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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.
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Introduction The CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) is one of the most well-known entry-level certifications within the IT industry. Holding this credential proves your ability to install, configure, manage and support small- to medium-sized networks. A study by CompTIA found that 47% of SMBs see the IT skills gap growing. This IT skills gap is […]
The post Average CCNA salary 2020 appeared first on Infosec Resources.
I’m pleased to report that I’ve achieved a number of personal bests in 2020 but the one I’m most proud about is my achievement in the highly skilled arena of online shopping. I’ve shopped online like I’m competing in the Olympics: groceries, homewares, clothing – even car parts! And my story is not unique. Living with a pandemic has certainly meant we’ve had to adapt – but when it came to ramping up my online shopping so we could stay home and stay safe – I was super happy to adapt!
And research from McAfee shows that I am not alone. In fact, over 40% of Aussies are buying more online since the onset of COVID-19 according to the 2020 Holiday Season: State of Today’s Digital e-Shopper survey. But this where it gets really interesting as the survey also shows that nearly 1/3 of us (29%) are shopping online 3-5 days a week, and over one in ten consumers (11%) are even shopping online daily!! But with many online retailers offering such snappy delivery, it has just made perfect sense to stay safe and stay home!
With just over a month till Santa visits, it will come as no surprise that many of us are starting to prepare for the Holiday season by purchasing gifts already. Online shopping events such as Click Frenzy or the Black Friday/Cyber Monday events are often very compelling times to buy. But some Aussies have decided they want to get in early to secure gifts for their loved ones in response to warnings from some retailers warning that some items may sell out before Christmas due to COVID-19 related supply chain issues. In fact, McAfee’s research shows that 48% of Aussies will be hitting the digital links to give gifts and cheer this year, despite 49% feeling cyber scams become more prevalent during the holiday season.
McAfee’s research shows very clearly that the bulk of us Aussies are absolutely aware of the risks and scams associated with online shopping but that we still plan to do more shopping online anyway. And with many of us still concerned about our health and staying well, it makes complete sense. However, if there was ever a time to take proactive steps to ensure you are minimizing risks online – it is now!
McAfee’s specialist online threat team (the Advanced Threat Research team) recently found evidence that online cybercrime is on increase this year, with McAfee Labs observing 419 threats per minute between April to June 2020 – an increase of almost 12% over the previous quarter.
And with many consumers gearing up to spend up big online in preparation for the Holiday season, many experts are worried that consumers are NOT taking these threats as seriously as they should. McAfee’s research showed that between April to June 2020, 41% of 18-24 year olds have fallen victim to an online scam and over 50% of the same age group are aware of the risks but have made no change to their online habits.
At the risk of sounding dramatic, I want you to channel your James Bond when you shop online this holiday period. Do your homework, think with your head and NOT your heart and always have your wits about you. Here are my top tips that I urge you to follow to ensure you don’t have any unnecessary drama this Christmas:
Click on random, unsafe links is the best way of falling victim to a phishing scam. Who wants their credit card details stolen? – no one! And Christmas is THE worst time for this to happen! If something looks too good to be true – it probably is. If you aren’t sure – check directly at the source – manually enter the online store address yourself to avoid those potentially nasty links!
This is a no-brainer – where possible, turn this on as it adds another lay of protection to your personal data and accounts. Yes, it will add another 10 seconds to the log-in process but it’s absolutely worth it.
If you have a VPN (or Virtual Private Network) on your laptop, you can use Wi-Fi without any concern – perfect for online purchases on the go! A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel between your device and the router which means anything you share is protected and safe! Check out McAfee’s Safe Connect which includes bank-grade encryption and private browsing services.
Ensuring all your devices are kitted out with comprehensive security software which will protect against viruses, phishing attacks and malicious website is key. Think of it as having a guardian cyber angel on your shoulder. McAfee’s Total Protection software does all that plus it has a password manager, a shredder and encrypted storage – and the Family Pack includes the amazing Safe Family app – which is lifechanging if you have tweens and teens!
So, yes – please make your list and check it twice BUT before you dive in and start spending please take a moment to ask yourself whether you are doing all you can to minimise the risks when online shopping this year. And don’t forget to remind your kids too – they may very well have their eye on a large gift for you too!
Happy Christmas Everyone
Alex xx
The post Christmas Shopping 2020 appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
I’ve had such a busy morning! I’ve hunted down my favourite foundation, bought a puzzle mat, stocked up on special dog food for our naughty new puppy, ordered the groceries, made a few appointments and chatted with several friends. And guess what? I haven’t left my study – or changed out of my pyjamas!! Ssshhh!! Because it’s all happened online…
Of course, some of us embraced the benefits of the online world long before 2020 but the Pandemic forced almost everyone to replace our in-person activities and routines with online ones. New research from McAfee in their 2021 Consumer Security Mindset Report shows that 72% of Aussies made changes in their online activities last year out of convenience which makes complete sense!
But what’s so interesting is that now we have these super handy new online routines in place – we aren’t that keen to give them up! McAfee’s report shows that 76% of Aussies are planning on continuing with online banking, 59% of us want to keep connecting with friends and family online and 55% of us remain totally committed to online shopping! Hear, hear, I say! I am absolutely staying that course too!!
There’s no doubt that there is a lot of upside to managing our lives online but unfortunately there is also a downside – increased risk! The more time spent online, the greater the chance that we will be exposed to potential risks and threats such as phishing attacks, entering details into malicious websites or even becoming a victim of fraud.
McAfee’s research shows that we are aware of the risks of being online. In fact, 66% of us are concerned about the potential dangers of living our lives online with losing control of our financial data top of the list for the majority of us. And almost 2/3 (65%) of us are also worried about having our social media accounts hacked.
But pandemic life has meant that we are now a lot more comfortable with sharing information online. Whether it’s paperless transaction records, text and email notifications, opting to stay logged in or auto-populating forms with our credit card, this level of online sharing does make life so convenient but it can be a risky business! Why, I hear you ask? Because these conveniences usually only work when you share multiple pieces of your contact details. And the more you share, the greater your chance of being hacked or compromised. But the report was very clear – if we can make our online life more seamless then we are only too happy to share our key contact information! Oh dear!!
In addition to confessing that they don’t always take the necessary security precautions, Aussie consumers in McAfee’s report also admitted that they haven’t thought about why hackers might want their data. I don’t know how many people tell me that they don’t need to really bother with a lot of online precautions because they live a pretty boring life and don’t spend that much time online.
But this is a very dangerous way to think. Your online data is like a pot of gold to hackers. Not only can they use it to possibly steal your identity and try to empty your bank accounts but they can also on-sell it for a profit. But the majority of Aussies don’t stop to consider this with the research showing that 64% of Aussies have never considered just how valuable their online data is worth.
Hackers are ALWAYS on the lookout for new ‘up-to-date’ ways to exploit others for money. Don’t forget how quick they were to conjure up scams around COVID in early 2020 – it was just a matter of weeks before Aussies received phishing emails and malicious text messages with the aim of extracting personal information from vulnerable consumers.
But, encouragingly, 85% of Aussies said they would be far more proactive about managing their data if it could be traded as a currency.
The good news is that there are ways to secure your online life and minimise the risk of being hacked. Here are my top tips:
Yes, it might take a minute or 2 more, but using multi-factor authentication is an easy way to add an additional layer of security to protect your personal data and information. Commit to using it wherever it is offered!
If you live your life out & about like I do then you’ll be very tempted to use Wi-Fi. Using public Wi-Fi to conduct transactions, particularly financial ones is a big no-no! It takes keen hackers minimal effort to set up a fraudulent wi-fi service which could easily fool a busy person into connecting. Using a Virtual Private Network (or VPN) like McAfee® Safe Connect, is the best way of ensuring everything you share over Wi-Fi is safe and secure.
Browsing the internet with a tool like the McAfee WebAdvisor is a great way of ensuring dangerous malware is blocked if you click on a malicious link in a phishing email. You’ll have real peace of mind knowing you can manage your online life while someone looks out for you!
With 4 kids, 3 pets, 2 jobs – I know I could never get to the bottom of my ‘to-do’ lists without managing the bulk of it online. I often think I should send the internet an e-card at Christmas!! Of course, I understand why corners are cut and precautions are overlooked when we all feel so stretched for time. But just think about how much more time it would take if you were hacked and had to spend hours on the phone to your bank or if you had to reconfigure all your online accounts and social media platforms!!
So, you know what you need to do! Stay safe online everyone!
The post How 2020 Has Shaped The Way We Live Our Lives appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Over the last 12 months, technology has featured in our lives in a way I don’t think any of us would have predicted. Whether you were in lockdown, choosing to stay home to stay well or quite simply, out of other option – technology saved the day. It helped us work and learn from home, stay connected with friends and family, entertain ourselves, shop and essentially, live our lives.
For many parents, this was a real ‘aha’ moment. A moment when technology went from being an annoying distraction to incredibly critical to the functioning of our day to day lives. Of course, many of us had always considered technology to be useful to help us order groceries and check Facebook but to experience first-hand that technology meant life could go on during a worldwide pandemic was a real game changer.
Whether it was downloading video calling apps like Zoom or Facetime, setting up a Twitter account to get updates from the Health Department, using Google Doc to work collaboratively or experiencing what online gaming really is via a few sessions on the Xbox, 2020 means many parents had to get up to date, real fast! And you know what – that’s a good thing! I’ve had so many parents remark to me that they know finally understand why their kids are so enamoured with technology. There really is nothing like walking in someone’s shoes to experience their world!
I’m a big believer in parents taking the time to truly understand the world in which their kids exist. For years, I’ve advised parents to download and use the apps and games their kids play so they can understand the attraction and complexity of their kids’ digital life. Well, it may have taken a global pandemic, but I am delighted to report that, anecdotally at this stage, more parents are now embracing their kids’ online world.
When we first become enamoured with something, we often enter the ‘honeymoon’ phase. As a married woman of 28 years, this was many years ago for me!! The honeymoon phase is when everything is wonderful and rosy, and negatives are not always considered. And our relationship with technology can be much the same. And I’ve been there – there’s nothing quite so wonderful as discovering a new app or piece of software and almost being joyous at just how transformational it could be for your life. And this often means we gloss over or even ignore the risks because we are in love!!!
So, as Cybermum, I’m here to cheer you on and pat you on the back for embracing and using new apps and software. Yes, I’m very proud! But I also want to share with you just a few steps that you need to take to ensure you are not taking on any unnecessary risks with your new favourite app. Here are my top tips:
1. Passwords
Every app, online account or piece of software needs it own individual password. Yes, I know that it is a real pain, but it is one of the most important things you will do to protect yourself online. I’m a big fan of password managers that not only generate the most incredibly complex passwords for each of your accounts but remember them for you. McAfee’s password manager, True Key, is a free option which has completely helped me manage my 80 plus collection of passwords!! Very grateful!
2. Software Updates
The main purpose of a software update is to protect the user from security threats. Yes, you may also get some new features and possibly have a glitch or 2 removed but it is all about the user’s safety. So, if you don’t update your software, it’s a little like leaving windows open when you go out. And the longer you leave between updates – the more windows you leave open!
So, automate these updates if you can or schedule them in your diary. Why not earmark the first day of the month to check and see what you need to download to protect yourself? And don’t forget about your operating system on your phone or laptop too!
