again, now you should be reading that even if you are an Azure, or GCP customer or, uh, that’s where you’re putting your most of your stuff, because it’s really about the principles, and everything we do, and encourage people to build well, it means that there’s less security issues, right?

            Especially we know that the number one problem is mistakes.

            That leads to the last question we have here, which is about that, how can I say that cyber criminals, you don’t need to worry about them.

            You need to worry about mistakes? That’s a good question. It’s valid, and, um, Trend Micro does a huge amount of research around cyber criminals. I do a whole huge amount of research around cyber criminals.

            Uh, my training, by training, and by professional experience. I’m a forensic investigator. This is what I do is take down cyber crimes. Um, but I think mistakes are the number one thing that we deal with in the cloud simply because of the underlying complexity.

            I know it’s ironic, and to talk about simplicity, to talk about complexity, but the idea is, um, is that you look at all the major breaches, especially around s3 buckets, those are all m- based on mistake.

            There’ve been billions, and billions, and billions of records, and, uh, millions of dollars of damage exposed because of simple mistakes, and that is far more common, uh, than cyber criminals.

            And yes, cyber crimes you have [inaudible 00:23:32] worry. You have to worry about them, but everything you’re going to do to fix mistakes, and to put systems in place to stop those mistakes from happening is also going to be for your pr- uh, protection up against cyber criminals, and honestly, if you’re the guy who runs around your organization’s screaming about cyber criminals all the time, you’re far less credible than if you’re saying, “Hey, I want to make sure that we build really, really well, and don’t make mistakes.”

            Thank you for taking the time. My name’s Mark Nunnikhoven. I’m the vice president of cloud research at Trend Micro. I’m also an AWS community hero, and I love this stuff. Hit me up on social @marknca. Happy to chat more.

            The post Cloud Security Is Simple, Absolutely Simple. appeared first on .

            Automatic Visibility And Immediate Security with Trend Micro + AWS Control Tower

            By Trend Micro

            Things fail. It happens. A core principle of building well in the AWS Cloud is reliability. Dr. Vogels said it best, “How can you reduce the impact of failure on your customers?” He uses the term “blast radius” to describe this principle.

            One of the key methods for reducing blast radius is the AWS account itself. Accounts are free and provide a strong barrier between resources, and thus, failures or other issues. This type of protection and peace of mind helps teams innovate by reducing the risk of running into another team’s work. The challenge is managing all of these accounts in a reasonable manner. You need to strike a balance between providing security guardrails for teams while also ensuring that each team gets access to the resources they need.

            AWS Services & Features

            There are a number of AWS services and features that help address this need. AWS Organizations, AWS Firewall Manager, IAM Roles, tagging, AWS Resource Access Manager, AWS Control Tower, and more, which all play a role in helping your team manage multiple accounts.

            For this post, we’ll look at AWS Control Tower a little closer. AWS Control Tower was made generally available at AWS re:Inforce. The service provides an easy way to setup and govern AWS accounts in your environment. You can configure strong defaults for all new accounts, pre-populate IAM Roles, and more. Essentially, AWS Control Tower makes sure that any new account starts off on the right foot.

            For more on the service, check out this excellent talk from the launch.

            Partner Integrations

            With almost a year under its belt, AWS Control Tower is now expanding to provide partner integrations. Now, in addition to setting up AWS services and features, you can pre-config supported APN solutions as well. Trend Micro is among the first partners to support this integration by providing the ability to add Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Workload Security and Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity to your Control Tower account factory. Once configured, any new account that is created via the factory will automatically be configured in your Trend Micro Cloud One account.

            Integration Advantage

            This integration not only reduces the friction in getting these key security tools setup, it also provides immediate visibility into your environment. Workload Security will now be able show you any Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon ECS hosts within your accounts. You’ll still need to install and apply a policy to the Workload Security agent to protect these instances, but this initial visibility provides a map for your teams, reducing the time to protection. Conformity will start generating information within minutes. This information from Conformity will allow your teams to get a quick handle on their security posture and more with fast and ongoing security and compliance checks.

            Integrating this from the beginning of every new account will allow each team to track their progress against a huge set of recommended practices across all five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework.

            What’s Next?

            One of the biggest challenges in cloud security is integrating it early in the development process. We know that the earlier security is factored into your builds, the better the result. You can’t get much earlier than the initial creation on an account. That’s why this new integration with AWS Control Tower is so exciting. Having security in every account within your organization from day zero provides much needed visibility and a fantastic head start.

            The post Automatic Visibility And Immediate Security with Trend Micro + AWS Control Tower appeared first on .

            Beyond the Endpoint: Why Organizations are Choosing XDR for Holistic Detection and Response

            By Trend Micro

            The endpoint has long been a major focal point for attackers targeting enterprise IT environments. Yet increasingly, security bosses are being forced to protect data across the organization, whether it’s in the cloud, on IoT devices, in email, or on-premises servers. Attackers may jump from one environment to the next in multi-stage attacks and even hide between the layers. So, it pays to have holistic visibility, in order to detect and respond more effectively.

            This is where XDR solutions offer a convincing alternative to EDR and point solutions. But unfortunately, not all providers are created equal. Trend Micro separates themselves from the pack by providing mature security capabilities across all layers, industry-leading threat intelligence, and an AI-powered analytical approach that produces fewer, higher fidelity alerts.

            Under pressure

            It’s no secret that IT security teams today are under extreme pressure. They’re faced with an enemy able to tap into a growing range of tools and techniques from the cybercrime underground. Ransomware, social engineering, fileless malware, vulnerability exploits, and drive-by-downloads, are just the tip of the iceberg. There are “several hundred thousand new malicious programs or unwanted apps registered every day,” according to a new Osterman Research report. It argues that, while endpoint protection must be a “key component” in corporate security strategy, “It can only be one strand” —complemented with protection in the cloud, on the network, and elsewhere.

            There’s more. Best-of-breed approaches have saddled organizations with too many disparate tools over the years, creating extra cost, complexity, management headaches, and security gaps. This adds to the workload for overwhelmed security teams.

            According to Gartner, “Two of the biggest challenges for all security organizations are hiring and retaining technically savvy security operations staff, and building a security operations capability that can confidently configure and maintain a defensive posture as well as provide a rapid detection and response capacity. Mainstream organizations are often overwhelmed by the intersectionality of these two problems.”

            XDR appeals to organizations struggling with all of these challenges as well as those unable to gain value from, or who don’t have the resources to invest in, SIEM or SOAR solutions. So what does it involve?

            What to look for

            As reported by Gartner, all XDR solutions should fundamentally achieve the following:

            • Improve protection, detection, and response
            • Enhance overall productivity of operational security staff
            • Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) to create an effective detection and response capability

            However, the analyst urges IT buyers to think carefully before choosing which provider to invest in. That’s because, in some cases, underlying threat intelligence may be underpowered, and vendors have gaps in their product portfolio which could create dangerous IT blind spots. Efficacy will be a key metric. As Gartner says, “You will not only have to answer the question of does it find things, but also is it actually finding things that your existing tooling is not.”

            A leader in XDR

            This is where Trend Micro XDR excels. It has been designed to go beyond the endpoint, collecting and correlating data from across the organization, including; email, endpoint, servers, cloud workloads, and networks. With this enhanced context, and the power of Trend Micro’s AI algorithms and expert security analytics, the platform is able to identify threats more easily and contain them more effectively.

            Forrester recently recognized Trend Micro as a leader in enterprise detection and response, saying of XDR, “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 performing threat hunting.”

            According to Gartner, fewer than 5% of organizations currently employ XDR. This means there’s a huge need to improve enterprise-wide protection. At a time when corporate resources are being stretched to the limit, Trend Micro XDR offers global organizations an invaluable chance to minimize enterprise risk exposure whilst maximizing the productivity of security teams.

            The post Beyond the Endpoint: Why Organizations are Choosing XDR for Holistic Detection and Response appeared first on .

            Survey: Employee Security Training is Essential to Remote Working Success

            By Trend Micro

            Organisations have been forced to adapt rapidly over the past few months as government lockdowns kept most workers to their homes. For many, the changes they’ve made may even become permanent as more distributed working becomes the norm. This has major implications for cybersecurity. Employees are often described as the weakest link in the corporate security chain, so do they become an even greater liability when working from home?

            Unfortunately, a major new study from Trend Micro finds that, although many have become more cyber-aware during lockdown, bad habits persist. CISOs looking to ramp up user awareness training may get a better return on investment if they try to personalize strategies according to specific user personas.

            What we found

            We polled 13,200 remote workers across 27 countries to compile the Head in the Clouds study. It reveals that 72% feel more conscious of their organisation’s cybersecurity policies since lockdown began, 85% claim they take IT instructions seriously, and 81% agree that cybersecurity is partly their responsibility. Nearly two-thirds (64%) even admit that using non-work apps on a corporate device is a risk.

            Yet in spite of these lockdown learnings, many employees are more preoccupied by productivity. Over half (56%) admit using a non-work app on a corporate device, and 66% have uploaded corporate data to it; 39% of respondents “often” or “always” access corporate data from a personal device; and 29% feel they can get away with using a non-work app, as IT-backed solutions are “nonsense.”

            This is a recipe for shadow IT and escalating levels of cyber-risk. It also illustrates that current approaches to user awareness training are falling short. In fact, many employees seem to be aware of what best practice looks like, they just choose not to follow it.

            Four security personas

            This is where the second part of the research comes in. Trend Micro commissioned Dr Linda Kaye, Cyberpsychology Academic at Edge Hill University, to profile four employee personas based on their cybersecurity behaviors: fearful, conscientious, ignorant and daredevil.

            In this way: Fearful employees may benefit from training simulation tools like Trend Micro’s Phish Insight, with real-time feedback from security controls and mentoring.

            Conscientious staff require very little training but can be used as exemplars of good behavior, and to team up with “buddies” from the other groups.

            Ignorant users need gamification techniques and simulation exercises to keep them engaged in training, and may also require additional interventions to truly understand the consequences of risky behavior.

            Daredevil employees are perhaps the most challenging because their wrongdoing is the result not of ignorance but a perceived superiority to others. Organisations may need to use award schemes to promote compliance, and, in extreme circumstances, step up data loss prevention and security controls to mitigate their risky behavior.

            By understanding that no two employees are the same, security leaders can tailor their approach in a more nuanced way. Splitting staff into four camps should ensure a more personalized approach than the one-size-fits-all training sessions most organisations run today.

            Ultimately, remote working only works if there is a high degree of trust between managers and their teams. Once the pandemic recedes and staff are technically allowed back in the office, that trust will have to be re-earned if they are to continue benefiting from a Work From Home environment.

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            Connected Car Standards – Thank Goodness!

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

            Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) require harmonization among manufacturers to have any chance of succeeding in the real world. No large-scale car manufacturer, multimodal shipper, or MaaS (Mobility as a Service) provider will risk investing in a single-vendor solution. Successful ITS require interoperable components, especially for managing cybersecurity issues. See https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/intelligent-transportation-systems for a set of reports on ITS cybersecurity.

            The good news is we now have a standard for automotive cybersecurity, ISA/SAE 21434. This standard addresses all the major elements of connected car security including V2X, reaching from the internals of ECUs and communications busses including CAN to the broader issues of fleet management and public safety. See https://www.iso.org/standard/70918.html for the current draft version of this standard.

            Intelligent transport systems rely on complex, contemporary infrastructure elements, including cloud (for data aggregation, traffic analysis, and system-wide recommendations) and 5G (for inter-component networking and real-time sensing). ITS also rely on aging industrial control systems and components, for vehicle detection, weather reporting, and traffic signaling, some dating back forty years or more. This profound heterogeneity makes the cybersecurity problem unwieldy. Automotive systems generally are the most complex public-facing applications of industrial IoT. Any information security problems with them will erode public trust in this important and ultimately critical infrastructure.

            Robert Bosch GmbH began working on the first automotive bus architecture in 1986. Automobiles gained increasing electronic functions (smog controls, seat belt monitors, electric window controls, climate controls, and so on). With each new device, the manufacturers had to install additional point-to-point wiring to monitor and control them. This led to increasing complexity, the possibility for error, extended manufacturing time, more costly diagnosis and repair post-sales, and added weight. See Figure 1 for details. By replacing point-to-point wiring with a simple bus, manufacturers could introduce new features connected with one pair of wires for control. This simplified design, manufacturing, diagnosis, and improved quality and maintainability.

            Figure 1: CAN Networks Significantly Reduce Wiring (from National Instruments https://www.ni.com/en-us/innovations/white-papers/06/controller-area-network–can–overview.html)

            The bus was simple: all devices saw all traffic and responded to messages relevant to them. Each message has a standard format, with a header describing the message content and priority (the arbitration IDs), the body which contains the relevant data, and a cyclic redundancy check (CRC), which is a code to verify that the message contents are accurate. This CRC uses a mathematical formula to determine if any bits have flipped, and for small numbers of errors can correct the message, like a checksum. This is not as powerful as a digital signature. It has no cryptographic power. Every device on the bus can use the CRC algorithm to create a code for messages it sends and to verify the data integrity of messages it receives. Other than this, there is no data confidentiality, authentication, authorization, data integrity, or non-repudiation in CAN bus messages – or any other automotive bus messages. The devices used in cars are generally quite simple, lightweight, and inexpensive: 8-bit processors with little memory on board. Any device connected to the network is trusted. Figure 2 shows the layout of a CAN bus message.

            Figure 2: The Standard CAN Frame Format, from National Instruments

            Today’s automobiles have more sophisticated devices on board. The types of messages and the services the offer are becoming more complex. In-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems provide maps, music, Bluetooth connectivity for smartphones and other devices, in addition to increasingly more elaborate driving assistance and monitoring systems all add more traffic to the bus. But given the diversity of manufacturers and suppliers, impeding security measures over the automotive network. No single vendor could today achieve what Robert Bosch did nearly forty years ago. Yet the need for stronger vehicle security is growing.

            The ISO/SAE 21434 standard describes a model for securing the supply chain for automotive technology, for validating the integrity of the development process, detecting vulnerabilities and cybersecurity attacks in automotive systems, and managing the deployment of fixes as needed. It is comprehensive. ISO/SAE 21434 builds on decades of work in information security. By applying that body of knowledge to the automotive case, the standard will move the industry towards a safer and more trustworthy connected car world.

            But the standard’s value doesn’t stop with cars and intelligent transport systems. Domains far beyond connected cars will benefit from having a model for securing communications among elements from diverse manufacturers sharing a common bus. The CAN bus and related technologies are used onboard ships, in aircraft, in railroad management, in maritime port systems, and even in controlling prosthetic limbs. The vulnerabilities are common, the complexity of the supply chain is equivalent, and the need for a comprehensive architectural solution is as great. So this standard is a superb achievement and will go far to improve the quality, reliability, and trustworthiness of critical systems globally.

            What do you think? Let me know in the comments below or @WilliamMalikTM.

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            Risk Decisions in an Imperfect World

            By Mark Nunnikhoven (Vice President, Cloud Research)

            Risk decisions are the foundation of information security. Sadly, they are also one of the most often misunderstood parts of information security.

            This is bad enough on its own but can sink any effort at education as an organization moves towards a DevOps philosophy.

            To properly evaluate the risk of an event, two components are required:

            1. An assessment of the impact of the event
            2. The likelihood of the event

            Unfortunately, teams—and humans in general—are reasonably good at the first part and unreasonably bad at the second.

            This is a problem.

            It’s a problem that is amplified when security starts to integration with teams in a DevOps environment. Originally presented as part of AllTheTalks.online, this talk examines the ins and outs of risk decisions and how we can start to work on improving how our teams handle them.

             

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            Principles of a Cloud Migration

            By Jason Dablow
            cloud

            Development and application teams can be the initial entry point of a cloud migration as they start looking at faster ways to accelerate value delivery. One of the main things they might use during this is “Infrastructure as Code,” where they are creating cloud resources for running their applications using lines of code.

            In the below video, as part of a NADOG (North American DevOps Group) event, I describe some additional techniques on how your development staff can incorporate the Well Architected Framework and other compliance scanning against their Infrastructure as Code prior to it being launched into your cloud environment.

            If this content has sparked additional questions, please feel free to reach out to me on my LinkedIn. Always happy to share my knowledge of working with large customers on their cloud and transformation journeys!

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            Knowing your shared security responsibility in Microsoft Azure and avoiding misconfigurations

            By Trend Micro

             

            Trend Micro is excited to launch new Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity capabilities that will strengthen protection for Azure resources.

             

            As with any launch, there is a lot of new information, so we decided to sit down with one of the founders of Conformity, Mike Rahmati. Mike is a technologist at heart, with a proven track record of success in the development of software systems that are resilient to failure and grow and scale dynamically through cloud, open-source, agile, and lean disciplines. In the interview, we picked Mike’s brain on how these new capabilities can help customers prevent or easily remediate misconfigurations on Azure. Let’s dive in.

             

            What are the common business problems that customers encounter when building on or moving their applications to Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

            The common problem is there are a lot of tools and cloud services out there. Organizations are looking for tool consolidation and visibility into their cloud environment. Shadow IT and business units spinning up their own cloud accounts is a real challenge for IT organizations to keep on top of. Compliance, security, and governance controls are not necessarily top of mind for business units that are innovating at incredible speeds. That is why it is so powerful to have a tool that can provide visibility into your cloud environment and show where you are potentially vulnerable from a security and compliance perspective.

             

            Common misconfigurations on AWS are an open Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or a misconfigured IAM policy. What is the equivalent for Microsoft?

            The common misconfigurations are actually quite similar to what we’ve seen with AWS. During the product preview phase, we’ve seen customers with many of the same kinds of misconfiguration issues as we’ve seen with AWS. For example, Microsoft Azure Blobs Storage is the equivalent to Amazon S3 – that is a common source of misconfigurations. We have observed misconfiguration in two main areas: Firewall and Web Application Firewall (WAF),which is equivalent to AWS WAF. The Firewall is similar to networking configuration in AWS, which provides inbound protection for non-HTTP protocols and network related protection for all ports and protocols. It is important to note that this is based on the 100 best practices and 15 services we currently support for Azure and growing, whereas, for AWS, we have over 600 best practices in total, with over 70 controls with auto-remediation.

             

            Can you tell me about the CIS Microsoft Azure Foundation Security Benchmark?

            We are thrilled to support the CIS Microsoft Azure Foundation Security Benchmark. The CIS Microsoft Azure Foundations Benchmark includes automated checks and remediation recommendations for the following: Identity and Access Management, Security Center, Storage Accounts, Database Services, Logging and Monitoring, Networking, Virtual Machines, and App Service. There are over 100 best practices in this framework and we have rules built to check for all of those best practices to ensure cloud builders are avoiding risk in their Azure environments.

            Can you tell me a little bit about the Microsoft Shared Responsibility Model?

            In terms of shared responsibility model, it’s is very similar to AWS. The security OF the cloud is a Microsoft responsibility, but the security IN the cloud is the customers responsibility. Microsoft’s ecosystem is growing rapidly, and there are a lot of services that you need to know in order to configure them properly. With Conformity, customers only need to know how to properly configure the core services, according to best practices, and then we can help you take it to the next level.

            Can you give an example of how the shared responsibility model is used?

            Yes. Imagine you have a Microsoft Azure Blob Storage that includes sensitive data. Then, by accident, someone makes it public. The customer might not be able to afford an hour, two hours, or even days to close that security gap.

            In just a few minutes, Conformity will alert you to your risk status, provide remediation recommendations, and for our AWS checks give you the ability to set up auto-remediation. Auto-remediation can be very helpful, as it can close the gap in near-real time for customers.

            What are next steps for our readers?

            I’d say that whether your cloud exploration is just taking shape, you’re midway through a migration, or you’re already running complex workloads in the cloud, we can help. You can gain full visibility of your infrastructure with continuous cloud security and compliance posture management. We can do the heavy lifting so you can focus on innovating and growing. Also, you can ask anyone from our team to set you up with a complimentary cloud health check. Our cloud engineers are happy to provide an AWS and/or Azure assessment to see if you are building a secure, compliant, and reliable cloud infrastructure. You can find out your risk level in just 10-minutes.

             

            Get started today with a 60-day free trial >

            Check out our knowledge base of Azure best practice rules>

            Learn more >

             

            Do you see value in building a security culture that is shifted left?

            Yes, we have done this for our customers using AWS and it has been very successful. The more we talk about shifting security left the better, and I think that’s where we help customers build a security culture. Every cloud customer is struggling with implementing earlier on in the development cycle and they need tools. Conformity is a tool for customers which is DevOps or DevSecOps friendly and helps them build a security culture that is shifted left.

            We help customers shift security left by integrating the Conformity API into their CI/CD pipeline. The product also has preventative controls, which our API and template scanners provide. The idea is we help customers shift security left to identify those misconfigurations early on, even before they’re actually deployed into their environments.

            We also help them scan their infrastructure-as-code templates before being deployed into the cloud. Customers need a tool to bake into their CI/CD pipeline. Shifting left doesn’t simply mean having a reporting tool, but rather a tool that allows them to shift security left. That’s where our product, Conformity, can help.

             

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            The Fear of Vendor Lock-in Leads to Cloud Failures

            By Trend Micro

             

            Vendor lock-in has been an often-quoted risk since the mid-1990’s.

            Fear that by investing too much with one vendor, an organization reduces their options in the future.

            Was this a valid concern? Is it still today?

             

            The Risk

            Organizations walk a fine line with their technology vendors. Ideally, you select a set of technologies that not only meet your current need but that align with your future vision as well.

            This way, as the vendor’s tools mature, they continue to support your business.

            The risk is that if you have all of your eggs in one basket, you lose all of the leverage in the relationship with your vendor.

            If the vendor changes directions, significantly increases their prices, retires a critical offering, the quality of their product drops, or if any number of other scenarios happen, you are stuck.

            Locking in to one vendor means that the cost of switching to another or changing technologies is prohibitively expensive.

            All of these scenarios have happened and will happen again. So it’s natural that organizations are concerned about lock-in.

            Cloud Maturity

            When the cloud started to rise to prominence, the spectre of vendor lock-in reared its ugly head again. CIOs around the world thought that moving the majority of their infrastructure to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud would lock them into that vendor for the foreseeable future.