3. Be Wi-Fi Wary
Dodgy wi-fi is where so many people come unstuck. Regardless of what app or software you are using, anything you share via unsecured wi-fi could be intercepted by a hacker. So, if you find yourself using wi-fi regularly, you might want to consider a Virtual Private Network or VPN. A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel so anything you share via Wi-Fi cannot be intercepted. Genius, really! Check out McAfee’s Safe Connect for peace of mind.
So, please keep going! Keep exploring new ways technology can work for you in our new COVID world. But remember to take a break too. There is no doubt that technology has saved the day and has ensure we can all still function but there must be a balance too. So, walk the dog, play a board game or having a cuppa outside. Remember you manage the technology; it doesn’t manage you!
Till next time
Stay safe online.
Alex xx
To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, subscribe to our email, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.
The post How 2020 Helped Parents Understand Their Kids’ Digital Lives appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
At Verisign we have a commitment to making a positive and lasting impact on the global internet community, and on the communities in which we live and work.
This commitment guided our initial efforts to help these communities respond to and recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, over a year ago. And at the end of 2020, our sense of partnership with our local communities helped shape our efforts to alleviate COVID-related food insecurity in the areas where we have our most substantial footprint. This same sense of community is reflected in our partnership with Virginia Ready, which aims to help individuals in our home State of Virginia access training and certification to pivot to new careers in the technology sector.
We also believe that our team is one of our most important assets. We particularly value the diverse origins of our people; we have colleagues from all over the world who, in turn, are closely connected to their own communities both in the United States and elsewhere. A significant proportion of our staff are of either Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) or South Asian origin, and today we are pleased to announce two charitable contributions, via our Verisign Cares program, directly related to these two communities.
First, Verisign is pleased to associate ourselves with the Stand with Asian Americans initiative, launched by AAPI business leaders in response to recent and upsetting episodes of aggression toward their community. Verisign supports this initiative and the pledge for which it stands, and has made a substantial contribution to the initiative’s partner, the Asian Pacific Fund, to help uplift the AAPI community.
Second, and after consultation with our staff, we have directed significant charitable contributions to organizations helping to fight the worsening wave of COVID-19 in India. Through Direct Relief we will be helping to provide oxygen and other medical equipment to hospitals, while through GiveIndia we will be supporting families in India impacted by COVID-19.
The ‘extended Verisign family’ of our employees, and their families and their communities, means a tremendous amount to us – it is only thanks to our talented and dedicated people that we are able to continue to fulfill our mission of enabling the world to connect online with reliability and confidence, anytime, anywhere.
The post Verisign Support for AAPI Communities and COVID Relief in India appeared first on Verisign Blog.
Businesses today have many options for interacting with customers online. The findings of our independent survey of online consumers suggest that websites and branded email continue to be critical components of many businesses’ online presence, essential to supporting consumer confidence and enabling effective interaction with customers.
The quantitative study, commissioned by Verisign and conducted in December 2019 and January 2020 by 451 Research, now a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, surveyed 5,450 online consumers across key markets in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia to help understand their sentiments on interacting with businesses online.
The survey was designed to arm service providers and registrars with an understanding of how the resources they provide to businesses can help create trust and deliver value to their customers.
Among those surveyed, approximately two-thirds (66%) agreed that a business with its own website is more credible than one without. Likewise, a majority indicated that they would expect it to be more difficult to verify the identity of (56%), find online (55%) and contact (54%) a business that does not have its own website.
Certainly, this doesn’t suggest that businesses should abandon other online channels, such as social media and search engine efforts, to focus on a website-only approach. Instead, 64% of respondents said that a business with many points of online presence is more credible than a business with few.
Still, the study suggests that other online resources should complement, rather than replace, a small business’s own website. Respondents identified a business’s own website as being one of the most popular online methods for learning about (69%) and conducting transactions with (57%) businesses. Further, 71% of respondents reported being more likely to recommend a business with a professional website.
Taken together, these findings suggest that a website can help add credibility and drive new business.
Trust is central to the relationship between a business and customers. This may be particularly true for online transactions (95% of survey respondents said they actively make purchases online), which require consumers to trust not only that the business will deliver the product or service for which they have paid, but also that it will not misuse payment or personal information.
A branded email address may be able to help, as an overwhelming number of respondents (85%) agreed that a business with a branded email address is more credible than one that uses a free email account. Respondents were more likely to have used a business’s branded email address (67%), than the telephone (56%) or social media (40%), to communicate with a business during the prior 12 months.
For a small business, failing to be perceived as credible online could mean lost business not just today, but also in the future. A website and branded email address can help businesses add credibility and more effectively engage with consumers online.
Service providers offer a variety of website-building tools, email hosting solutions, and domain name registration services that can help businesses – whether just starting or well-established – to have a website and use a branded email.
Detailed survey results are available in 451 Research’s Black & White Paper Websites, Branded Email Remain Key to SMB Internet Services.
Verisign is a global wholesale provider of some of the world’s most recognized top-level domains, including .com and .net. For website building tools and email hosting solutions, contact a registrar. You can find a registrar here.
The post Websites, Branded Email Remain Key to SMB Internet Services appeared first on Verisign Blog.
This article originally appeared in The Domain Name Industry Brief (Volume 18, Issue 3)
Earlier this year, the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF’s) Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) announced that several Proposed Standards related to the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP), including three that I co-authored, were being promoted to the prestigious designation of Internet Standard. Initially accepted as proposed standards six years ago, RFC 7480, RFC 7481, RFC 9082 and RFC 9083 now comprise the new Standard 95. RDAP allows users to access domain registration data and could one day replace its predecessor the WHOIS protocol. RDAP is designed to address some widely recognized deficiencies in the WHOIS protocol and can help improve the registration data chain of custody.
In the discussion that follows, I’ll look back at the registry data model, given the evolution from WHOIS to the RDAP protocol, and examine how the RDAP protocol can help improve upon the more traditional, WHOIS-based registry models.
In 1998, Network Solutions was responsible for providing both consumer-facing registrar and back-end registry functions for the legacy .com, .net and .org generic top-level domains (gTLDs). Network Solutions collected information from domain name registrants, used that information to process domain name registration requests, and published both collected data and data derived from processing registration requests (such as expiration dates and status values) in a public-facing directory service known as WHOIS.
From Network Solution’s perspective as the registry, the chain of custody for domain name registration data involved only two parties: the registrant (or their agent) and Network Solutions. With the introduction of a Shared Registration System (SRS) in 1999, multiple registrars began to compete for domain name registration business by using the registry services operated by Network Solutions. The introduction of additional registrars and the separation of registry and registrar functions added parties to the chain of custody of domain name registration data. Information flowed from the registrant, to the registrar, and then to the registry, typically crossing multiple networks and jurisdictions, as depicted in Figure 1.
Over time, new gTLDs and new registries came into existence, new WHOIS services (with different output formats) were launched, and countries adopted new laws and regulations focused on protecting the personal information associated with domain name registration data. As time progressed, it became clear that WHOIS lacked several needed features, such as:
The IETF made multiple attempts to add features to WHOIS to address some of these issues, but none of them were widely adopted. A possible replacement protocol known as the Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS) was standardized in 2005, but it was not widely adopted. Something else was needed, and the IETF went back to work to produce what became known as RDAP.
RDAP was specified in a series of five IETF Proposed Standard RFC documents, including the following, all of which were published in March 2015:
Only when RDAP was standardized did we start to see broad deployment of a possible WHOIS successor by domain name registries, domain name registrars and address registries.
The broad deployment of RDAP led to RFCs 7480 and 7481 becoming Internet Standard RFCs (part of Internet Standard 95) without modification in March 2021. As operators of registration data directory services implemented and deployed RDAP, they found places in the other specifications where minor corrections and clarifications were needed without changing the protocol itself. RFC 7482 was updated to become Internet Standard RFC 9082, which was published in June 2021. RFC 7483 was updated to become Internet Standard RFC 9083, which was also published in June 2021. All were added to Standard 95. As of the writing of this article, RFC 7484 is in the process of being reviewed and updated for elevation to Internet Standard status.
Operators of registration data directory services who implemented RDAP can take advantage of key features not available in the WHOIS protocol. I’ve highlighted some of these important features in the table below.
| RDAP Feature | Benefit |
| Standard, well-understood, and widely available HTTP transport | Relatively easy to implement, deploy and operate using common web service tools, infrastructure and applications. |
| Securable via HTTPS | Helps provide confidentiality for RDAP queries and responses, reducing the amount of information that is disclosed to monitors. |
| Structured output in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) | JSON is well-understood and tool friendly, which makes it easier for clients to parse and format responses from all servers without the need for software that’s customized for different service providers. |
| Easily extensible | Designed to support the addition of new features without breaking existing implementations. This makes it easier to address future function needs with less risk of implementation incompatibility. |
| Internationalized output, with full support for Unicode character sets | Allows implementations to provide human-readable inputs and outputs that are represented in a language appropriate to the local operating environment. |
| Referral capability, leveraging HTTP constructs | Provides information to software clients that allow the client to retrieve additional information from other RDAP servers. This can be used to hide complexity from human users. |
| Support of standardized authentication | RDAP can take full advantage of all of the client identification, authentication and authorization methods that are available to web services. This means that RDAP can be used to provide the basic framework for differentiated access to registration data based on attributes associated with the user and the user’s query. |
Verisign’s RDAP service, which was originally launched as an experimental implementation several years before gaining widespread adoption, allows users to look up records in the registry database for all registered .com, .net, .name, .cc and .tv domain names. It also supports Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).
We at Verisign were pleased not only to see the IETF recognize the importance of RDAP by elevating it to an Internet Standard, but also that the protocol became a requirement for ICANN-accredited registrars and registries as of August 2019. Widespread implementation of the RDAP protocol makes registration data more secure, stable and resilient, and we are hopeful that the community will evolve the prescribed implementation of RDAP such that the full power of this rich protocol will be deployed.
You can learn more in the RDAP Help section of the Verisign website, and access helpful documents such as the RDAP technical implementation guide and the RDAP response profile.
The post Industry Insights: RDAP Becomes Internet Standard appeared first on Verisign Blog.
How does that information get collected in the first place? We share personal information with companies for multiple reasons simply by going about our day—to pay for takeout at our favorite restaurant, to check into a hotel, or to collect rewards at the local coffee shop. Of course, we use our credit and debit cards too, sometimes as part of an online account that tracks our purchase history.
In other words, we leave trails of data practically wherever we go these days, and that data is of high value to hackers. Thus, all those breaches we read about.
Whether it’s a major breach that exposes millions of records or one of many other smaller-scale breaches like the thousands that have struck healthcare providers, each one serves as a reminder that data breaches happen regularly and that we could find ourselves affected. Depending on the breach and the kind of information you’ve shared with the business or organization in question, information stolen in a breach could include:
What do crooks do with that data? Several things. Apart from using it themselves, they may sell that data to other criminals. Either way, this can lead to illicit use of credit and debit cards, draining of bank accounts, claiming tax refunds or medical expenses in the names of the victims, or, in extreme cases, assuming the identity of others altogether.
In all, data is a kind of currency in of itself because it has the potential to unlock several aspects of victim’s life, each with its own monetary value. It’s no wonder that big breaches like these have made the news over the years, with some of the notables including:
Facebook – 2019: Two sets of data exposed the records of more than 530 million users, including phone numbers, account names, and Facebook IDs.