            Trying to mitigate this risk, organizations regularly adopt a “cloud neutral” approach. This means they only use “generic” cloud services that can be found from the providers. Often hidden under the guise of a “multi-cloud” strategy, it’s really a hedge so as not to lose position in the vendor/client relationship.

            In isolation, that’s a smart move.

            Taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture starts to show some of the issues with this approach.

            Automation

            The first issue is the heavy use of automation in cloud deployments means that vendor “lock-in” is not nearly as significant a risk as in was in past decades. The manual effort required to make a vendor change for your storage network used to be monumental.

            Now? It’s a couple of API calls and a consumption-based bill adjusted by the megabyte. This pattern is echoed across other resource types.

            Automation greatly reduces the cost of switching providers, which reduces the risk of vendor lock-in.

            Missing Out

            When your organization sets the mandate to only use the basic services (server-based compute, databases, network, etc.) from a cloud service provider, you’re missing out one of the biggest advantages of moving to the cloud; doing less.

            The goal of a cloud migration is to remove all of the undifferentiated heavy lifting from your teams.

            You want your teams directly delivering business value as much of the time as possible. One of the most direct routes to this goal is to leverage more and more managed services.

            Using AWS as an example, you don’t want to run your own database servers in Amazon EC2 or even standard RDS if you can help it. Amazon Aurora and DynamoDB generally offer less operation impacts, higher performance, and lower costs.

            When organizations are worried about vendor lock-in, they typically miss out on the true value of cloud; a laser focus on delivering business value.

             

            But Multi-cloud…

            In this new light, a multi-cloud strategy takes on a different aim. Your teams should be trying to maximize business value (which includes cost, operational burden, development effort, and other aspects) wherever that leads them.

            As organizations mature in their cloud usage and use of DevOps philosophies, they generally start to cherry pick managed services from cloud providers that best fit the business problem at hand.

            They use automation to reduce the impact if they have to change providers at some point in the future.

            This leads to a multi-cloud split that typically falls around 80% in one cloud and 10% in the other two. That can vary depending on the situation but the premise is the same; organizations that thrive have a primary cloud and use other services when and where it makes sense.

             

            Cloud Spanning Tools

            There are some tools that are more effective when they work in all clouds the organization is using. These tools range from software products (like deployment and security tools) to metrics to operational playbooks.

            Following the principles of focusing on delivering business value, you want to actively avoid duplicating a toolset unless it’s absolutely necessary.

            The maturity of the tooling in cloud operations has reached the point where it can deliver support to multiple clouds without reducing its effectiveness.

            This means automation playbooks can easily support multi-cloud (e.g.,  Terraform). Security tools can easily support multi-cloud (e.g., Trend Micro Cloud One™).  Observability tools can easily support multi-cloud (e.g., Honeycomb.io).

            The guiding principle for a multi-cloud strategy is to maximize the amount of business value the team is able to deliver. You accomplish this by becoming more efficient (using the right service and tool at the right time) and by removing work that doesn’t matter to that goal.

            In the age of cloud, vendor lock-in should be far down on your list of concerns. Don’t let a long standing fear slow down your teams.

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            Trend Micro Guardian: Protecting Your Kids On-the-Go

            By Trend Micro

            Some smart devices are not limited to use on the home network; for instance, your child’s mobile phone or tablet. Keeping your kids safe on these on-the-go devices means extending your security policies beyond the home. Trend Micro Home Network Security (HNS) makes it easy with its complementary app, Trend Micro Guardian. Guardian integrates with HNS’s parental control rules via Mobile Device Management technology to extend the rules you’ve applied on your home network to your children’s Wi-Fi / mobile connections outside the home.

            Guardian enables the following security and parental controls:

            • Web Threat Protection, which blocks dangerous websites and phishing attempts.
            • Website Filtering, which is equipped with category-based filters to protect your children from inappropriate websites.
            • You can Pause the Internet and YouTube, to turn off your child’s distractions when they need to focus on other tasks.
            • You can enforce Time Limits, to restrict when your child is online within a range of time. (This feature will be available around mid-year).

            Setup and Configuration

            In order to benefit from these features, the Trend Micro Guardian app must be installed on your child’s device and paired with your Home Network Security Station. It’s recommended that you install Trend Micro Guardian on the child’s device before setting up Parental Controls. However, you may also save the Trend Micro Guardian setup process until after you’ve defined the Parental Control rules for your child. Either way, Guardian accepts the rules defined and applies them to the child’s device whenever they go beyond your home and hook up to public WiFi or their mobile network.

            For the Trend Micro Guardian app setup and installation process, you may refer to FAQ: Trend Micro Guardian or the Home Network Security Product Guide for more details.

            A Few Additional Notes

            • Trend Micro Guardian is only available for Android and iOS platforms. For protecting your child while using a laptop outside the home network, use Trend Micro Security for your Windows machine (Antivirus+, Internet Security or Maximum Security) or Mac (Antivirus for Mac), available directly from the Trend Micro website. Trend Micro Antivirus One is also available for Macs directly from the Apple App Store.
            • Once installed, you need to protect Trend Micro Guardian from being uninstalled. Uninstall Protection is set up somewhat differently on an iOS or Android device. Again refer to the Home Network Security Product Guide for more details.
            • Trend Micro Guardian can be installed on your mobile device with any existing Trend Micro Mobile Security app for Android or iOS. When Trend Micro Mobile Security and Trend Micro Guardian are used together, Guardian takes precedence over Mobile Security in detecting and blocking dangerous or malicious sites. It does not affect the other features in Trend Micro Mobile Security, which are still fully enabled on your mobile device.

            Protection that Goes Where Your Child Goes

            Internet safety for kids is a must, whether they’re online at home, or out and about, away from home. Trend Micro Guardian ensures the child will observe and practice the same security rules at home and on the internet anywhere in the world.

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

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            Not Just Good Security Products, But a Good Partner

            By Greg Young (Vice President for Cybersecurity)
            cybersecurity champion badge of honor

            The analyst firm Canalys annually produces their Cybersecurity Leadership Matrix. Whereas many third-party assessments are looking at just the security product, this one focuses on the value to channel partners.

            Sidebar: what is the channel? If you aren’t actively buying or selling cybersecurity and aren’t familiar with the term, the short answer is that the channel is how products get from the maker to the buyer. Resellers are the most commonly discussed example, however the channel is also distributors, system integrators, and others. Most established cybersecurity makers don’t have a big sales force that sells direct, for good reasons. Channel partners are usually not a single product seller, and they know a region, vertical or specific customer best and are ideally the end users’ de facto partner or trusted advisor. The channel dedicated for smaller companies sell more than just cybersecurity and can be an extension of the CIO team. Channel partners select products carefully: they are usually in for a much longer period of time and more of a commitment than a specific buyer.

            Partners have to train staff, make significant investments, become familiar with the product and back it with their reputation. Features alone aren’t enough. Even the very best product that isn’t backed with a channel friendly vendor is a nightmare for the channel. Of course, bad products are a non-starter no matter how channel-friendly a company is as that reseller has to live with any fallout. Assessing channel success matters obviously to the channel but it is also significant for buyers. Channel partner success at the end of the day is a simple metric: a positive customer experience throughout a product lifecycle. In my experience a channel partner will do a more thorough product assessment than any enterprise buyer.

            Canalys does a good job in capturing the channel aspects of a successful cybersecurity vendor with the leadership matrix, and they make it more than just about product or channel but combine the two.  So, it is good news that Trend Micro is in the upper right “Champions” quadrant in 2020.  It’s significant to me that Trend Micro is one of only seven entries in that quadrant when there are, according to Richard Stiennon, more than 2300 cybersecurity vendors in the world[1].  What is particularly significant to me is that the placement movement for Trend from last 2019 was so important, as it reflects the effort and focus we have put on our channel activities.

            Like any third-party assessment it matters to know the context, so check out the Matrix here, and our own formal announcement here.

             

            [1] https://www.techcentury.com/2020/02/14/cybersecurity-guru-stiennon-publishes-2020-yearbook/

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            Message from Eva Chen – as a human being, not a CEO: We need to speak out and act against racism

            By Eva Chen

             

            I would like to express my outrage over the brutal killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery – not as the CEO of an international company, but as a human being and a citizen of the world. It makes me very sad, but also intensely frustrated and angry to realize how little is being done around the world to overcome the blatant inequality and racism that persists. The disturbing, high-profile incidents in the past weeks expose in a cruel way how we live in a world where fear, uncertainty and discrimination continue to impact the lives of black people every single day.

             

            As a global society, we should do better; we must be better.

             

            At Trend Micro, we are committed to providing a safe, empathetic and respectful environment where we reject any form of racism and discrimination, with zero tolerance. We not only welcome diversity in our Trend Micro family, we encourage it, whether it is diversity of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, gender identification, sexual orientation, physical ability, age, religion, veteran status, socio-economic status, and political philosophy. We believe it is our different backgrounds and experiences that make us who we are and make us as strong as we are. But we continue to listen and learn how to create equality for all.

             

            I feel very strongly that we all need to do something and become a force for change. We have an obligation towards our communities and our children to leave this world in a better place. I am fortunate as a CEO to be able to use my voice to speak out against any kind of discrimination, against racism in any form. I ask that we all seek to expand our perspectives and heighten our awareness of others. We must open our eyes to the current and ugly truth and challenge any subconscious tendencies to avoid this painful reality of inequality!

             

            Today I am inspired to lift up the voice of a young Trend Micro employee who posted on our internal web site:

             

            “Progress is a process. Unity is part of the process.
            Unity drives awareness…
            Awareness drives education…
            Education drives action…
            Action drives change…
            Let’s make a change!”

             

            These are very difficult times for us as individuals, communities, and as nations. I ask you to join me in doing our part to fight racism – we can’t afford any more lives to be lost, any more children growing up deprived of their opportunities. First and foremost, we need to listen to our black communities and educate ourselves. And we must acknowledge that this is an ongoing issue – and continue to fight inequality every day, even when the protests don’t make headlines anymore. We can all make a difference. Speak out against injustice, listen to the stories of inequality, act, vote and make a change.

             

            Together, we can make this world a better place!

            Eva Chen

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            Principles of a Cloud Migration – Security W5H – The HOW

            By Jason Dablow
            cloud

            “How about… ya!”

            Security needs to be treated much like DevOps in evolving organizations; everyone in the company has a responsibility to make sure it is implemented. It is not just a part of operations, but a cultural shift in doing things right the first time – Security by default. Here are a few pointers to get you started:

            1. Security should be a focus from the top on down

            Executives should be thinking about security as a part of the cloud migration project, and not just as a step of the implementation. Security should be top of mind in planning, building, developing, and deploying applications as part of your cloud migration. This is why the Well Architected Framework has an entire pillar dedicated to security. Use it as a framework to plan and integrate security at each and every phase of your migration.

            2. A cloud security policy should be created and/or integrated into existing policy

            Start with what you know: least privilege permission models, cloud native network security designs, etc. This will help you start creating a framework for these new cloud resources that will be in use in the future. Your cloud provider and security vendors, like Trend Micro, can help you with these discussions in terms of planning a thorough policy based on the initial migration services that will be used. Remember from my other articles, a migration does not just stop when the workload has been moved. You need to continue to invest in your operation teams and processes as you move to the next phase of cloud native application delivery.

            3. Trend Micro’s Cloud One can check off a lot of boxes!

            Using a collection of security services, like Trend Micro’s Cloud One, can be a huge relief when it comes to implementing runtime security controls to your new cloud migration project. Workload Security is already protecting thousands of customers and billions of workload hours within AWS with security controls like host-based Intrusion Prevention and Anti-Malware, along with compliance controls like Integrity Monitoring and Application Control. Meanwhile, Network Security can handle all your traffic inspection needs by integrating directly with your cloud network infrastructure, a huge advantage in performance and design over Layer 4 virtual appliances requiring constant changes to route tables and money wasted on infrastructure. As you migrate your workloads, continuously check your posture against the Well Architected Framework using Conformity. You now have your new infrastructure secure and agile, allowing your teams to take full advantage of the newly migrated workloads and begin building the next iteration of your cloud native application design.

            This is part of a multi-part blog series on things to keep in mind during a cloud migration project.  You can start at the beginning which was kicked off with a webinar here: https://resources.trendmicro.com/Cloud-One-Webinar-Series-Secure-Cloud-Migration.html. To have a more personalized conversation, please add me to LinkedIn!

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            Securing the Connected World with Support for The Shadowserver Foundation

            By Trend Micro

            If the first few months of 2020 have taught us anything, it’s the importance of collaboration and partnership to tackle a common enemy. This is true of efforts to fight the current pandemic, and it’s also true of the fight against cybercrime. That’s why Trend Micro has, over the years, struck partnerships with various organizations that share a common goal of securing our connected world.

            So when we heard that one of these partners, the non-profit Shadowserver Foundation, was in urgent need of financial help, we didn’t hesitate to step in. Our new $600,000 commitment over three years will help to support the vital work it does collecting and sharing global threat data for the next three years.

            What is Shadowserver?

            Founded in 2004, The Shadowserver Foundation is now one of the world’s leading resources for reporting vulnerabilities, threats and malicious activity. Their work has helped to pioneer a more collaborative approach among the international cybersecurity community, from vendors and academia to governments and law enforcement.

            Today, its volunteers, 16 full-time staff and global infrastructure of sinkholes, honeypots and honeyclients help run 45 scans across 4 billion IPv4 addresses every single day. It also performs daily sandbox scans on 713,000 unique malware samples, to add to the 12 Petabytes of malware and threat intelligence already stored on its servers. Thousands of network owners, including 109 CSIRTS in 138 countries worldwide, rely on the resulting daily reports — which are available free of charge to help make the digital world a safer place.

            A Global Effort

            Trend Micro is a long-time partner of The Shadowserver Foundation. We automatically share new malware samples via its malware exchange program, with the end goal of improving protection for both Trend Micro customers and Shadowserver subscribers around the world. Not only that, but we regularly collaborate on global law enforcement-led investigations. Our vision and mission statements of working towards a more secure, connected world couldn’t be more closely aligned.

            As COVID-19 has brutally illustrated, protecting one’s own backyard is not enough to tackle a global challenge. Instead, we need to reach out and build alliances to take on the threats and those behind them, wherever they are. These are even more pronounced at a time when remote working has dramatically expanded the corporate attack surface, and offered new opportunities for the black hats to prosper by taking advantage of distracted employees and stretched security teams.

            The money Trend Micro has donated over the next three years will help the Shadowserver Foundation migrate to the new data center it urgently needs and support operational costs that combined will exceed $2 million in 2020. We wish the team well with their plans for this year.

            It’s no exaggeration to say that our shared digital world is a safer place today because of their efforts, and we hope to continue to collaborate long into the future

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            Is Cloud Computing Any Safer From Malicious Hackers?

            By Rob Maynard

            Cloud computing has revolutionized the IT world, making it easier for companies to deploy infrastructure and applications and deliver their services to the public. The idea of not spending millions of dollars on equipment and facilities to host an on-premises data center is a very attractive prospect to many. And certainly, moving resources to the cloud just has to be safer, right? The cloud provider is going to keep our data and applications safe for sure. Hackers won’t stand a chance. Wrong. More commonly than anyone should, I often hear this delusion from many customers. The truth of the matter is, without proper configuration and the right skillsets administering the cloud presence, as well as practicing common-sense security practices, cloud services are just (if not more) vulnerable.

            The Shared Responsibility Model

            Before going any further, we need to discuss the shared responsibility model of the cloud service provider and user.

            When planning your migration to the cloud, one needs to be aware of which responsibilities belong to which entity. As the chart above shows, the cloud service provider is responsible for the cloud infrastructure security and physical security of such. By contrast, the customer is responsible for their own data, the security of their workloads (all the way to the OS layer), as well as the internal network within the companies VPC’s.

            One more pretty important aspect that remains in the hands of the customer is access control. Who has access to what resources? This is really no different than it’s been in the past, exception being the physical security of the data center is handled by the CSP as opposed to the on-prem security, but the company (specifically IT and IT security) are responsible for locking down those resources efficiently.

            Many times, this shared responsibility model is overlooked, and poor assumptions are made the security of a company’s resources. Chaos ensues, and probably a firing or two.

            So now that we have established the shared responsibility model and that the customer is responsible for their own resource and data security, let’s take a look at some of the more common security issues that can affect the cloud.

            Amazon S3 

            Amazon S3 is a truly great service from Amazon Web Services. Being able to store data, host static sites or create storage for applications are widely used use cases for this service. S3 buckets are also a prime target for malicious actors, since many times they end up misconfigured.

            One such instance occurred in 2017 when Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense contractor for the United States, was pillaged of battlefield imagery as well as administrator credentials to sensitive systems.

            Yet another instance occurred in 2017, when due to an insecure Amazon S3 bucket, the records of 198 million American voters were exposed. Chances are if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance this breach got you.

            A more recent breach of an Amazon S3 bucket (and I use the word “breach,” however most of these instances were a result of poor configuration and public exposure, not a hacker breaking in using sophisticated techniques) had to do with the cloud storage provider “Data Deposit Box.” Utilizing Amazon S3 buckets for storage, a configuration issue caused the leak of more than 270,000 personal files as well as personal identifiable information (PII) of its users.

            One last thing to touch on the subject of cloud file storage has to do with how many organizations are using Amazon S3 to store uploaded data from customers as a place to send for processing by other parts of the application. The problem here is how do we know if what’s being uploaded is malicious or not? This question comes up more and more as I speak to more customers and peers in the IT world.

            API

            APIs are great. They allow you to interact with programs and services in a programmatic and automated way. When it comes to the cloud, APIs allow administrators to interact with services, an in fact, they are really a cornerstone of all cloud services, as it allows the different services to communicate. As with anything in this world, this also opens a world of danger.

            Let’s start with the API gateway, a common construct in the cloud to allow communication to backend applications. The API gateway itself is a target, because it can allow a hacker to manipulate the gateway, and allow unwanted traffic through. API gateways were designed to be integrated into applications. They were not designed for security. This means untrusted connections can come into said gateway and perhaps retrieve data that individual shouldn’t see. Likewise, the API requests to the gateway can come with malicious payloads.

            Another attack that can affect your API gateway and likewise the application behind it, is a DDOS attack. The common answer to defend against this is Web Application Firewall (WAF). The problem is WAFs struggle to deal with low, slow DDOS attacks, because the steady stream of requests looks like normal traffic. A really great way to deter DDOS attacks at the API gateway however is to limit the number of requests for each method.

            A great way to prevent API attacks lies in the configuration. Denying anonymous access is huge. Likewise, changing tokens, passwords and keys limit the chance effective credentials can be used. Lastly, disabling any type of clear-text authentication. Furthermore, enforcing SSL/TLS encryption and implementing multifactor authentication are great deterrents.

            Compute

            No cloud service would be complete without compute resources. This is when an organization builds out virtual machines to host applications and services. This also introduces yet another attack surface, and once again, this is not protected by the cloud service provider. This is purely the customers responsibility.

            Many times, in discussing my customers’ migration from an on-premises datacenter to the cloud, one of the common methods is the “lift-and-shift” approach. This means customers take the virtual machines they have running in their datacenter and simply migrating those machines to the cloud. Now, the question is, what kind of security assessment was done on those virtual machines prior to migrating? Were those machines patched? Were discovered security flaws fixed? In my personal experience the answer is no. Therefore, these organizations are simply taking their problems from one location to the next. The security holes still exist and could potentially be exploited, especially if the server is public facing or network policies are improperly applied. For this type of process, I think a better way to look at this is “correct-and-lift-and-shift”.

            Now once organizations have already established their cloud presence, they will eventually need to deploy new resources, and this can mean developing or building upon a machine image. The most important thing to remember here is that these are computers. They are still vulnerable to malware, so regardless of being in the cloud or not, the same security controls are required including things like anti-malware, host IPS, integrity monitoring and application control just to name a few.

            Networking

            Cloud services make it incredibly easy to deploy networks and divide them into subnets and even allow cross network communication. They also give you the ability to lock down the types of traffic that are allowed to traverse those networks to reach resources. This is where security groups come in. These security groups are configured by people, so there’s always that chance that a port is open that shouldn’t be, opening a potential vulnerability. It’s incredibly important from this perspective to really have a grasp on what a compute resource is talking to and why, so the proper security measures can be applied.

            So is the cloud really safe from hackers? No safer than anything else unless organizations make sure they’re taking security in their hands and understand where their responsibility begins, and the cloud service provider’s ends. The arms war between hackers and security professionals is still the same as it ever was, the battleground just changed.

            The post Is Cloud Computing Any Safer From Malicious Hackers? appeared first on .

            How the Cybercriminal Underground Has Changed in 5 Years

            By Trend Micro
            Cybercriminal Underground

            The cybercrime economy is one of the runaway success stories of the 21st century — at least, for those who participate in it. Estimates claim it could be worth over $1 trillion annually, more than the GDP of many countries. Part of that success is due to its ability to evolve and shift as the threat landscape changes. Trend Micro has been profiling the underground cybercrime community for many years. Over the past five years, we’ve seen a major shift to new platforms, communications channels, products and services, as trust on the dark web erodes and new market demands emerge.

            We also expect the current pandemic to create yet another evolution, as cyber-criminals look to take advantage of new ways of working and systemic vulnerabilities.

            Shifts in the underground

            Our latest report, Shifts in the Cybercriminal Underground Markets, charts the fascinating progress of cybercrime over the past five years, through detailed analysis of forums, marketplaces and dark web sites around the world. It notes that in many product areas, the cost of items has dropped as they become commoditised: so where in 2015 you expected to pay $1000 per months for crypting services, today they may be as little as $20.

            In other areas, such as IoT botnets, cyber-propaganda and stolen gaming account credentials, prices are high as new products spark surging demand. Fortnite logins can sell for around $1,000 on average, for example.

            The good news is that law enforcement action appears to be working. Trend Micro has long partnered with Interpol, Europol, national crime agencies and local police to provide assistance in investigations. So it’s good to see that these efforts are having an impact. Many dark web forums and marketplaces have been infiltrated and taken down over the past five years, and our researchers note that current users complain of DDoS-ing and log-in issues.