Marriott International (Starwood) – 2018: Half a million guests had names, email and physical mailing addresses, phone numbers, passport numbers, Starwood Preferred Guest account information, dates of birth, and other information about their stays exposed.
Equifax – 2017: Some 147 million records that included names, addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and Social Security Numbers were exposed, along with a relatively small subset of 200,000 victims having their credit card information exposed as well.
As mentioned, these are big breaches with big companies that we likely more than recognize. Yet smaller and mid-sized businesses are targets as well, with some 43% of data breaches involving companies of that size. Likewise, restaurants and retailers have seen their Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals compromised, right on down to neighborhood restaurants.
When a company experiences a data breach, customers need to realize that this could impact their online safety. If your favorite coffee shop’s customer database gets leaked, there’s a chance that your personal or financial information was exposed. However, this doesn’t mean that your online safety is doomed. If you think you were affected by a breach, there are multiple steps you can take to help protect yourself from the potential side effects.
One of the most effective ways to determine whether someone is fraudulently using one or more of your accounts is to check your statements. If you see any charges that you did not make, report them to your bank or credit card company immediately. They have processes in place to handle fraud. While you’re with them, see if they offer alerts for strange purchases, transactions, or withdrawals.
File a police report and a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Identity Theft Report. This will help in case someone uses your Social Security number to commit fraud, since it will provide a legal record of the theft. The FTC can also assist by guiding you through the identity theft recovery process as well. Their site offers a step-by-step recovery plan that you can follow and track your progress as you go.
If you suspect that your data might have been compromised, place a fraud alert on your credit. This not only ensures that any new or recent requests undergo scrutiny, but also allows you to have extra copies of your credit report so you can check for suspicious activity. You can place one fraud alert with any of the three major credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion) and they will notify the other two. A fraud alert typically lasts for a year, although there are options for extending it as well.
Freezing your credit will make it highly difficult for criminals to take out loans or open new accounts in your name, as a freeze halts all requests to pull your credit—even legitimate ones. In this way, it’s a far stronger measure than placing a fraud alert. Note that if you plan to take out a loan, open a new credit card, or other activity that will prompt a credit report, you’ll need to take extra steps to see that through while the freeze is in place. (The organization you’re working with can assist with the specifics.) Unlike the fraud alert, you’ll need to contact each major credit reporting agency to put one in place. Also, a freeze lasts as long as you have it in place. You’ll have to remove it yourself, again with each agency.
Ensure that your passwords are strong and unique. Many people utilize the same password or variations of it across all their accounts. Therefore, be sure to diversify your passcodes to ensure hackers cannot obtain access to all your accounts at once, should one password be compromised. You can also employ a password manager to keep track of your credentials, such as one you’ll find in comprehensive online protection software.
A solution such as this will help you to monitor your accounts and alert you of any suspicious activity. Specifically, our own Identity Protection Service will monitor several types of personally identifiable information, alert you of potentially stolen personal info, and offer guided help to neutralize the threat. Also, it can help you steer clear of some types of theft with preventative guidance that can help keep theft from happening in the first place. With this set up on your computers and smartphone you can stay in the know and address issues immediately.
To use your credit card safely online to make purchases, add both a VPN and password manager into your toolbox of security solutions. A VPN keeps your shopping experience private, while a password manager helps you keep track of and protect all your online accounts. Again, you’ll find a VPN as part of comprehensive online protection software.
The post Affected by a Data Breach? Here Are Security Steps You Should Take appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
Did you just get word that your personal information may have been caught up in a data breach? If so, you can take steps to protect yourself from harm should your info get into the hands of a scammer or thief.
How does that information get collected in the first place? We share personal information with companies for multiple reasons simply by going about our day—to pay for takeout at our favorite restaurant, to check into a hotel, or to collect rewards at the local coffee shop. Of course, we use our credit and debit cards too, sometimes as part of an online account that tracks our purchase history.
In other words, we leave trails of data practically wherever we go these days, and that data is of high value to hackers. Thus, all those breaches we read about.
Whether it’s a major breach that exposes millions of records or one of many other smaller-scale breaches like the thousands that have struck healthcare providers, each one serves as a reminder that data breaches happen regularly and that we could find ourselves affected. Depending on the breach and the kind of information you’ve shared with the business or organization in question, information stolen in a breach could include:
What do crooks do with that data? Several things. Apart from using it themselves, they may sell that data to other criminals. Either way, this can lead to illicit use of credit and debit cards, draining of bank accounts, claiming tax refunds or medical expenses in the names of the victims, or, in extreme cases, assuming the identity of others altogether.
In all, data is a kind of currency in of itself because it has the potential to unlock several aspects of victim’s life, each with its own monetary value. It’s no wonder that big breaches like these have made the news over the years, with some of the notables including:
As mentioned, these are big breaches with big companies that we likely more than recognize. Yet smaller and mid-sized businesses are targets as well, with some 43% of data breaches involving companies of that size. Likewise, restaurants and retailers have seen their Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals compromised, right on down to neighborhood restaurants.
When a company experiences a data breach, customers need to realize that this could impact their online safety. If your favorite coffee shop’s customer database gets leaked, there’s a chance that your personal or financial information was exposed. However, this doesn’t mean that your online safety is doomed. If you think you were affected by a breach, you can take several steps to protect yourself from the potential side effects.
One of the most effective ways to determine whether someone is fraudulently using one or more of your accounts is to check your statements. If you see any charges that you did not make, report them to your bank or credit card company immediately. They have processes in place to handle fraud. While you’re with them, see if they offer alerts for strange purchases, transactions, or withdrawals.
Our credit monitoring service can help you keep an eye on this. It monitors changes to your credit score, report, and accounts with timely notifications and guidance so you can take action to tackle identity theft.
Breached and stolen information often ends up in dark web marketplaces where hackers, scammers, and thieves purchase it to commit yet more crime. Once it was difficult to know if your information was caught up in such marketplaces, yet now an identity monitoring service can do the detective work for you.
Our service monitors the dark web for your personal info, including email, government IDs, credit card and bank account info, and more. This can help keep your personal info safe with early alerts that show you if your data is found on the dark web, an average of 10 months ahead of similar services. From there, you’ll get guidance that you can act on, which can help protect your info and accounts from theft.
If you suspect that your data might have been compromised, place a fraud alert on your credit. This not only ensures that any new or recent requests undergo scrutiny, but also allows you to have extra copies of your credit report so you can check for suspicious activity. You can place one fraud alert with any of the three major credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion) and they will notify the other two. A fraud alert typically lasts for a year, although there are options for extending it as well.
Freezing your credit will make it highly difficult for criminals to take out loans or open new accounts in your name, as a freeze halts all requests to pull your credit—even legitimate ones. In this way, it’s a far stronger measure than placing a fraud alert. Note that if you plan to take out a loan, open a new credit card, or other activity that will prompt a credit report, you’ll need to take extra steps to see that through while the freeze is in place. (The organization you’re working with can assist with the specifics.) Unlike the fraud alert, you’ll need to contact each major credit reporting agency to put one in place. Also, a freeze lasts as long as you have it in place. You’ll have to remove it yourself, again with each agency.
You can centrally manage this process with our security freeze service, which stops companies from looking at your credit profile, and thus halts the application process for loans, credit cards, utilities, new bank accounts, and more. A security freeze won’t affect your credit score.
Ensure that your passwords are strong and unique. Many people utilize the same password or variations of it across all their accounts. Therefore, be sure to diversify your passcodes to ensure hackers cannot obtain access to all your accounts at once, should one password be compromised. You can also employ a password manager to keep track of your credentials, such as the one you’ll find in comprehensive online protection software.
If the unfortunate happens to you, an identity theft coverage & restoration service can help you get back on your feet. Ours offers $1 million in coverage for lawyer fees, travel expenses, and stolen funds reimbursement. It further provides support from a licensed recovery expert who can take the needed steps to repair your identity and credit. In all, it helps you recover the costs of identity theft along with the time and money it takes to recover from it.
You can take this step any time, even if you haven’t been caught up in a data breach. The fact is that data broker companies collect and sell thousands of pieces of information on millions and millions of people worldwide, part of a global economy estimated at $200 billion U.S. dollars a year. And they’ll sell it to anyone—from advertisers for their campaigns, to scammers who will use it for spammy emails, texts, and calls, and to thieves who use that information for identity theft.
Yet you can clean it up. Our personal data cleanup service can scan some of the riskiest data broker sites and show you which ones are selling your personal info. It also provides guidance on how you can remove your data from those sites and, with select products, even manage the removal for you.
Comprehensive online protection software will offer you the tools and services listed above, along with further features that can protect you online. That includes a VPN to keep your time online more private from online data collection while protecting it from thieves who’re out to steal credit card and account information. It also includes web browsing protection that can warn you of sketchy websites and malicious downloads that look to steal your information. In all, it’s thorough protection for your devices, privacy, and identity. And in a time of data breaches, that kind of protection has become essential.
The post How to Protect Yourself From Identity Theft After a Data Breach appeared first on McAfee Blog.
The Domain Name System has provided the fundamental service of mapping internet names to addresses from almost the earliest days of the internet’s history. Billions of internet-connected devices use DNS continuously to look up Internet Protocol addresses of the named resources they want to connect to — for instance, a website such as blog.verisign.com. Once a device has the resource’s address, it can then communicate with the resource using the internet’s routing system.
Just as ensuring that DNS is secure, stable and resilient is a priority for Verisign, so is making sure that the routing system has these characteristics. Indeed, DNS itself depends on the internet’s routing system for its communications, so routing security is vital to DNS security too.
To better understand how these challenges can be met, it’s helpful to step back and remember what the internet is: a loosely interconnected network of networks that interact with each other at a multitude of locations, often across regions or countries.
Packets of data are transmitted within and between those networks, which utilize a collection of technical standards and rules called the IP suite. Every device that connects to the internet is uniquely identified by its IP address, which can take the form of either a 32-bit IPv4 address or a 128-bit IPv6 address. Similarly, every network that connects to the internet has an Autonomous System Number, which is used by routing protocols to identify the network within the global routing system.
The primary job of the routing system is to let networks know the available paths through the internet to specific destinations. Today, the system largely relies on a decentralized and implicit trust model — a hallmark of the internet’s design. No centralized authority dictates how or where networks interconnect globally, or which networks are authorized to assert reachability for an internet destination. Instead, networks share knowledge with each other about the available paths from devices to destination: They route “by rumor.”
Under the Border Gateway Protocol, the internet’s de-facto inter-domain routing protocol, local routing policies decide where and how internet traffic flows, but each network independently applies its own policies on what actions it takes, if any, with data that connects through its network.
BGP has scaled well over the past three decades because 1) it operates in a distributed manner, 2) it has no central point of control (nor failure), and 3) each network acts autonomously. While networks may base their routing policies on an array of pricing, performance and security characteristics, ultimately BGP can use any available path to reach a destination. Often, the choice of route may depend upon personal decisions by network administrators, as well as informal assessments of technical and even individual reliability.
Two prominent types of operational and security incidents occur in the routing system today: route hijacks and route leaks. Route hijacks reroute internet traffic to an unintended destination, while route leaks propagate routing information to an unintended audience. Both types of incidents can be accidental as well as malicious.
Preventing route hijacks and route leaks requires considerable coordination in the internet community, a concept that fundamentally goes against the BGP’s design tenets of distributed action and autonomous operations. A key characteristic of BGP is that any network can potentially announce reachability for any IP addresses to the entire world. That means that any network can potentially have a detrimental effect on the global reachability of any internet destination.