            Cybercriminals have been forced to take extreme measures as trust erodes among the community, for example, by using gaming communications service Discord to arrange trades, and e-commerce platform Shoppy.gg to sell items. A new site called DarkNet Trust was even created to tackle this specific challenge: it aims to verify cybercrime vendors’ reputations by analysing their usernames and PGP fingerprints.

            What does the future hold?

            However, things rarely stay still on the cybercrime underground. Going forward, we expect to see a range of new tools and techniques flood dark web stores and forums. AI will be at the centre of these efforts. Just as it’s being used by Trend Micro and other companies to root out fraud, sophisticated malware and phishing, it could be deployed in bots designed to predict roll patterns on gambling sites. It could also be used in deepfake services developed to help buyers bypass photo ID systems, or launch sextortion campaigns against individuals.

            Some emerging trends are less hi-tech but no less damaging. Log-ins for wearable devices could be stolen and used to request replacements under warranty, defrauding the customer and costing the manufacturers dear. In fact, access to devices, systems and accounts is so common today that we’re already seeing it spun out in “as-a-service” cybercrime offerings. Prices for access to Fortune 500 companies can hit as much as $10,000.

            Post-pandemic threats

            Then there’s COVID-19. We’re already seeing fraudsters targeted government stimulus money with fake applications, sometimes using phished information from legitimate businesses. And healthcare organisations are being targeted with ransomware as they battle to save lives.

            Even as the pandemic recedes, remote working practices are likely to stay in many organisations. What does this mean for cybercrime? It means more targeting of VPN vulnerabilities with malware and DDoS services. And it means more opportunities to compromise corporate networks via connected home devices. Think of it like a kind of Reverse BYOD scenario – instead of bringing devices into work to connect, the corporate network is now merged with home networks.

            Tackling such challenges will demand a multi-layered strategy predicated around that familiar trio: people, process and technology. It will require more training, better security for home workers, improved patch management and password security, and much more besides. But most of all it will demand continued insight into global cybercriminals and the platforms they inhabit, to anticipate where the next threats are coming from.

            Fortunately, this is where Trend Micro’s expert team of researchers come in. We won’t let them out of our sight.

            The post How the Cybercriminal Underground Has Changed in 5 Years appeared first on .

            From Bugs to Zoombombing: How to Stay Safe in Online Meetings

            By Trend Micro

            The COVID-19 pandemic, along with social distancing, has done many things to alter our lives. But in one respect it has merely accelerated a process begun many years ago. We were all spending more and more time online before the virus struck. But now, forced to work, study and socialize at home, the online digital world has become absolutely essential to our communications — and video conferencing apps have become our “face-to-face” window on the world.

            The problem is that as users flock to these services, the bad guys are also lying in wait — to disrupt or eavesdrop on our chats, spread malware, and steal our data. Zoom’s problems have perhaps been the most widely publicized, because of its quickly rising popularity, but it’s not the only platform whose users have been potentially at risk. Cisco’s WebEx and Microsoft Teams have also had issues; while other platforms, such as Houseparty, are intrinsically less secure (almost by design for their target audience, as the name suggests).

            Let’s take a look at some of the key threats out there and how you can stay safe while video conferencing.

            What are the risks?

            Depending on the platform (designed for work or play) and the use case (business or personal), there are various opportunities for the online attacker to join and disrupt or eavesdrop on video conferencing calls. The latter is especially dangerous if you’re discussing sensitive business information.

            Malicious hackers may also look to deliver malware via chats or shared files to take control of your computer, or to steal your passwords and sensitive personal and financial information. In a business context, they could even try to hijack your video conferencing account to impersonate you, in a bid to steal info from or defraud your colleagues or company.

            The bad guys may also be able to take advantage of the fact that your home PCs and devices are less well-secured than those at work or school—and that you may be more distracted at home and less alert to potential threats.

            To accomplish their goals, malicious hackers can leverage various techniques at their disposal. These can include:

            • Exploiting vulnerabilities in the video conferencing software, particularly when it hasn’t been updated to fend off the latest threats
            • Stealing your log-ins/meeting ID via malware or phishing attacks; or by obtaining a meeting ID or password shared on social media
            • Hiding malware in legitimate-looking video apps, links and files
            • Theft of sensitive data from meeting recordings stored locally or in the cloud.

            Zooming in on trouble

            Zoom has in many ways become the victim of its own success. With daily meeting participants soaring from 10 million in December last year to 200 million by March 2020, all eyes have been focused on the platform. Unfortunately, that also includes hackers. Zoom has been hit by a number of security and privacy issues over the past several months, which include “Zoombombing” (meetings disrupted by uninvited guests), misleading encryption claims, a waiting room vulnerability, credential theft and data collection leaks, and fake Zoom installers. To be fair to Zoom, it has responded quickly to these issues, realigning its development priorities to fix the security and privacy issues discovered by its intensive use.

            And Zoom isn’t alone. Earlier in the year, Cisco Systems had its own problem with WebEx, its widely-used enterprise video conferencing system, when it discovered a flaw in the platform that could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to enter a password-protected video conferencing meeting. All an attacker needed was the meeting ID and a WebEx mobile app for iOS or Android, and they could have barged in on a meeting, no authentication necessary. Cisco quickly moved to fix the high-severity vulnerability, but other flaws (also now fixed) have cropped up in WebEx’s history, including one that could enable a remote attacker to send a forged request to the system’s server.

            More recently, Microsoft Teams joined the ranks of leading business videoconferencing platforms with potentially deadly vulnerabilities. On April 27 it surfaced that for at least three weeks (from the end of February till the middle of March), a malicious GIF could have stolen user data from Teams accounts, possibly across an entire company. The vulnerability was patched on April 20—but it’s a reminder to potential video conferencing users that even leading systems such as Zoom, WebEx, and Teams aren’t fool-proof and require periodic vulnerability and security fixes to keep them safe and secure. This is compounded during the COVID-19 pandemic when workers are working from home and connecting to their company’s network and systems via possibly unsecure home networks and devices.

            Video conferencing alternatives

            So how do you choose the best, most secure, video conferencing software for your work-at-home needs? There are many solutions on the market today. In fact, the choice can be dizzying. Some simply enable video or audio meetings/calls, while others also allow for sharing and saving of documents and notes. Some are only appropriate for one-on-one connections or small groups, while others can scale to thousands.

            In short, you’ll need to choose the video conferencing solution most appropriate to your needs, while checking if it meets a minimum set of security standards for working at home. This set of criteria should include end-to-end encryption, automatic and frequent security updates, the use of auto-generated meeting IDs and strong access controls, a program for managing vulnerabilities, and last but not least, good privacy practices by the company.

            Some video conferencing options alongside Zoom, WebEx, and Teams include:

            • Signal which is end-to-end encrypted and highly secure, but only supports one-to-one calls.
            • FaceTime, Apple’s video chat tool, is easy-to-use and end-to-end encrypted, but is only available to Mac and iOS users.
            • Jitsi Meet is a free, open-source video conferencing app that works on Android, iOS, and desktop devices, with no limit on participants beyond your bandwidth.
            • Skype Meet Now is Microsoft’s free, popular conferencing tool for up to 50 users that can be used without an account, (in contrast to Teams, which is a paid, more business-focused platform for Office 365 users).
            • Google Duo is a free option for video calls only, while the firm’s Hangouts platform can also be used for messaging. Hangouts Meet is a more business-focused paid version.
            • Doxy.me is a well-known telemedicine platform used by doctors and therapists that works through your browser—so it’s up to you to keep your browser updated and to ensure the appropriate security and privacy settings are in place. Secure medical consultation with your healthcare provider is of particular concern during the shelter- and work-from-home quarantine.

            How do I stay safe?

            Whatever video conferencing platform you use, it’s important to bear in mind that cyber-criminals will always be looking to take advantage of any security gaps they can find — in the tool itself or your use of it. So how do you secure your video conferencing apps? Some tips listed here are Zoom-specific, but consider their equivalents in other platforms as general best-practice tips. Depending on the use case, you might choose to not enable some of the options here.

            • Check for end-to-end encryption before getting onboard with the app. This includes encryption for data at rest.
            • Ensure that you generate one-off meeting IDs and passwords automatically for recurring meetings (Zoom).
            • Don’t share any meeting IDs online.
            • Use the “waiting room” feature in Zoom (now fixed), so the host can only allow attendees from a pre-assigned list.
            • Lock the meeting once it’s started to stop anyone new from joining.
            • Allow the host to put attendees on hold, temporarily removing them from a meeting if necessary.
            • Play a sound when someone enters or leaves the room.
            • Set screen-sharing to “host only” to stop uninvited guests from sharing disruptive content.
            • Disable “file transfers” to block possible malware.
            • Keep your systems patched and up-to-date so there are no bugs that hackers can target.
            • Only download conferencing apps from official iOS/Android stores and manufacturer websites.
            • Never click on links or open attachments in unsolicited mail.
            • Check the settings in your video conferencing account. Switch off camera access if you don’t want to appear on-screen.
            • Use a password manager for video conferencing app log-ins.
            • Enhance passwords with two-factor authentication (2FA) or Single-Sign-On (SSO) to protect access, if available.
            • Install anti-malware software from a reputable vendor on all devices and PCs. And implement a network security solution if you can.

            How Trend Micro can help

            Fortunately, Trend Micro has a range of capabilities that can support your efforts to stay safe while using video conferencing services.

            Trend Micro Home Network Security (HNS) protects every device in your home connected to the internet. That means it will protect you from malicious links and attachments in phishing emails spoofed to appear as if sent from video conferencing firms, as well as from those sent by hackers that may have covertly entered a meeting. Its Vulnerability Check can identify any vulnerabilities in your home devices and PCs, including work laptops, and its Remote Access Protection can reduce the risk of tech support scams and unwanted remote connections to your device. Finally, it allows parents to control their kids’ usage of video conferencing applications, to limit their exposure.

            Trend Micro Security also offers protection against email, file, and web threats on your devices. Note too, that Password Manager is automatically installed with Maximum Security to help users create unique, strong passwords for each application/website they use, including video conferencing sites.

            Finally, Trend Micro WiFi Protection (multi-platform) / VPN Proxy One (Mac and iOS) offer VPN connections from your home to the internet, creating secure encrypted tunnels for traffic to flow down. The VPN apps work on both Wi-Fi and Ethernet connections. This could be useful for users concerned their video conferencing app isn’t end-to-end encrypted, or for those wishing to protect their identity and personal information when interacting on these apps.

            The post From Bugs to Zoombombing: How to Stay Safe in Online Meetings appeared first on .

            Securing Smart Manufacturing

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

            “Alexa, turn on the TV.”

            ”Get it yourself.”

            This nightmare scenario could play out millions of times unless people take steps to protect their IoT devices. The situation is even worse in industrial settings. Smart manufacturing, that is, Industry 4.0, relies on tight integration between IT systems and OT systems. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has evolved into supply chain management (SCM) systems, reaching across organizational and national boundaries to gather all forms of inputs, parting out subcomponent development and production, and delivering finished products, payments, and capabilities across a global canvas.

            Each of these synergies fulfills a rational business goal: optimize scarce resources across diverse sources; minimize manufacturing, shipping, and warehousing expense across regions; preserve continuity of operations by diversifying suppliers; maximize sales among multiple delivery channels. The supply chain includes not only raw materials for manufacturing, but also third party suppliers of components, outsourced staff for non-core business functions, open source software to optimize development costs, and subcontractors to fulfill specialized design, assembly, testing, and distribution tasks. Each element of the supply chain is an attack surface.

            Software development has long been a team effort. Not since the 1970s have companies sought out the exceptional talented solo developer whose code was exquisite, flawless, ineffable, undocumented, and impossible to maintain.  Now designs must be clear across the team, and testing requires close collaboration between architects, designers, developers, and production. Teams identify business requirements, then compose a solution from components sourced from publically shared libraries. These libraries may contain further dependencies on yet other third-party code of unknown provenance. Simplified testing relies on the quality of the shared libraries, but shared library routines may have latent (or intentionally hidden) defects that do not come to life until in a vulnerable production environment. Who tests GitHub? The scope of these vulnerabilities is daunting. Trend Micro just published a report, “Attacks on Smart Manufacturing Systems: A Forward-looking Security Analysis,” that surveys the Industry 4.0 attack surface.

            Within the manufacturing operation, the blending of IT and OT exposes additional attack surfaces. Industrial robots provide a clear example. Industrial robots are tireless, precision machines programmed to perform exacting tasks rapidly and flawlessly. What did industry do before robots? Factories either relied on hand-built products or on non-programmable machines that had to be retooled for any change in product specifications. Hand-built technology required highly skilled machinists, who are expensive and require time to deliver. See Figure 1 for an example.

            Figure 1: The cost of precision

            Non-programmable robots require factory down time for retooling, a process that can take weeks. Before programmable industrial robots, automobile factories would deliver a single body style across multiple years of production. Programmable robots can produce different configurations of materials with no down time. They are used everywhere in manufacturing, warehousing, distribution centers, farming, mining, and soon guiding delivery vehicles. The supply chain is automated.

            However, the supply chain is not secure. The protocols industrial robots depend on assumed the environment was isolated. One controller would govern the machines in one location. Since the connection between the controller and the managed robots was hard-wired, there was no need for operator identification or message verification. My controller would never see your robot. My controller would only connect to my robot, so the messages they exchanged needed no authentication. Each device assumed all its connections were externally verified. Even the safety systems assumed the network was untainted and trustworthy. No protocols included any security or privacy controls. Then Industry 4.0 adopted wireless communications.

            The move, which saved the cost of laying cable in the factory, opened those networks to eavesdropping and attacks. Every possible attack against industrial robots is happening now. Bad guys are forging commands, altering specifications, changing or suppressing error alerts, modifying output statistics, and rewriting logs. The consequences can be vast yet nearly undetectable. In the current report on Rogue Robots, our Forward-looking Threat Research team, collaborating with the Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI), analyzes the range of specific attacks today’s robots face, and the potential consequences those attacks may have.

            Owners and operators of programmable robots should heed the warnings of this research, and consider various suggested remedies. Forewarned is forearmed.

            The Rogue Robots research is here: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/internet-of-things/rogue-robots-testing-industrial-robot-security.

            The new report, Attacks on Smart Manufacturing Systems: A Forward-looking Security Analysis, is here: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/threat-intelligence-center/internet-of-things/threats-and-consequences-a-security-analysis-of-smart-manufacturing-systems.

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

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            Principles of a Cloud Migration – Security W5H – The WHERE

            By Jason Dablow
            cloud

            “Wherever I go, there I am” -Security

            I recently had a discussion with a large organization that had a few workloads in multiple clouds while assembling a cloud security focused team to build out their security policy moving forward.  It’s one of my favorite conversations to have since I’m not just talking about Trend Micro solutions and how they can help organizations be successful, but more so on how a business approaches the creation of their security policy to achieve a successful center of operational excellence.  While I will talk more about the COE (center of operational excellence) in a future blog series, I want to dive into the core of the discussion – where do we add security in the cloud?

            We started discussing how to secure these new cloud native services like hosted services, serverless, container infrastructures, etc., and how to add these security strategies into their ever-evolving security policy.

            Quick note: If your cloud security policy is not ever-evolving, it’s out of date. More on that later.

            A colleague and friend of mine, Bryan Webster, presented a concept that traditional security models have been always been about three things: Best Practice Configuration for Access and Provisioning, Walls that Block Things, and Agents that Inspect Things.  We have relied heavily on these principles since the first computer was connected to another. I present to you this handy graphic he presented to illustrate the last two points.

            But as we move to secure cloud native services, some of these are outside our walls, and some don’t allow the ability to install an agent.  So WHERE does security go now?

            Actually, it’s not all that different – just how it’s deployed and implemented. Start by removing the thinking that security controls are tied to specific implementations. You don’t need an intrusion prevention wall that’s a hardware appliance much like you don’t need an agent installed to do anti-malware. There will also be a big focus on your configuration, permissions, and other best practices.  Use security benchmarks like the AWS Well-Architected, CIS, and SANS to help build an adaptable security policy that can meet the needs of the business moving forward.  You might also want to consider consolidating technologies into a cloud-centric service platform like Trend Micro Cloud One, which enables builders to protect their assets regardless of what’s being built.  Need IPS for your serverless functions or containers?  Try Cloud One Application Security!  Do you want to push security further left into your development pipeline? Take a look at Trend Micro Container Security for Pre-Runtime Container Scanning or Cloud One Conformity for helping developers scan your Infrastructure as Code.

            Keep in mind – wherever you implement security, there it is. Make sure that it’s in a place to achieve the goals of your security policy using a combination of people, process, and products, all working together to make your business successful!

            This is part of a multi-part blog series on things to keep in mind during a cloud migration project.  You can start at the beginning which was kicked off with a webinar here: https://resources.trendmicro.com/Cloud-One-Webinar-Series-Secure-Cloud-Migration.html.

            Also, feel free to give me a follow on LinkedIn for additional security content to use throughout your cloud journey!

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            Teaming up with INTERPOL to combat COVID-19 threats

            By Trend Micro

            If the past couple of months have taught us anything, it’s that partnerships matter in times of crisis. We’re better, stronger and more resilient when we work together. Specifically, public-private partnerships matter in cybersecurity, which is why Trend Micro is always happy to reach out across industry, academia and law enforcement to offer its expertise.

            We are again delighted to be working with long-time partner INTERPOL over the coming weeks on a new awareness campaign to help businesses and remote workers stay safe from a deluge of COVID-19 threats.

            The new normal

            All over the world, organizations have been forced to rapidly adjust to the new normal: social distancing, government lockdowns and mass remote working. While most have responded superbly to the challenge, there’s no denying that IT security teams and remote access infrastructure are being stretched to the limit. There are understandable concerns that home workers may be more distracted, and therefore likely to click on phishing links, and that their PCs and devices may not be as well protected as corporate equivalents.

            At the same time, the bad guys have also reacted quickly to take advantage of the pandemic. Phishing campaigns using COVID as a lure have surged, spoofing health authorities, government departments and corporate senders. BEC attacks try to leverage the fact that home workers may not have colleagues around to check wire transfer requests. And remote infrastructure like RDP endpoints and VPNs are being targeted by ransomware attackers — even healthcare organizations that are simultaneously trying to treat critical patients infected with the virus.

            Getting the basics right

            That’s why Trend Micro has been pushing out regular updates — not only on the latest scams and threats we’re picking up around the globe, but also with advice on how to secure the newly distributed workforce. Things like improved password security, 2FA for work accounts, automatic software updates, regular back-ups, remote user training, and restricted use of VPNs can all help. We’re also offering six months free use of our flagship Trend Micro Maximum Security product to home workers.

            Yet there’s always more to do. Getting the message across as far and wide as possible is where organizations like INTERPOL come in. That’s why we’re delighted to be teaming up with the global policing organization to run a new public awareness campaign throughout May. It builds on highly successful previous recent campaigns we’ve collaborated on, to tackle BEC and crypto-jacking.

            This time, we’ll be resharing some key resources on social media to alert users to the range of threats out there, and what businesses and home workers can do to stay safe. And we’ll help to develop infographics and other new messages on how to combat ransomware, online scams, phishing and other threats.

            We’re all doing what we can during these difficult days. But if some good can come from a truly terrible event like this, then it’s that we show our strength in the face of adversity. And by following best practices, we can make life much tougher for the cybercriminals looking to profit from tragedy.

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            Principles of a Cloud Migration – Security W5H – The When

            By Jason Dablow
            cloud

            If you have to ask yourself when to implement security, you probably need a time machine!

            Security is as important to your migration as the actual workload you are moving to the cloud. Read that again.

            It is essential to be planning and integrating security at every single layer of both architecture and implementation. What I mean by that, is if you’re doing a disaster recovery migration, you need to make sure that security is ready for the infrastructure, your shiny new cloud space, as well as the operations supporting it. Will your current security tools be effective in the cloud? Will they still be able to do their task in the cloud? Do your teams have a method of gathering the same security data from the cloud? More importantly, if you’re doing an application migration to the cloud, when you actually implement security means a lot for your cost optimization as well.

            NIST Planning Report 02-3

            In this graph, it’s easy to see that the earlier you can find and resolve security threats, not only do you lessen the workload of infosec, but you also significantly reduce your costs of resolution. This can be achieved through a combination of tools and processes to really help empower development to take on security tasks sooner. I’ve also witnessed time and time again that there’s friction between security and application teams often resulting in Shadow IT projects and an overall lack of visibility and trust.

            Start there. Start with bringing these teams together, uniting them under a common goal: Providing value to your customer base through agile secure development. Empower both teams to learn about each other’s processes while keeping the customer as your focus. This will ultimately bring more value to everyone involved.

            At Trend Micro, we’ve curated a number of security resources designed for DevOps audiences through our Art of Cybersecurity campaign.  You can find it at https://www.trendmicro.com/devops/.

            Also highlighted on this page is Mark Nunnikhoven’s #LetsTalkCloud series, which is a live stream series on LinkedIn and YouTube. Seasons 1 and 2 have some amazing content around security with a DevOps focus – stay tuned for Season 3 to start soon!

            This is part of a multi-part blog series on things to keep in mind during a cloud migration project.  You can start at the beginning which was kicked off with a webinar here: https://resources.trendmicro.com/Cloud-One-Webinar-Series-Secure-Cloud-Migration.html.

            Also, feel free to give me a follow on LinkedIn for additional security content to use throughout your cloud journey!

            The post Principles of a Cloud Migration – Security W5H – The When appeared first on .

            Trend Micro’s Top Ten MITRE Evaluation Considerations

            By Trend Micro

            The introduction of the MITRE ATT&CK evaluations is a welcomed addition to the third-party testing arena. The ATT&CK framework, and the evaluations in particular, have gone such a long way in helping advance the security industry as a whole, and the individual security products serving the market.

            The insight garnered from these evaluations is incredibly useful.  But let’s admit, for everyone except those steeped in the analysis, it can be hard to understand. The information is valuable, but dense. There are multiple ways to look at the data and even more ways to interpret and present the results (as no doubt you’ve already come to realize after reading all the vendor blogs and industry articles!) We have been looking at the data for the past week since it published, and still have more to examine over the coming days and weeks.