Fortunately, there is a solution already receiving considerable deployment momentum, the Resource Public Key Infrastructure. RPKI provides an internet number resource certification infrastructure, analogous to the traditional PKI for websites. RPKI enables number resource allocation authorities and networks to specify Route Origin Authorizations that are cryptographically verifiable. ROAs can then be used by relying parties to confirm the routing information shared with them is from the authorized origin.
RPKI is standards-based and appears to be gaining traction in improving BGP security. But it also brings new challenges.
Specifically, RPKI creates new external and third-party dependencies that, as adoption continues, ultimately replace the traditionally autonomous operation of the routing system with a more centralized model. If too tightly coupled to the routing system, these dependencies may impact the robustness and resilience of the internet itself. Also, because RPKI relies on DNS and DNS depends on the routing system, network operators need to be careful not to introduce tightly coupled circular dependencies.
Regional Internet Registries, the organizations responsible for top-level number resource allocation, can potentially have direct operational implications on the routing system. Unlike DNS, the global RPKI as deployed does not have a single root of trust. Instead, it has multiple trust anchors, one operated by each of the RIRs. RPKI therefore brings significant new security, stability and resiliency requirements to RIRs, updating their traditional role of simply allocating ASNs and IP addresses with new operational requirements for ensuring the availability, confidentiality, integrity, and stability of this number resource certification infrastructure.
As part of improving BGP security and encouraging adoption of RPKI, the routing community started the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security initiative in 2014. Supported by the Internet Society, MANRS aims to reduce the most common routing system vulnerabilities by creating a culture of collective responsibility towards the security, stability and resiliency of the global routing system. MANRS is continuing to gain traction, guiding internet operators on what they can do to make the routing system more reliable.
Routing by rumor has served the internet well, and a decade ago it may have been ideal because it avoided systemic dependencies. However, the increasingly critical role of the internet and the evolving cyberthreat landscape require a better approach for protecting routing information and preventing route leaks and route hijacks. As network operators deploy RPKI with security, stability and resiliency, the billions of internet-connected devices that use DNS to look up IP addresses can then communicate with those resources through networks that not only share routing information with one another as they’ve traditionally done, but also do something more. They’ll make sure that the routing information they share and use is secure — and route without rumor.
The post Routing Without Rumor: Securing the Internet’s Routing System appeared first on Verisign Blog.
Today, we released the latest issue of The Domain Name Industry Brief, which shows that the fourth quarter of 2021 closed with 341.7 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains, an increase of 3.3 million domain name registrations, or 1.0%, compared to the third quarter of 2021.1,2 Domain name registrations have increased by 1.6 million, or 0.5%, year over year.1,2
Check out the latest issue of The Domain Name Industry Brief to see domain name stats from the fourth quarter of 2021, including:
• Top 10 Largest TLDs by Number of Reported Domain Names
• Top 10 Largest ccTLDs by Number of Reported Domain Names
• ngTLDs as Percentage of Total TLDs
• Geographical ngTLDs as Percentage of Total Corresponding Geographical TLDs
To see past issues of The Domain Name Industry Brief, please visit verisign.com/dnibarchives.
The post Verisign Q4 2021 The Domain Name Industry Brief: 341.7 Million Domain Name Registrations in the Fourth Quarter of 2021 appeared first on Verisign Blog.
Imagine – your favorite brand on Instagram just announced a giveaway. You’ll receive a free gift! All you have to do is provide your credit card information. Sounds easy, right? This is a brand you’ve followed and trusted for a while now. You’ve engaged with them and even purchased some of their items. The link comes directly from their official page, so you don’t think to question it.
This is the same mindset that led to several Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs being stolen by a cybercriminal who had hacked into the company’s official Instagram account. Let’s dive into the details of this scam.
Bored Ape Yacht Club, the NFT collection, disclosed through Twitter that their Instagram account had been hacked, and advised users not to click on any links or link their crypto wallets to anything. The hacker managed to log into the account and post a phishing link promoting an “airdrop,” or a free token giveaway, to users who connected their MetaMask wallets. Those who linked their wallets before BAYC’s warning lost a combined amount of over $1 million in NFTs.
Despite the large price tag attached to NFTs, they are often held in smartphone wallets rather than more secure alternatives. MetaMask, the crypto wallet application, only allows NFT display through mobile devices and encourages users to use the smartphone app to manage them. While it may be a good method for display purposes, this limitation provides hackers with a new and effective way to easily steal from users’ mobile wallets.
BAYC does not yet know how the hacker was able to gain access to their Instagram account, but they are following security best practices and actively working to contact the users affected.
This scam was conducted through the official BAYC account, making it appear legitimate to BAYC’s followers. It is incredibly important to stay vigilant and know how to protect yourself and your assets from scams like these. Follow the tips below to steer clear of phishing scams and keep your digital assets safe:
A seed phrase is the “open sesame” to your cryptocurrency wallet. The string of words is what grants you access to all your wallet’s assets. Ensuring that your seed phrase is stored away safely and not easily accessible by anyone but yourself is the first step to making sure your wallet is secure.
With all transactional and wallet data publicly available, scammers can pick and choose their targets based on who appears to own valuable assets. To protect your privacy and avoid being targeted, refrain from sharing your personal information on social media sites or using your NFT as a social media avatar.
Phishing scams targeting NFT collectors are becoming increasingly common. Be wary of any airdrops offering free tokens in exchange for your information or other “collectors” doing the same.
Phishing scams tend to get more sophisticated over time, especially in cases like the Bored Ape Yacht Club where the malicious links are coming straight from the official account. It is always best to remain skeptical and cautious, but when in doubt, here are some extra tips to spot phishing scams:
As crypto and NFTs continue to take the world by storm, hackers and scammers are constantly on the prowl for ways to steal and deceive. No matter the source or how trustworthy it may seem at first glance, always exercise caution to keep yourself and your assets safe!
The post Instagram Hack Results in $1 Million Loss in NFTs appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Below research is reflecting our observations during month of March 2022. We also would like to thank Maria Jose Erquiaga for her contribution in introduction and support during the process of writing.
As the Russian-Ukrainian war continues over conventional warfare, cybersecurity professionals witnessed their domain turning into a real frontier. Threat actors picking sides [1], group members turning against each other [2], some people handing out DDoS tools [3], some people blending in to turn it into profit [4], and many other stories, proving that this new frontier is changing daily, and its direct impact is not limited to geographical boundaries.
While attacks seem to be evolving daily, it is challenging for one to stay up to date with all that is going around. Therefore, we believe that it is important to distinguish between information and actionable intelligence. In Cisco Global Threat Alerts, we would like to share our observations related to this conflict during March of 2022 and discover how we can turn them into actionable intelligence together.
Since the rapid escalation of the conflict in 2022, security researchers and analysts have been gathering information regarding the adversarial groups, malware, techniques, and types of attacks implemented [1, 5, 6]. Some of the groups and malware related to the conflict are described in Table 1:
| Threat Actor | Malware | Location |
| Gamaredon [7] | Pteranodon [8] | Crimea |
| Sandworm [9] | CyclopsBlink [10] | Russia |
| WizardSpider [11] | Cobalt Strike [12], Emotet [13], Conti [14], Ryuk [15], Trickbot [16] | Russia |
Table 1: Threat actors and their relations
Gamaredon group, also known as Primitive Bear, Shuckworm and ACTINIUM, is an advanced persistent threat (APT) based in Russia. Their activities can be traced back as early as 2013, prior to Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. They are known to target state institutions of Ukraine and western government entities located in Ukraine. Ukrainian officials attribute them to Russian Federal Security Service, also known as FSB [17].
Gamaredon often leverages malicious office files, distributed through spear phishing as the first stage of their attacks. They are known to use a PowerShell beacon called PowerPunch to download and execute malware for ensuing stages of attacks. Pterodo and QuietSieve are popular malware families that they deploy for stealing information and various actions on objective [18].
We were able to collect network IoC’s related to Gamaredon infrastructure. During our initial analysis, most of the indicators were not attributed directly to any specific malware and they were rather listed as part of Gamaredon’s infrastructure. Therefore, we wanted to analyze their infrastructure to understand their arsenal and deployment in greater detail.
The first part of this research is focused on WHOIS record analysis. We observed that Gamaredon domains were dominantly registered by REG[.]RU. Creation dates are going back as early as February 2019 and have a changing pattern for the registrant email. Until August 2020, we observed that message-yandex.ru@mail[.]ru was the main registrant email. Later, it shifted to macrobit@inbox[.]ru, mixed with the occasional usage of message-yandex.ru@mail[.]ru and tank-bank15@yandex[.]ru. Domain creation dates in some of the WHOIS records are as recent as March 2022.
Other than WHOIS information, the domains we observed that were related to Gamaredon campaigns had a distinguishing naming convention. While dataset consisted of domain names (without TLDs) varying between 4 to 16 characters, 70% percent of them were between 7 to 10 characters. Combined with a limited group of top-level domains (TLDs) used (see Table 2), this leads us to a naming pattern for further attribution. Additionally, the usage of TLDs on domain creation seems to be rotating.
| TLD | Distribution | TLD Usage |
| online | 42.07% | 08/2020-02/2021,02/2022 |
| xyz | 29.47% | 06/2022-08/2022, 02/2022-03/2022 |
| ru | 14.22% | 08/2020, 05/2021-02/2022 |
| site | 8.94% | 07/2020-02/2021 |
| space | 2.64% | 02/2019-06/2020 |
Table 2: TLD distribution and time in use
In the case of domain resolutions, we aimed to analyze the distribution of autonomous system numbers (ASN) used by resolved IP addresses (see Table 3). Once more, the owner REG[.]RU is leading the list, owning most of the domains. TimeWeb was the second this time, with 28% of the domains we found to be related to Gamaredon activities. Domains having ‘. online’ and ‘.ru’ TLDs are regularly updating their IP resolutions, almost daily.
| Owner | ASN | Popular Networks | Distribution |
| REG.RU, Ltd | AS197695 | 194.67.71.0/24 194.67.112.0/24 194.58.100.0/24 194.58.112.0/24 194.58.92.0/24 89.108.81.0/24 |
45.93% |
| TimeWeb Ltd. | AS9123 | 185.104.114.0/24 188.225.77.0/24 188.225.82.0/24 94.228.120.0/24 94.228.123.0/24 |
28.25% |
| EuroByte LLC | AS210079 | 95.183.12.42/32 | 10.56% |
| AS-CHOOPA | AS20473 | 139.180.196.149/32 | 5.08% |
| LLC Baxet | AS51659 | 45.135.134.139/32 91.229.91.124/32 |
2.23% |
| System Service Ltd. | AS50448 | 109.95.211.0/24 | 1.82% |
Table 3: Distribution of IP addresses per ASN and owner
After understanding the infrastructure, let’s proceed with their arsenal. We looked at associated file samples for the domains through Umbrella and Virustotal. A sample of the results can be seen below. Referring to a file type, we can see that the Gamaredon group prefers malicious office documents with macros. Also, they are known to use Pterodo, which is a constantly evolving custom backdoor [8, 18].
| Domain | Hash | Type | Malware |
| acetica[.]online | 4c12713ef851e277a66d985f666ac68e73ae21a82d8dcfcedf781c935d640f52 | Office Open XML Document | Groooboor |
| arvensis[.]xyz | 03220baa1eb0ad80808a682543ba1da0ec5d56bf48391a268ba55ff3ba848d2f | Office Open XML Document | Groooboor |
| email-smtp[.]online | 404ed6164154e8fb7fdd654050305cf02835d169c75213c5333254119fc51a83 | Office Open XML Document | Groooboor |
| gurmou[.]site | f9a1d7e896498074f7f3321f1599bd12bdf39222746b756406de4e499afbc86b | Office Open XML Document | Groooboor |
| mail-check[.]ru | 41b7a58d0d663afcdb45ed2706b5b39e1c772efd9314f6c1d1ac015468ea82f4 | Office Open XML Document | Groooboor |
| office360-expert[.]online | 611e4b4e3fd15a1694a77555d858fced1b66ff106323eed58b11af2ae663a608 | Office Open XML Document | Groooboor |
| achilleas[.]xyz | f021b79168daef8a6359b0b14c0002316e9a98dc79f0bf27e59c48032ef21c3d | Office Open XML Document | Macro enabled Word Trojan |
| anisoptera[.]online | 8c6a3df1398677c85a6e11982d99a31013486a9c56452b29fc4e3fc8927030ad | MS Word Document | Macro enabled Word Trojan |
| erythrocephala[.]online | 4acfb73e121a49c20423a6d72c75614b438ec53ca6f84173a6a27d52f0466573 | Office Open XML Document | Macro enabled Word Trojan |
| hamadryas[.]online | 9b6d89ad4e35ffca32c4f44b75c9cc5dd080fd4ce00a117999c9ad8e231d4418 | Office Open XML Document | Macro enabled Word Trojan |
| intumescere[.]online | 436d2e6da753648cbf7b6b13f0dc855adf51c014e6a778ce1901f2e69bd16360 | MS Word Document | Macro enabled Word Trojan |
| limosa[.]online | 0b525e66587e564db10bb814495aefb5884d74745297f33503d32b1fec78343f | MS Word Document | Macro enabled Word Trojan |
| mesant[.]online | 936b70e0babe7708eda22055db6021aed965083d5bc18aad36bedca993d1442a | MS Word Document | Macro enabled Word Trojan |
| sufflari[.]online | 13b780800c94410b3d68060030b5ff62e9a320a71c02963603ae65abbf150d36 | MS Word Document | Macro enabled Word Trojan |
| apusa[.]xyz | 23d417cd0d3dc0517adb49b10ef11d53e173ae7b427dbb6a7ddf45180056c029 | Win32 DLL | Pterodo |
| atlanticos[.]site | f5023effc40e6fbb5415bc0bb0aa572a9cf4020dd59b2003a1ad03d356179aa1 | VBA | Pterodo |
| barbatus[.]online | 250bd134a910605b1c4daf212e19b5e1a50eb761a566fffed774b6138e463bbc | VBA | Pterodo |
| bitsadmin2[.]space | cfa58e51ad5ce505480bfc3009fc4f16b900de7b5c78fdd2c6d6c420e0096f6b | Win32 EXE | Pterodo |
| bitsadmin3[.]space | 9c8def2c9d2478be94fba8f77abd3b361d01b9a37cb866a994e76abeb0bf971f | Win32 EXE | Pterodo |
| bonitol[.]online | 3cbe7d544ef4c8ff8e5c1e101dbdf5316d0cfbe32658d8b9209f922309162bcf | VBA | Pterodo |
| buhse[.]xyz | aa566eed1cbb86dab04e170f71213a885832a58737fcab76be63e55f9c60b492 | Office Open XML Document | Pterodo |
| calendas[.]ru | 17b278045a8814170e06d7532e17b831bede8d968ee1a562ca2e9e9b9634c286 | Win32 EXE | Pterodo |
| coagula[.]online | c3eb8cf3171aa004ea374db410a810e67b3b1e78382d9090ef9426afde276d0f | MS Word Document | Pterodo |
| corolain[.]ru | 418aacdb3bbe391a1bcb34050081bd456c3f027892f1a944db4c4a74475d0f82 | Win32 EXE | Pterodo |
| gorigan[.]ru | 1c7804155248e2596ec9de97e5cddcddbafbb5c6d066d972bad051f81bbde5c4 | Win32 EXE | Pterodo |
| gorimana[.]site | 90cb5319d7b5bb899b1aa684172942f749755bb998de3a63b2bccb51449d1273 | MS Word Document | Pterodo |
| krashand[.]ru | 11d6a641f8eeb76ae734951383b39592bc1ad3c543486dcef772c14a260a840a | Win32 EXE | Pterodo |
| libellus[.]ru | 4943ca6ffef366386b5bdc39ea28ad0f60180a54241cf1bee97637e5e552c9a3 | Win32 EXE | Pterodo |
| melitaeas[.]online | 55ad79508f6ccd5015f569ce8c8fcad6f10b1aed930be08ba6c36b2ef1a9fac6 | Office Open XML Document | Pterodo |
| mullus[.]online | 31afda4abdc26d379b848d214c8cbd0b7dc4d62a062723511a98953bebe8cbfc | Win32 EXE | Pterodo |
| upload-dt[.]hopto[.]org | 4e72fbc5a8c9be5f3ebe56fed9f613cfa5885958c659a2370f0f908703b0fab7 | MS Word Document | Pterodo |
Table 4: Domains, files (hash and type), and malware name associated to the Gamaredon group
After reviewing the behaviors of the associated malicious samples, it is easier to build attribution between the malicious domain and the corresponding sample. IP addresses resolved by the domain are later used to establish raw IP command and control (C2) communication with a distinguishing URL pattern. The following example shows how 1c7804155248e2596ec9de97e5cddcddbafbb5c6d066d972bad051f81bbde5c4 resolves gorigan[.]ru and uses its IP address to build a C2 URL (http|https<IP>/<random alphanumerical string>). Therefore, DNS and outgoing web traffic is crucial for its detection.
In Cisco Global Threat Alerts, we are tracking the Gamaredon group under the Gamaredon Activity threat object. The threat description is enriched with MITRE references (see Figure 3).
Figure 4 shows a detection sample of Gamaredon activity. Observe that the infected device attempted to communicate with the domains alacritas[.]ru, goloser[.]ru, and libellus[.]ru, which seemed to be sinkholed to the OpenDNS IP address of 146.112.61.[.]107.
We’ve walked through the steps of producing intelligence from information we’ve collected. We began our analysis with an unattributed list of network IoC’s and were able to identify unique patterns in their metadata. Then, we pivoted to endpoint IoC’s and attributed domains to malware families. Next, we showed how we turned it into a detection of the Gamaredon group displayed in the Cisco Global Threat Alerts portal.
For your convenience, here’s a summary of the intelligence we developed in this blog post:
| Aliases | Primitive Bear, Shuckworm, ACTINIUM |
| Type | Threat Actor |
| Originating From | Russia |
| Targets | Ukranian State Organizations |
| Malware used | Pterodo, Groooboor |
| File Type | Macro enabled office files, Win32 Exe, VBA |
| TLD’s used | .online, .xyz, .ru, .site, .space |
| ASN’s used | REG.RU, Ltd, TimeWeb Ltd., EuroByte LLC, AS-CHOOPA, LLC Baxet, System Service Ltd. |
[1] Cyber Group Tracker: https://cyberknow.medium.com/update-10-2022-russia-ukraine-war-cyber-group-tracker-march-20-d667afd5afff
[2] Conti ransomware’s internal chats leaked after siding with Russia: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/conti-ransomwares-internal-chats-leaked-after-siding-with-russia/
[3] Hackers sound call to arms with digital weapon aimed at Russian websites: https://cybernews.com/news/hackers-sound-call-to-arms-with-digital-weapon-aimed-at-russian-websites/
[4] Threat advisory: Cybercriminals compromise users with malware disguised as pro-Ukraine cyber tools: https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2022/03/threat-advisory-cybercriminals.html
[5] Ukraine-Cyber-Operations: https://github.com/curated-intel/Ukraine-Cyber-Operations
[6] What You Need to Know About Russian Cyber Escalation in Ukraine: https://socradar.io/what-you-need-to-know-about-russian-cyber-escalation-in-ukraine/
[7] Gamaredon: https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0047/
[8] Pteranodon: https://attack.mitre.org/software/S0147/
[9] Sandworm: https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0034/
[10] Threat Advisory: Cyclops Blink: https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2022/02/threat-advisory-cyclops-blink.html
[11] Wizard Spider: https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0102/
[12] Cobalt Strike: https://attack.mitre.org/software/S0154
[13] Emotet: https://attack.mitre.org/software/S0367
[14] Conti: https://attack.mitre.org/software/S0575
[15] Ryuk: https://attack.mitre.org/software/S0446
[16] TrickBot: https://attack.mitre.org/software/S0446
[17] Technical Report Gamaredon/Armageddon group: https://ssu.gov.ua/uploads/files/DKIB/Technical%20report%20Armagedon.pdf
[18] ACTINIUM targets Ukrainian organizations: https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2022/02/04/actinium-targets-ukrainian-organizations/
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Imagine – your favorite brand on Instagram just announced a giveaway. You’ll receive a free gift! All you have to do is provide your credit card information. Sounds easy, right? This is a brand you’ve followed and trusted for a while now. You’ve engaged with them and even purchased some of their items. The link comes directly from their official page, so you don’t think to question it. Don’t fall prey to crypto scams, download reputable mobile security protection.
This is the same mindset that led to several Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs being stolen by a cybercriminal who had hacked into the company’s official Instagram account. Let’s dive into the details of this scam.
Bored Ape Yacht Club, the NFT collection, disclosed through Twitter that their Instagram account had been hacked, and advised users not to click on any links or link their crypto wallets to anything. The hacker managed to log into the account and post a phishing link promoting an “airdrop,” or a free token giveaway, to users who connected their MetaMask wallets. Those who linked their wallets before BAYC’s warning lost a combined amount of over $1 million in NFTs.
Despite the large price tag attached to NFTs, they are often held in smartphone wallets rather than more secure alternatives. MetaMask, the crypto wallet application, only allows NFT display through mobile devices and encourages users to use the smartphone app to manage them. While it may be a good method for display purposes, this limitation provides hackers with a new and effective way to easily steal from users’ mobile wallets.
BAYC does not yet know how the hacker was able to gain access to their Instagram account, but they are following security best practices and actively working to contact the users affected.
This scam was conducted through the official BAYC account, making it appear legitimate to BAYC’s followers. It is incredibly important to stay vigilant and know how to protect yourself and your assets from scams like these. Follow the tips below to steer clear of phishing scams and keep your digital assets safe:
A seed phrase is the “open sesame” to your cryptocurrency wallet. The string of words is what grants you access to all your wallet’s assets. Ensuring that your seed phrase is stored away safely and not easily accessible by anyone but yourself is the first step to making sure your wallet is secure.
With all transactional and wallet data publicly available, scammers can pick and choose their targets based on who appears to own valuable assets. To protect your privacy and avoid being targeted, refrain from sharing your personal information on social media sites or using your NFT as a social media avatar.
Phishing scams targeting NFT collectors are becoming increasingly common. Be wary of any airdrops offering free tokens in exchange for your information or other “collectors” doing the same.