            The more we assess the information, the clearer the story becomes, so we wanted to share with you Trend Micro’s 10 key takeaways for our results:

            1. Looking at the results of the first run of the evaluation is important:

            • Trend Micro ranked first in initial overall detection. We are the leader in detections based on initial product configurations. This evaluation enabled vendors to make product adjustments after a first run of the test to boost detection rates on a re-test. The MITRE results show the final results after all product changes. If you assess what the product could detect as originally provided, we had the best detection coverage among the pool of 21 vendors.
            • This is important to consider because product adjustments can vary in significance and may or may not be immediately available in vendors’ current product. We also believe it is easier to do better, once you know what the attacker was doing – in the real world, customers don’t get a second try against an attack.
            • Having said that, we too took advantage of the retest opportunity since it allows us to identify product improvements, but our overall detections were so high, that even removing those associated with a configuration change, we still ranked first overall.

            • And so no one thinks we are just spinning… without making any kind of exclusions to the data at all, and just taking the MITRE results in their entirety, Trend Micro had the second highest detection rate, with 91+% detection coverage.

            2. There is a hierarchy in the type of main detections – Techniques is most significant

            • There is a natural hierarchy in the value of the different types of main detections.
              • A general detection indicates that something was deemed suspicious but it was not assigned to a specific tactic or technique.
              • A detection on tactic means the detection can be attributed to a tactical goal (e.g. credential access).
              • Finally, a detection on technique means the detection can be attributed to a specific adversarial action (e.g. credential dumping).
            • We have strong detection on techniques, which is a better detection measure. With the individual MITRE technique identified, the associated tactic can be determined, as typically, there are only a handful of tactics that would apply to a specific technique. When comparing results, you can see that vendors had lower tactic detections on the whole, demonstrating a general acknowledgement of where the priority should lie.
            • Likewise, the fact that we had lower general detections compared to technique detections is a positive. General detections are typically associated with a signature; as such, this proves that we have a low reliance on AV.
            • It is also important to note that we did well in telemetry which gives security analysts access to the type and depth of visibility they need when looking into detailed attacker activity across assets.


            https://attackevals.mitre.org/APT29/detection-categories.html 

            3. More alerts does not equal better alerting – quite the opposite

            • At first glance, some may expect one should have the same number of alerts as detections. But not all detections are created equal, and not everything should have an alert (remember, these detections are for low level attack steps, not for separate attacks.)
            • Too many alerts can lead to alert fatigue and add to the difficulty of sorting through the noise to what is most important.
            • When you consider the alerts associated with our higher-fidelity detections (e.g. detection on technique), you can see that the results show that Trend Micro did very well at reducing the noise of all of the detections into a minimal volume of meaningful/actionable alerts.

            4. Managed Service detections are not exclusive

            • Our MDR analysts contributed to the “delayed detection” category. This is where the detection involved human action and may not have been initiated automatically.
            • Our results shows the strength of our MDR service as one way for detection and enrichment. If an MDR service was included in this evaluation, we believe you would want to see it provide good coverage, as it demonstrates that the team is able to detect based on the telemetry collected.
            • What is important to note though is that the numbers for the delayed detection don’t necessarily mean it was the only way a detection was/could be made; the same detection could be identified by other means. There are overlaps between detection categories.
            • Our detection coverage results would have remained strong without this human involvement – approximately 86% detection coverage (with MDR, it boosted it up to 91%).

            5. Let’s not forget about the effectiveness and need for blocking!

            • This MITRE evaluation did not test for a product’s ability to block/protect from an attack, but rather exclusively looks at how effective a product is at detecting an event that has happened, so there is no measure of prevention efficacy included.
            • This is significant for Trend, as our philosophy is to block and prevent as much as you can so customers have less to clean up/mitigate.

            6. We need to look through more than the Windows

            • This evaluation looked at Windows endpoints and servers only; it did not look at Linux for example, where of course Trend has a great deal of strength in capability.
            • We look forward to the expansion of the operating systems in scope. Mitre has already announced that the next round will include a linux system.

            7. The evaluation shows where our product is going

            • We believe the first priority for this evaluation is the main detections (for example, detecting on techniques as discussed above). Correlation falls into the modifier detection category, which looks at what happens above and beyond an initial detection.
            • We are happy with our main detections, and see great opportunity to boost our correlation capabilities with Trend Micro XDR, which we have been investing in heavily and is at the core of the capabilities we will be delivering in product to customers as of late June 2020.
            • This evaluation did not assess our correlation across email security; so there is correlation value we can deliver to customers beyond what is represented here.

            8. This evaluation is helping us make our product better

            • The insight this evaluation has provided us has been invaluable and has helped us identify areas for improvement and we have initiate product updates as a result.
            • As well, having a product with a “detection only” mode option helps augment the SOC intel, so our participation in this evaluation has enabled us to make our product even more flexible to configure; and therefore, a more powerful tool for the SOC.
            • While some vendors try to use it against us, our extra detections after config change show that we can adapt to the changing threat landscape quickly when needed.

            9. MITRE is more than the evaluation

            • While the evaluation is important, it is important to recognize MITRE ATT&CK as an important knowledge base that the security industry can both align and contribute to.
            • Having a common language and framework to better explain how adversaries behave, what they are trying to do, and how they are trying to do it, makes the entire industry more powerful.
            • Among the many things we do with or around MITRE, Trend has and continues to contribute new techniques to the framework matrices and is leveraging it within our products using ATT&CK as a common language for alerts and detection descriptions, and for searching parameters.

            10. It is hard not to get confused by the fud!

            • MITRE does not score, rank or provide side by side comparison of products, so unlike other tests or industry analyst reports, there is no set of “leaders” identified.
            • As this evaluation assesses multiple factors, there are many different ways to view, interpret and present the results (as we did here in this blog).
            • It is important that individual organizations understand the framework, the evaluation, and most importantly what their own priorities and needs are, as this is the only way to map the results to the individual use cases.
            • Look to your vendors to help explain the results, in the context that makes sense for you. It should be our responsibility to help educate, not exploit.

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            Principles of a Cloud Migration – Security, The W5H – Episode WHAT?

            By Jason Dablow
            cloud

            Teaching you to be a Natural Born Pillar!

            Last week, we took you through the “WHO” of securing a cloud migration here, detailing each of the roles involved with implementing a successful security practice during a cloud migration. Read: everyone. This week, I will be touching on the “WHAT” of security; the key principles required before your first workload moves.  The Well-Architected Framework Security Pillar will be the baseline for this article since it thoroughly explains security concepts in a best practice cloud design.

            If you are not familiar with the AWS Well-Architected Framework, go google it right now. I can wait. I’m sure telling readers to leave the article they’re currently reading is a cardinal sin in marketing, but it really is important to understand just how powerful this framework is. Wait, this blog is html ready – here’s the link: https://wa.aws.amazon.com/index.en.html. It consists of five pillars that include best practice information written by architects with vast experience in each area.

            Since the topic here is Security, I’ll start by giving a look into this pillar. However, I plan on writing about each and as I do, each one of the graphics above will become a link. Internet Magic!

            There are seven principles as a part of the security framework, as follows:

            • Implement a strong identity foundation
            • Enable traceability
            • Apply security at all layers
            • Automate security best practices
            • Protect data in transit and at rest
            • Keep people away from data
            • Prepare for security events

            Now, a lot of these principles can be solved by using native cloud services and usually these are the easiest to implement. One thing the framework does not give you is suggestions on how to set up or configure these services. While it might reference turning on multi-factor authentication as a necessary step for your identity and access management policy, it is not on by default. Same thing with file object encryption. It is there for you to use but not necessarily enabled on the ones you create.

            Here is where I make a super cool (and free) recommendation on technology to accelerate your learning about these topics. We have a knowledge base with hundreds of cloud rules mapped to the Well-Architected Framework (and others!) to help accelerate your knowledge during and after your cloud migration. Let us take the use case above on multi-factor authentication. Our knowledge base article here details the four R’s: Risk, Reason, Rationale, and References on why MFA is a security best practice.

            Starting with a Risk Level and detailing out why this is presents a threat to your configurations is a great way to begin prioritizing findings.  It also includes the different compliance mandates and Well-Architected pillar (obviously Security in this case) as well as descriptive links to the different frameworks to get even more details.

            The reason this knowledge base rule is in place is also included. This gives you and your teams context to the rule and helps further drive your posture during your cloud migration. Sample reason is as follows for our MFA Use Case:

            “As a security best practice, it is always recommended to supplement your IAM user names and passwords by requiring a one-time passcode during authentication. This method is known as AWS Multi-Factor Authentication and allows you to enable extra security for your privileged IAM users. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is a simple and efficient method of verifying your IAM user identity by requiring an authentication code generated by a virtual or hardware device on top of your usual access credentials (i.e. user name and password). The MFA device signature adds an additional layer of protection on top of your existing user credentials making your AWS account virtually impossible to breach without the unique code generated by the device.”

            If Reason is the “what” of the rule, Rationale is the “why” supplying you with the need for adoption.  Again, perfect for confirming your cloud migration path and strategy along the way.

            “Monitoring IAM access in real-time for vulnerability assessment is essential for keeping your AWS account safe. When an IAM user has administrator-level permissions (i.e. can modify or remove any resource, access any data in your AWS environment and can use any service or component – except the Billing and Cost Management service), just as with the AWS root account user, it is mandatory to secure the IAM user login with Multi-Factor Authentication.

            Implementing MFA-based authentication for your IAM users represents the best way to protect your AWS resources and services against unauthorized users or attackers, as MFA adds extra security to the authentication process by forcing IAM users to enter a unique code generated by an approved authentication device.”

            Finally, all the references for each of the risk, reason, and rationale, are included at the bottom which helps provide additional clarity. You’ll also notice remediation steps, the 5th ‘R’ when applicable, which shows you how to actually the correct the problem.

            All of this data is included to the community as Trend Micro continues to be a valued security research firm helping the world be safe for exchanging digital information. Explore all the rules we have available in our public knowledge base: https://www.cloudconformity.com/knowledge-base/.

            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/

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            Trend Micro Integrates with Amazon AppFlow

            By Trend Micro

            The acceleration of in-house development enabled by public cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform adoption in the last few years has given us new levels of visibility and access to data. Putting all of that data together to generate insights and action, however, can substitute one challenge for another.

            Proprietary protocols, inconsistent fields and formatting combined with interoperability and connectivity hurdles can turn the process of answering simple questions into a major undertaking. When this undertaking is a recurrent requirement then that effort can seem overwhelming.

            Nowhere is this more evident than in security teams, where writing code to integrate technologies is rarely a core competency and almost never a core project, but when a compliance or security event requires explanation, finding and making sense of that data is necessary.

            Amazon is changing that with the release of AppFlow. Trend Micro Cloud One is a launch partner with this new service, enabling simple data retrieval from your Cloud One dashboard to be fed into AWS services as needed.

            Amazon AppFlow is an application integration service that enables you to securely transfer data between SaaS applications and AWS services in just a few clicks. With AppFlow, you can data flows between supported SaaS applications, including Trend Micro, and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Redshift, and run flows on a schedule, in response to a business event, or on demand. Data transformation capabilities, such as data masking, validation, and filtering, empower you to enrich your data as part of the flow itself without the need for post-transfer manipulation. AppFlow keeps data secure in transit and at rest with the flexibility to bring your own encryption keys.

            Audit automation

            Any regularly scheduled export or query of Cloud One requires data manipulation before an audit can be performed.

            You may be responsible for weekly or monthly reports on the state of your security agents. To create this report today, you’ve written a script to automate the data analysis process. However, any change to the input or output requires new code to be written for your script, and you have to find somewhere to actually run the script for it to work.

            As part of a compliance team, this isn’t something you really have time for and may not be your area of expertise, so it takes significant effort to create the required audit report.

            Using Amazon AppFlow, you can create a private data flow between RedShift, for example, and your Cloud One environment to automatically and regularly retrieve data describing security policies into an easy to digest format that can be stored for future review. Data flows can also be scheduled so regular reports can be produced without recurring user input.

            This process also improves integrity and reduces overall effort by having reports always available, rather than needing to develop them in response to a request.

            This eliminates the need for custom code and the subsequent frustration from trying to automate this regularly occurring task.

            Developer Enablement

            Developers don’t typically have direct access to security management consoles or APIs for Cloud One or Deep Security as a Service. However, they may need to retrieve data from security agents or check the state of agents that need remediation. This requires someone from the security team to pull data for the developer each time this situation arises.

            While we encourage and enable DevOps cultures working closely with security teams to automate and deploy securely, no one likes unnecessary steps in their workflow. And having to wait on the security team to export data is adding a roadblock to the development team.

            Fortunately, Amazon AppFlow solves this issue as well. By setting up a flow between Deep Security as a Service and Amazon S3, the security team can enable developers to easily access the necessary information related to security agents on demand.

            This provides direct access to the needed data without expanding access controls for critical security systems.

            Security Remediation

            Security teams focus on identifying and remediating security alerts across all their tools and multiple SaaS applications. This often leads to collaborating with other teams across the organization on application-specific issues that must be resolved. Each system and internal team has different requirements and they all take time and attention to ensure everything is running smoothly and securely.

            At Trend Micro, we are security people too. We understand the need to quickly and reliably scale infrastructure without compromising its security integrity. We also know that this ideal state is often hindered by the disparate nature of the solutions on which we rely.

            Integrating Amazon AppFlow with your Cloud One – Workload Security solution allows you to obtain the security status from each agent and deliver them to the relevant development or cloud team. Data from all machines and instances can be sent on demand to the Amazon S3 bucket you indicate. As an added bonus, Amazon S3 can trigger a Lambda to automate how the data is processed, so what is in the storage bucket can be immediately useful. And all of this data is secured in transit and at rest by default, so you don’t have to worry about an additional layer of security controls to maintain.

            Easy and secure remediation that doesn’t slow anyone down is the goal we’re collectively working toward.

            It is always our goal to help your business securely move to and operate in the cloud. Our solutions are designed to enable security teams to seamlessly integrate with a DevOps environment, removing the “roadblock” of security.

            As always, we’re excited to be part of this new Amazon service, and we believe our customers can see immediate value by leveraging Amazon AppFlow with their existing Trend Micro cloud solutions.

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            “We Need COBOL Programmers!” No, You Probably Don’t

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

            Editor’s note: While this topic isn’t entirely security-specific, Trend Micro leader William Malik, has career expertise on the trending topic and shared his perspective.

            ——

            There was a provocative report recently that the Governor of New Jersey told reporters that the state of New Jersey needed COBOL programmers. The reason was that the number of unemployment claims had spiked, and the legacy system running unemployment claims had failed. That 40-year-old system was written in COBOL, so the conclusion was that the old language had finally given out. Hiring COBOL programmers would let the State update and modernize the application to handle the increase in load.

            This might be the problem, but it probably is not. Here’s why.

            1. Software doesn’t wear out, and it doesn’t rust. Any code that’s been running for 40 years is probably rock solid.
            2. Computers have a fixed amount of specific resources: processing power, memory, network capacity, disk storage. If any of these is used up, the computer cannot do any more work.
            3. When a computer application gets more load than it can handle, things back up. Here’s a link to a process that works fine until excessive load leads to a system failure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkQ58I53mjk Trigger warning – this may be unsettling to people working on assembly lines, or on diets.
            4. Adding more resources must fit the machine architecture proportionately.
            5. Incidentally, throwing a bunch of people at an IT problem usually makes things worse.

            From these points, we learn the following lessons.

            Software Doesn’t Wear Out

            Logic is indelible. A computer program is deterministic. It will do exactly what you tell it to do, even if what you tell it to do isn’t precisely what you meant it to do. Code never misbehaves – but your instructions may be incorrect. That’s why debugging is such a hard problem.

            Incidentally, that’s also why good developers usually make lousy testers. The developer focuses her mind on one thing – getting a bunch of silicon to behave. The tester looks for faults, examines edge conditions, limit conditions, and odd configurations of inputs and infrastructure to see how things break. The two mindsets are antithetical.

            Once a piece of software has been in production long enough, the mainline paths are usually defect free. In fact, the rest of the code may be a hot mess, but that stuff doesn’t get executed so those defects are latent and do not impact normal processing. Ed Adams published a report in 1984 titled “Optimizing Preventative Service for Software Products” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5390362, originally published in the IBM Journal of Research and Development, v 28, n 1). He concluded that once a product has been in production for a sufficient time, it was safer to leave it alone. Installing preventative maintenance was likely to disrupt the system. Most IT organizations know this, having learned the hard way. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the mantra for this wisdom.

            As a corollary, new software has a certain defect rate. Fixes to that software typically have a defect rate ten times greater. So if a typical fix is large enough, you put in a new bug for every bug you take out.

            Computers Are Constrained

            All computers have constraints. The relative amount of resources mean some computers are better for some workloads than others. For mainframes, the typical constraint is processing power. That’s why mainframes are tuned to run at 100% utilization, or higher. (How do you get past 100% utilization? Technically, of course, you can’t. But what the measurements are showing you is how much work is ready to run, waiting for available processing power. The scale actually can go to 127%, if there’s enough work ready.)

            Different types of computers have different constraints. Mainframes run near 100% utilization – the CPU is the most expensive and constrained resource. PCs on the other hand never get busy. No human can type fast enough to drive utilization above a few percent. The constrained resource on PCs is typically disk storage. That’s why different types of computers do better at different types of work. PCs are great for user interface stuff. Mainframes are perfect for chewing through a million database records. By chance we developed mainframes first; that’s not an indictment of either type, Both are useful.

            Computers Can Run Out of Resources

            Any IT infrastructure has a design point for load. That is, when you put together a computer you structure it to meet the likely level of demand on the system. If you over-provision it, you waste resources that will never be used. If you under-provision it, you will not meet your service level agreements. So when you begin, you must know what the customers – your users – expect in terms of response time, number of concurrent transactions, database size, growth rates, network transaction load, transaction mix, computational complexity of transaction types, and so on. If you don’t specify what your targets are for these parameters, you probably won’t get the sizing right. You will likely buy too much of one resource or not enough of another.

            Note that cloud computing can help – it allows you to dynamically add additional capacity to handle peak load. However, cloud isn’t a panacea. Some workloads don’t flex that much, so you spend extra money for flexibility for a capability that you can provide more economically and efficiently if it were in-house.

            Add Capacity in Balance

            When I was in high school our physics teacher explained that temperature wasn’t the same as heat. He said “Heat is the result of a physical or chemical reaction. Temperature is simply the change in heat over the mass involved.” One of the kids asked (snarkily) “Then why don’t drag racers have bicycle tires on the back?” The teacher was caught off guard. The answer is that the amount of heat put into the tire is the same regardless of its size, but the temperature was related to the size of the area where the tire touched the road. A bicycle tire has only about two square inches on the pavement, a fat drag tire has 100 square inches or more. So putting the same amount of horsepower spinning the tire will cause the bicycle tire’s temperature to rise about 50 times more than the gumball’s will.

            When you add capacity to a computing system, you need to balance related capacity elements or you’ll be wasting money. Doubling the processor’s power (MHz or MIPS) without proportionately increasing the memory or network capacity simply moves the constraint from one place to another. What used to be a system with a flat-out busy CPU now becomes a system that’s waiting for work with a queue at the memory, the disk drive, or the network card.

            Adding Staff Makes Things Worse

            Increasing any resource creates potential problems of its own, especially of the system’s underlying architecture is ignored. Fore the software development process (regardless of form) one such resource is staff. The book “The Mythical Man-Month” by Fred Brooks (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-mythical-man-month-frederick-p-brooks-jr/1126893908) discusses how things go wrong.

            The core problem is adding more people require strong communications and clear goals. Too many IT projects lack both. I once was part of an organization that consulted on a complex application rewrite – forty consultants, hundreds of developers, and very little guidance. The situation degenerated rapidly when the interim project manager decided we shouldn’t waste time on documentation. A problem would surface, the PM would kick off as task force, hold a meeting, and send everybody on their way. After the meeting, people would ask what specific decisions had been reached, but since there were no minutes, nobody could be sure. That would cause the PM to schedule another meeting, and so on. Two lessons I learned concerns meetings:

            1. If you do not have agenda, you do not have a meeting.
            2. If you do not distribute minutes, you did not have a meeting.

            When you add staff, you must account for the extra overhead managing the activities of each person, and establish processes to monitor changes that every participant must follow. Scrum is an excellent way of flattening potentially harmful changes. By talking face to face regularly, the team knows everything that’s going on. Omit those meetings or rely on second-hand reports and the project is already off the rails. All that remains is to see how far things go wrong before someone notices.

            In Conclusion …

            If you have a computer system that suddenly gets a huge spike in load, do these things first:

            1. Review the performance reports. Look at changes in average queue length, response time, transaction flight time, and any relevant service level agreements or objectives.
            2. Identify likely bottlenecks
            3. Model the impact of additional resources
            4. Apply additional resource proportionately
            5. Continue to monitor performance

            If you are unable to resolve the capacity constraints with these steps, examine the programs for internal limitations:

            1. Review program documentation, specifications, service level objectives, workload models and predictions, data flow diagrams, and design documents to understand architectural and design limits
            2. Determine what resource consumption assumptions were built per transaction type, and expected transaction workload mix
            3. Verify current transaction workload mix and resource consumption per transaction type
            4. Design program extension alternatives to accommodate increased concurrent users, transactions, resource demands per transaction class
            5. Model alternative design choices, including complexity, size, and verification (QA cost)
            6. Initiate refactoring based on this analysis

            Note that if you do not have (or cannot find) the relevant documentation, you will need to examine the source code. At this point, you may need to bring in a small set of experts in the programming language to recreate the relevant documentation. Handy hint: before you start working on the source code, regenerate the load modules and compare them with the production stuff to identify any patches or variance between what’s in the library and what’s actually in production.

            Bringing in a bunch of people before going through this analysis will cause confusion and waste resources. While to an uninformed public it may appear that something is being done, the likelihood is that what is actually being done will have to be expensively undone before the actual core problem can be resolved. Tread lightly. Plan ahead. State your assumptions, then verify them. Have a good plan and you’ll work it out. Remember, it’s just ones and zeros.

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

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            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 .

            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/

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            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.

             

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            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.

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            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

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            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

             

             

             

             

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            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/.

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            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.

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            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

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            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

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            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.

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            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!

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            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.

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            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.

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            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 .

            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 .

            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 .

            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 .

            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 .

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