Phishing scams tend to get more sophisticated over time, especially in cases like the Bored Ape Yacht Club where the malicious links are coming straight from the official account. It is always best to remain skeptical and cautious, but when in doubt, here are some extra tips to spot phishing scams:
As crypto and NFTs continue to take the world by storm, hackers and scammers are constantly on the prowl for ways to steal and deceive. No matter the source or how trustworthy it may seem at first glance, always exercise caution to keep yourself and your assets safe!
The post Instagram Hack Results in $1 Million Loss in NFTs appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Hybrid work is here to stay. According to our survey, only 9 percent of the global workforce plans to return to the office full time. Employees have become accustomed to working from home and on-the-go, and modern organizations will need to keep up with this shift to retain much-needed talent.
While flexibility has become king, many people may also miss in-person collaboration, and will want to meet with others in the office on an ad hoc basis. Businesses will need to be ready for this future of work, and empower their employees to easily conduct their roles from the office, home, coffee shop, or anywhere in between.
While it may sound daunting, it doesn’t have to be. With the right strategies and technologies in place, hybrid work can afford an organization many opportunities. It can introduce enhanced levels of agility and resilience for better company performance. It can help businesses attract skilled professionals in a competitive market. And it can also lead to cost savings, greater operational efficiencies, and improved environmental sustainability.
Of course there will always be challenges. One such challenge is cybersecurity, and hence, security resilience. With more assets to keep track of in more places, hybrid work can lead to gaps in visibility and control, providing attackers with additional ways to get in. But while attackers work hard to get into your network, Cisco continues to innovate to keep them out, no matter where your devices or users may go.
Many of the core security architectures we have been building and offering for the past several years will help to ensure a smoother transition to hybrid work, as well as greater security resilience:
Just as the workplace has evolved, so has the threat landscape. To make things even easier, we have put together the Cisco Secure Hybrid Work solution to provide exactly what you need to keep your business safe in this new work environment. All of our security technologies are backed by the superior threat intelligence of Cisco Talos, so customers can quickly adapt to detect and combat the latest risks. Talos also offers robust incident response services to help companies prepare for, respond to, and rapidly recover from attacks.
Learn how Mediapro used Cisco technologies to transition to hybrid work.
We continue to innovate to make sure our customers are prepared for what’s next. Most recently, we launched the Cisco Secure Firewall 3100 Series, which is specifically designed for hybrid work. The new firewall supports more remote workers with up to six times faster VPN performance, and also delivers a strong video conferencing experience. Cisco Secure Firewall enhances visibility and threat detection even in encrypted traffic, and helps strengthen your zero trust security posture. It also integrates with Cisco SecureX for rapid incident response.
Additionally, we recently unveiled the Cisco SecureX device insights feature. Device insights allows organizations to collect and correlate data from multiple sources to determine which devices are in an environment, where they are located, who is accessing them, their security status, and more. With so many new machines connecting to corporate infrastructure, this level of information is crucial for safeguarding the future of work.
In addition to security, Cisco’s broad hybrid work portfolio spans collaboration, networking, and IoT. With a nearly 40-year history of providing secure connectivity around the globe, we are well-equipped to empower workers to perform their best from anywhere.
“Security has always been a high priority with our extensive and intricate network but was even more critical once the pandemic began,” said Lukene Berrosteguieta, head of security operations at energy company, Repsol. “[Cisco] Business Critical Services has supported our efforts every step of the way to enhance and maintain network security across our entire infrastructure to ensure the safety of our customers and workers.”
According to Dan Turner, CIO at Per Mar Security Services, “Once COVID-19 hit the United States…we leveraged our existing infrastructure to spin up virtual workspaces for all our employees within a week so that they could work from home…. Our Cisco systems and security frameworks allowed Per Mar to move quickly and safely to support our employees.”
The way we work has forever changed, and will continue to evolve. We must enable our teams to be productive and competitive no matter what comes next. Learn how you can boost your organization’s security resilience for the years ahead.
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At Cisco Duo, we continually strive to enhance our products to make it easy for security practitioners to apply access policies based on the principles of zero trust. This blog highlights how Duo is achieving that goal by simplifying user and administrator experience and supporting data sovereignty requirements for customers around the world. Read on to get an overview of what we have been delivering to our customers in those areas in the past few months.
Duo strives to make secure access frictionless for employees while reducing the administrative burden on IT (Information Technology) and helpdesk teams. This is made possible thanks to the strong relationship between our customers and our user research team. The insights we gained helped us implement some exciting enhancements to Duo Single Sign-On (SSO) and Device Trust capabilities.
Duo SSO unifies identities across systems and reduces the number of credentials a user must remember and enter to gain access to resources. Active Directory (AD) is the most popular authentication source connected to Duo SSO, accounting for almost 80% of all setups. To make Duo’s integration with AD even easier to implement, we have introduced Duo SSO support for multiple Active Directory forests for organizations that have users in multiple domains. Additionally, we added the Expired Password Resets feature in Duo SSO. It provides an easy experience for users to quickly reset their expired Active Directory password, log into their application, and carry on with their day. Continuing the theme of self service, we introduced a hosted device management portal – a highly requested feature from customers. Now administrators no longer need to host and manage the portal, and end users can login with Duo SSO to manage their authentication devices (e.g.: TouchID, security keys, mobile phone etc.) without needing to open IT helpdesk tickets.
We are also simplifying the administrator experience. We have made it easy for administrators to configure Duo SSO with Microsoft 365 using an out of the box integration. Duo SSO layers Duo’s strong authentication and flexible policy engine on top of Microsoft 365 logins. Further, we have heard from many customers that they want to deliver a seamless on-brand login experience for their workforce. To support this, we have made custom branding so simple that administrators can quickly customize their end-user authentication experience from the settings page in the Duo Admin Panel.
Device Trust is a critical capability required to enable secure access for the modern workforce from any location. We have made it easy for organizations to adopt device trust and distinguish between managed and unmanaged devices. Organizations can enforce a Trusted Endpoint policy to allow access only from managed devices for critical applications. We have eliminated the requirement to deploy and manage device certificates to enforce this policy. Device Health application now checks the managed status of a device. This lowers administrative overhead while enabling organizations to achieve a better balance between security and usability. We have also added out-of-box integrations with unified endpoint management solutions such as Active Directory domain-joined devices, Microsoft Intune, Jamf Pro and VMware Workspace ONE. For organizations that have deployed a solution that is not listed above, Duo provides a Device API that works with any enterprise device management system.
To support our growing customer base around the world, Duo expanded its data center presence to Australia, Singapore, and Japan in September last year. And now Duo is thrilled to announce the launch of the two new data centers in the UK and India. Both the new and existing data centers will allow customers to meet all local requirements, all while maintaining ISO27001 and SOC2 compliance and a 99.999% service availability goal.
The launch of the new data centers is the backbone of Duo’s international expansion strategy. In the last two years, Duo has met key international growth milestones and completed the C5 attestation (Germany), AgID certification (Italy) and IRAP assessment (Australia) – all of which demonstrate that Duo meets the mandatory baseline standards for use by the public sector in the countries listed above. Check out this Privacy Data Sheet to learn more about Cisco Duo’s commitment to our customer’s data privacy and data sovereignty.
That is a summary of what we have been up to here at Cisco Duo in the past few months. But we are not done yet! Stay tuned for more exciting announcements at RSA Conference 2022 next week. Visit us at our booth at RSAC 2022 and World of solutions at Cisco Live 2022.
In the meanwhile, check out this on-demand #CiscoChat panel discussion with real-world security practitioners on how they have implemented secure access best practices for hybrid work using Duo. And if you do not want to wait, sign-up for a 30 day trial and experience how Duo can simplify secure access for your workforce.
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This blog was also published by APNIC.
With so much traffic on the global internet day after day, it’s not always easy to spot the occasional irregularity. After all, there are numerous layers of complexity that go into the serving of webpages, with multiple companies, agencies and organizations each playing a role.
That’s why when something does catch our attention, it’s important that the various entities work together to explore the cause and, more importantly, try to identify whether it’s a malicious actor at work, a glitch in the process or maybe even something entirely intentional.
That’s what occurred last year when Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers staff and contractors were analyzing names in Domain Name System queries seen at the ICANN Managed Root Server, and the analysis program ran out of memory for one of their data files. After some investigating, they found the cause to be a very large number of mysterious queries for unique names such as f863zvv1xy2qf.surgery, bp639i-3nirf.hiphop, qo35jjk419gfm.net and yyif0aijr21gn.com.
While these were queries for names in existing top-level domains, the first label consisted of 12 or 13 random-looking characters. After ICANN shared their discovery with the other root server operators, Verisign took a closer look to help understand the situation.
One of the first things we noticed was that all of these mysterious queries were of type NS and came from one autonomous system network, AS 15169, assigned to Google LLC. Additionally, we confirmed that it was occurring consistently for numerous TLDs. (See Fig. 1)
Although this phenomenon was newly uncovered, analysis of historical data showed these traffic patterns actually began in late 2019. (See Fig. 2)
Perhaps the most interesting discovery, however, was that these specific query names were not also seen at the .com and .net name servers operated by Verisign. The data in Figure 3 shows the fraction of queried names that appear at A-root and J-root and also appear on the .com and .net name servers. For second-level labels of 12 and 13 characters, this fraction is essentially zero. The graphs also show that there appears to be queries for names with second-level label lengths of 10 and 11 characters, which are also absent from the TLD data.
The final mysterious aspect to this traffic is that it deviated from our normal expectation of caching. Remember that these are queries to a root name server, which returns a referral to the delegated name servers for a TLD. For example, when a root name server receives a query for yyif0aijr21gn.com, the response is a list of the name servers that are authoritative for the .com zone. The records in this response have a time to live of two days, meaning that the recursive name server can cache and reuse this data for that amount of time.
However, in this traffic we see queries for .com domain names from AS 15169 at the rate of about 30 million per day. (See Fig. 4) It is well known that Google Public DNS has thousands of backend servers and limits TTLs to a maximum of six hours. Assuming 4,000 backend servers each cached a .com referral for six hours, we might expect about 16,000 queries over a 24-hour period. The observed count is about 2,000 times higher by this back-of-the-envelope calculation.
From our initial analysis, it was unclear if these queries represented legitimate end-user activity, though we were confident that source IP address spoofing was not involved. However, since the query names shared some similarities to those used by botnets, we could not rule out malicious activity.
These findings were presented last year at the DNS-OARC 35a virtual meeting. In the conference chat room after the talk, the missing piece of this puzzle was mentioned by a conference participant. There is a Google webpage describing its public DNS service that talks about prepending nonce (i.e., random) labels for cache misses to increase entropy. In what came to be known as “the Kaminsky Attack,” an attacker can cause a recursive name server to emit queries for names chosen by the attacker. Prepending a nonce label adds unpredictability to the queries, making it very difficult to spoof a response. Note, however, that nonce prepending only works for queries where the reply is a referral.
In addition, Google DNS has implemented a form of query name minimization (see RFC 7816 and RFC 9156). As such, if a user requests the IP address of www.example.com and Google DNS decides this warrants a query to a root name server, it takes the name, strips all labels except for the TLD and then prepends a nonce string, resulting in something like u5vmt7xanb6rf.com. A root server’s response to that query is identical to one using the original query name.
Now, we are able to explain nearly all of the mysterious aspects of this query traffic from Google. We see random second-level labels because of the nonce strings that are designed to prevent spoofing. The 12- and 13-character-long labels are most likely the result of converting a 64-bit random value into an unpadded ASCII label with encoding similar to Base32. We don’t observe the same queries at TLD name servers because of both the nonce prepending and query name minimization. The query type is always NS because of query name minimization.
With that said, there’s still one aspect that eludes explanation: the high query rate (2000x for .com) and apparent lack of caching. And so, this aspect of the mystery continues.
Even though we haven’t fully closed the books on this case, one thing is certain: without the community’s teamwork to put the pieces of the puzzle together, explanations for this strange traffic may have remained unknown today. The case of the mysterious DNS root query traffic is a perfect example of the collaboration that’s required to navigate today’s ever-changing cyber environment. We’re grateful and humbled to be part of such a dedicated community that is intent on ensuring the security, stability and resiliency of the internet, and we look forward to more productive teamwork in the future.
The post More Mysterious DNS Root Query Traffic from a Large Cloud/DNS Operator appeared first on Verisign Blog.
Eighty-one percent of organizations told Gartner they have a multi-cloud strategy. As more organizations subscribe to cloud offerings for everything from hosted data centers to enterprise applications, the topology of the typical IT environment grows increasingly complex.
Now add the proliferation of hybrid work environments, the rapid ascendance of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and an increasingly sophisticated and malicious cyber threat landscape, and it becomes immediately clear that protecting the integrity of your IT ecosystem is now a next-level problem.
In an unpredictable world, organizations everywhere are investing in initiatives that will infuse resilience into every aspect of their business, from finance to supply chains. To protect those investments, we believe they also need to invest in security resilience — the ability to protect your business against threats and disruption, and to respond to changes confidently so you can emerge even stronger.
This requires a next-level solution.
That’s why we’re building the Cisco Security Cloud — a global, cloud-delivered, integrated platform that secures and connects organizations of any shape and size. This cloud-native service is aimed at helping you protect users, devices and applications across your entire ecosystem. It will be a comprehensive, integrated set of services designed to scale with your business.
The Cisco Security Cloud will directly address these challenges by bringing together the depth and breadth of the Cisco security portfolio, and is:
We have been on this journey for years. We at Cisco Secure have been delivering key components of this security cloud, and those solutions already protect 840,000 networks, 67 million mailboxes and 87 million endpoints for customers the world over.
And today at the RSA Conference, we’re taking the next step by announcing our latest innovations addressing four key areas:
Today we are announcing Cisco’s turnkey Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering, Cisco+ Secure Connect Now, to simplify how organizations connect and protect users, devices, data, and applications, anywhere. Built on the Meraki platform, and available as a subscription, it unifies security and networking operations, as well as client connectivity and visibility into a single cloud-native solution, that can be set up in minutes.
Cisco is continuing to build out continuous trusted access solutions that that constantly verify user and device identity, device posture, vulnerabilities, and indicators of compromise. To evaluate risk after authentication, location information is critical, but we think GPS data is too intrusive. So today we are introducing a new patent-pending Wi-Fi Fingerprint capability (available in Public Preview this summer) to understand user location without compromising location privacy. We are also announcing new Session Trust Analysis capabilities to evaluate risk after login by using open standards for shared signals and events. We will unveil the first integration of this technology with a demo of Duo MFA and Box this week.
As organizations become more interconnected as ecosystems, and attacks become more sophisticated and personalized, it is no longer adequate to evaluate risk and threats generically across the industry. Organizations need deeper levels of advice and expertise. We are excited to launch the new Talos Intelligence On-Demand service, available now, offering custom research on the threat landscape unique to each organization. Talos Intelligence on Demand can assist with custom research, and brief our customers on the unique risks, threats, and mitigation strategies for their organizations.
Simplification is critical to driving better security efficacy. To that end, we are excited to announce the new Cisco Secure Client (available this summer), combining AnyConnect, Secure Endpoint, and Umbrella, to simplify how administrators and users manage endpoints. This follows the launch of the new cloud-delivered Secure Firewall Management Center, which unifies management for both cloud and on-premise firewalls.
There is more work to be done, of course, and today’s announcements at the RSA Conference are the latest advances in support of this vision. We will continue working on all aspects of the Security Cloud to improve our customers’ security resilience in the face of unprecedented change and increasing threats. Because next-level problems deserve next-level solutions.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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What is it that customers truly want from their security? Is it simplicity? Robust protection? Agility and flexibility? Yes! In today’s uncertain world where new challenges are being thrown at IT teams each day, security must meet many diverse needs. At the end of the day, it’s about keeping the entire business resilient despite the chaos of the cyber world.
As hybrid work, the move to the cloud, and increasingly insidious threats all converge to create layers of complexity, security teams must be extra vigilant and ready for what’s next. They need a comprehensive, integrated security system whose various components share information and work together to pinpoint attacks and minimize organizational impact — without introducing undue friction.
With businesses, networks, clouds and devices becoming so interconnected, delivering next-level security to match the future of work is a formidable undertaking — one that few vendors are positioned to tackle. But thanks to our nearly 40-year heritage of providing and protecting a vast amount of the world’s networking infrastructure, Cisco is up for the challenge.
“At a moment’s notice, we were able to transition 80 percent of our workforce to be remote — and our company was never remote before. Because of our Cisco solutions, we were able to deploy everything and have people work well remotely with very minimal issues.”
— Joseph Rodriguez, Assistant Director of IT, Allied Beverage Group
Delivering security that is simple, powerful and resilient is something we’ve been executing on for years, yet it’s never been more critical than it is at this very moment. The month of June has afforded us the perfect opportunity to showcase exactly how we plan to keep our customers cyber resilient both now and in the future.
Read about the five dimensions of security resilience.
During the RSA Conference and Cisco Live, we announced our strategic plan for the Cisco Security Cloud, a global, cloud-delivered, integrated platform that secures and connects organizations of any shape and size. As we continue to move towards the Cisco Security Cloud vision, we recently unveiled several advancements in our portfolio across SASE, XDR and zero trust.
You can read our news announcement to learn more about security resilience and how we’re delivering it. But more important than the ‘how’ is the ‘why.’ Why Cisco? What makes us uniquely positioned to secure your resilience?
As I mentioned, our customers have trusted us with their networks for nearly four decades. Currently, 80 percent of the world’s internet traffic travels through Cisco infrastructure — so we have a pretty good handle on what’s going on out there. From a security standpoint alone, we have over 300,000 customers around the globe, including 100% of the Fortune 100.
As a leader in both networking and security, the breadth and depth of our solutions is unmatched. While other vendors are just beginning to join networking with security, we’ve been doing it for years. And yet, we’re continually finding ways to simplify our robust solutions for a streamlined user experience — no matter the size of your organization, where your employees work, or whether your applications are on-premises, in the cloud, or both.
Learn more about security resilience for the hybrid work era.
In addition to unparalleled infrastructure and expertise, our open, cloud-native architecture allows you to integrate with a wide range of third-party security and technology solutions for more seamless threat defense. This includes the major cloud vendors, enabling you to secure a multi-cloud environment without getting locked in with just one public cloud provider.
Additionally, all of our solutions are backed by Cisco Talos, one of the largest commercial threat intelligence teams in the world. Combined with in-depth visibility from our Cisco Secure technologies, Talos’ extensive insight into the threat landscape leads to rapid, highly effective detection and response.
Even more crucial than what we have to say is what we have heard from our customers surrounding the “new normal” for security. “I think what the security industry could use right now is a real business outcome-oriented viewpoint,” said Tom Doughty, vice president and CISO at Prudential Financial. “Meaning, what are the strategic business outcomes you’re trying to enable? Cisco can help security teams be more aligned to our business and more resilient by allowing us to see at a granular level what’s happening in our environment, especially in an extended network.”
For the law firm of George Sink, P.A., the demands of supporting hybrid work accelerated the company’s move to the cloud. The firm is now using Cisco’s new, turnkey SASE solution to securely serve its clients under any circumstance — be it a pandemic or a hurricane. According to the firm’s CIO, Timothy Mullen, “The ability to…re-establish connectivity in another region almost immediately, with my small IT team, is unheard of and a game-changing experience.”
From financial to legal transactions, and much more, we can secure it all with our open, integrated protection platform and unwavering focus on resilience. We even had the honor of securing the Super Bowl earlier this year, helping to safeguard mission-critical gameday operations.
“The Super Bowl and events of that magnitude require a humongous orchestration of interconnectedness, not only from a technology perspective but also a people standpoint,” said NFL Chief Information Security Officer, Tomás Maldonado. “What we’re trying to do is slow down the bad actors and make it more difficult for them to attack us and impact what’s happening on the field. But at the same time, we also have to look beyond the field and think about all the various parts of our business that could be affected by an attack — recognizing that our risk factors are always changing.”
To learn more about how to keep your business strong in the face of adversity, visit our resilience web page and check out the blog from Cisco’s Jeetu Patel, “Security Resilience for a Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Future.”
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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The past few months have been chockfull of conversations with security customers, partners, and industry leaders. After two years of virtual engagements, in-person events like our CISO Forum and Cisco Live as well as the industry’s RSA Conference underscore the power of face-to-face interactions. It’s a reminder of just how enriching conversations are and how incredibly interconnected the world is. And it’s only made closer by the security experiences that impact us all.
I had the pleasure of engaging with some of the industry’s best and brightest, sharing ideas, insights, and what keeps us up at night. The conversations offered more than an opportunity to reconnect and put faces with names. It was a chance to discuss some of the most critical cybersecurity issues and implications that are top of mind for organizations.
The collective sentiments are clear. The need for better security has never been so strong. Securing the future is good business. Disruptions are happening faster than ever before, making our interconnected world more unpredictable. Hybrid work is here to stay, hybrid and complex architectures will continue to be a reality for most organizations and that has dramatically expanded the threat surface. More and more businesses are operating as ecosystems—attacks have profound ripple effects across value chains. Attacks are becoming more bespoke, government-sponsored threat actors and ransomware as a service, continue to unravel challenging businesses to minimize the time from initial breach to complete compromise, in the event of a compromise.
Regardless of where organizations are on their digital transformations, they are progressively embarking upon journeys to unify networking and secure connectivity needs. Mobility, BYOD (bring your own device), cloud, increased collaboration, and the consumerization of IT have necessitated a new type of access control security–zero trust security. Supporting a modern enterprise across a distributed network and infrastructure involves the ability to validate user IDs, continuously verify authentication and device trust, and protect every application—
without compromising user experience. Zero trust offers organizations a simpler approach to securing access for everyone, from any device, anywhere—all the while, making it harder for attackers.
Simplicity continues to be a hot topic, and in the context of its functionality. In addition to a frictionless user experience, the real value to customers is improving operational challenges. Security practitioners want an easier way to secure the edge, access, and operations—including threat intelligence and response. Key to this simplified experience is connecting and managing business-critical control points and vulnerabilities, exchanging data, and contextualizing threat intelligence. And it requires a smarter ecosystem that brings together capabilities, unifying admin, policy, visibility, and control. Simplicity that works hard and smart—and enhances their security posture. The ultimate simplicity is improved efficacy for the organization.
Insider cyber-attacks are among the fastest growing threats in the modern security network, an increasingly common cause of data breaches. Using their authorized access, employees are intentionally or inadvertently causing harm by stealing, exposing, or destroying sensitive company data. Regardless, the consequences are the same—costing companies big bucks and massive disruption. It’s also one of the reasons why “identity as the new perimeter” is trending, as the primary objective of all advanced attacks is to gain privileged credentials. Insider attack attempts are not slowing down. However, advanced telemetry, threat detection and protection, and continuous trusted access all help decelerate the trend. Organizations are better able to expose suspicious or malicious activities caused by insider threats. Innovations are enabling business to analyze all network traffic and historical patterns of employee access and determine whether to let an employee continue uninterrupted or prompt to authenticate again.
Supply chain attacks have become one of the biggest security worries for businesses. Not only are disruptions debilitating, but no one knew the impacts or perceived outcomes. Attackers are highly aware that supply chains are comprised of larger entities often tightly connected to a broad array of smaller and less cyber-savvy organizations. Lured by lucrative payouts, attackers seek the weakest supply chain link for a successful breach. In fact, two of the four biggest cyber-attacks that the Cisco Talos team saw in the field last year were supply chain attacks that deployed ransomware on their targets’ networks: SolarWinds and REvil’s attack exploiting the Kaseya managed service provider. While there’s no perfect way to absolutely protect from ransomware, businesses are taking steps to bolster their defenses and protect against disaster.
Security incidents targeting personal information are on the rise. In fact, 86 percent of global consumers were victims of identity theft, credit/debit card fraud, or a data breach in 2020. In a recent engagement discovered by the Cisco Talos team, the API on a customer’s website could have been exploited by an attacker to steal sensitive personal information. The good news is governments and businesses alike are leaning into Data Privacy and Protection, adhering to global regulations that enforce high standards for collecting, using, disclosing, storing, securing, accessing, transferring, and processing personal data. Within the past year, the U.S. government implemented new rules to ensure companies and federal agencies follow required cybersecurity standards. As long as cyber criminals continue seeking to breach our privacy and data, these rules help hold us accountable.
Through all the insightful discussions with customers, partners, and industry leaders, a theme emerged. When it comes to cybersecurity, preparation is key and the cost of being wrong is extraordinary. By acknowledging there will continue to be disruptions, business can prepare for whatever comes next. And when it comes, they’ll not only weather the storm, but they will also come out of it stronger. And the good news is that Cisco Security Business Group is already on the journey actively addressing these headlines, and empowering our customers to reach their full potential, securely.
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The past couple of years have brought security resilience to the forefront. How can organizations around the world build resilience when uncertainty is the new normal? How can we be better prepared for whatever is next on the threat horizon? When threats are unpredictable, resilient security strategies are crucial to endure change when we least expect it.
In a previous blog post, we assessed security resilience in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). Now, we take a look at organizations in the Americas to find out how they fare across four security outcomes that are critical for building resilience, based on findings from Cisco’s latest Security Outcomes Study. These outcomes include:
Based on the following chart, clear differences emerge when we examine these outcomes at the country level. The chart shows the proportion of organizations in each country that are reportedly “excelling” in the four outcomes contributing to security resilience.
What we see is that 52.7% of organizations in Colombia, for example, say their security programs are excelling at keeping up with the business, while only 35.3% report that they are excelling at avoiding major incidents. You can follow each country’s path through the four outcomes to see how they view their respective performance in certain areas.
What’s really at the crux of these differences in security resilience among countries? Is Colombia that much more resilient than Mexico? Do organizations in different countries have varying definitions of what resilience is, and how they perceive their success? Reasons behind these country-level differences can be attributed to a variety of things, including security maturity, cultural factors and other organizational parameters.
Find out how our customers in the Americas
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Knowing what we know about how organizations across the Americas view their resilience, how can they improve it? The Security Outcomes Study, Volume 2, sheds some light here. In the study, we uncovered five practices proven to boost overall success in security programs, dubbed as the Fab Five:
So, how did countries in the Americas rank their implementation of these Fab Five practices? If we look at Colombia, for example, 64% of organizations say their capabilities for accurate threat detection are strong, while only 48.1% of Canadian organizations say the same. There is a lot of movement around the top three countries: Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. The U.S. ranks fourth consistently across the board.
You may be wondering if implementing these five security practices improved resilience across organizations in the Americas. Our study found that organizations in the Americas that do not implement any of these five practices rank in the bottom 25% for resilience, whereas those that reported strength in all five practices rose to the top 25%.
Resilience is a cornerstone of cybersecurity. The ability to quickly pivot while maintaining business continuity and robust defenses is increasingly important in today’s world. If you would like more insight on how to build a cyber resilient organization, please check out our resilience web page and the full Security Outcomes Study.
Watch video: What is security resilience?
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No, ransomware attacks are not random. From extortion to data breaches, ransomware is always evolving, and is becoming very lucrative with ransomware-as-a-service kit making it easier to target organizations. The days of just a single bad actor searching for vulnerabilities in your security stack are over. Security Operations Centers (SOCs) and the security analyst community are dealing with a sophisticated global network of adversaries who can do irreversible damage. The conversation must shift from how we can prevent a breach to how do we prepare for the inevitable breach.
Recently I found out that the small private college I attended right out of high school closed their doors permanently, falling victim to a targeted ransomware attack. This institution not only provided an education but also contributed to the local economy in this rural town for over 150 years.
The cyberattack occurred during the pandemic when most educational institutions had suddenly shifted to remote learning. Adversaries knew that the shift to remote learning would expose the college’s lack of acceptable tools for monitoring and managing applications, frequently from unsecure locations.
Unfortunately, the hackers were able to halt all admission activities, locked the administrators out from accessing critical data pertaining to the upcoming school year and ultimately, forced the school to close their doors – even after they paid the hackers the ransom.
And this is not an isolated case – Comparitech published a story ‘Ransomware attacks on US schools and colleges cost $3.56bn in 2021’ and outlined how threat actors have evolved with their ransomware attacks on schools and colleges. This is particularly concerning as many of these institutions do not have the skillsets or resources to protect their students or organization from these attacks. Below you can review their findings from a study done between 2018 – 2022:
In 2021:
Just having a firewall alone will not stop all of the attacks, it’s just a matter of time before you experience a breach. Once the breach happens, you need a security system that will quickly detect and remediate the threat .
Resiliency must be a critical outcome for any security solution and Cisco Secure Endpoint is built to stop hackers at the point of entry. Our cloud native solution allows your security operations team to quickly detect and respond to threats minutes after a breach occurs.
Small to medium size businesses, hospitals, and educational institutions internal network will rely on cyber insurance in-lieu of a fully staffed, skilled cyber-security team. In today’s climate of ever-increasing sophisticated cyber threats this won’t cut it. You will need an agent that quickly detects, responds, and has visibility across your different security solutions.
With Cisco Secure Endpoint Pro we are equipped to assist with the responsibility of monitoring your endpoints for cyberattacks. With 24/7/365 monitoring capabilities, our SOC will quickly detect and remediate any threats that targets your organization. Secure endpoint pro provides flexibility and the option of letting our SOC team do the heavy lifting while you focus on your core business.
Tangible outcomes provided by Secure Endpoint and Secure Endpoint Pro:
An effective managed endpoint detection and response solution frees up time for your SOC team along with accelerating detection and response time. Cisco Secure Endpoint can reduce incident response time by as much as 97%, which limits the damage threat actors can cause after you have been breached.
Cisco Security has launched a solution geared towards protecting your school’s network by blocking malicious threats before they enter the endpoint and compromising your data. The secure endpoint agent is deployed, sits on the school endpoint freeing up time from a stretched thin IT department.
Don’t know where to get started? Check out how our EDR solution got you covered below and how to contact us to learn more.
Interested? Reach out to grantsquestions@cisco.com to learn about public funding options available in your state.
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As the world continues to face formidable challenges, one of the many things impacted is cybersecurity. While recent challenges have been varied, they have all contributed to great uncertainty. How can organizations stay strong and protect their environments amidst so much volatility?
Lately we’ve been talking a lot about security resilience, and how companies can embrace it to stay the course no matter what happens. By building a resilient security strategy, organizations can more effectively address unexpected disruptions and emerge stronger.
Through our Security Outcomes Study, Volume 2, we were able to benchmark how companies around the world are doing when it comes to cyber resilience. Recent blog posts have taken a look at security resilience in the EMEA and Americas regions, and this post assesses resilience in Asia Pacific, Japan and China (APJC).
While the Security Outcomes Study focuses on a dozen outcomes that contribute to overall security program success, for this analysis, we focused on four specific outcomes that are most critical for security resilience. These include: keeping up with the demands of the business, avoiding major cyber incidents, maintaining business continuity, and retaining talented personnel.
The following chart shows the proportion of organizations in each market within APJC that reported “excelling” in these four outcomes:
There is a lot of movement in this chart, but if you take a closer look, you will see that many of the percentage differences between markets are quite small. For example, 44.9% of organizations in the Philippines reported that they are proficient at keeping up with the business, with Mainland China closely following at 44.4%.
The biggest difference we see between the top spot and the bottom spot is around retaining security talent—42.4% of organizations in Australia reported that they were successful in that area, while only 18.3% of organizations in Hong Kong reported the same.
Next, we looked at the mean resilience score for each market in the region:
When we look at this, we can see the differences between the top six and bottom seven markets a bit more clearly. However, as the previous chart also showed, the differences are very slight. (When we take into account the gray error bars, they become even more slight.)
There are many factors that could contribute to these small differences when it comes to security resilience. But the most important thing to be gleaned from this data is how each market can improve its respective resilience level.
The Security Outcomes Study revealed the top five practices—what we refer to as “The Fab Five”—that make the most impact when it comes to enhancing security. The following chart outlines the Fab Five, and demonstrates how each market in the APJC region ranked its own strength across these practices.
If we look at Thailand, for example, 69.1% of organizations say they are adept at accurate threat detection, while only 28% of organizations in Taiwan say the same. Like in the previous charts, there is a lot of movement between how various markets reported their performance against these practices. However, it’s interesting to note that Taiwan remained consistent.
So does implementing the Fab Five improve resilience across organizations in APJC? Looking at the chart below, it’s safe to say that, yes, implementing the Fab Five does improve resilience. Organizations in APJC that did not implement any of the Fab Five practices ranked in the bottom 30% for resilience, whereas those that reported strength in all five rose to the top 30%.
While building resilience can sometimes seem like an elusive concept, we hope this data provides some concrete benchmarks to strive for in today’s security programs.
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Sextortion is something no parent wants to think could happen to their child, nor a topic most of us would ever imagine we’d need to discuss in our homes. However, according to the latest FBI reports, sextortion is a digital threat to children that, woefully, is on the rise.
According to the FBI, there has been a considerable increase lately in sextortion cases involving children and teens being coerced by adults online.
A sextortion scenario can emerge in several ways. Most often, it occurs when an adult (posing as a peer) engages in casual conversation with an underage child, gains their trust through online conversation, then pressures or threatens the child into sharing sexual photos or videos of themselves.
In some cases, the initial contact with the criminal will be a threat. The person may claim to already have a revealing picture or video of a child that they threaten to share if the victim does not send more pictures.
According to the FBI, this crime more often starts when young people believe they are communicating with someone their age who is interested in a relationship or with someone who is offering something of value. This catfish (false profile) relationship usually involves the predator using gifts, money, flattery, lies, or other methods to get a young person to produce an image.
These dangerous conversations can be initiated through text, a social or chat app, a gaming site, or any number of digital connection points.
After a criminal successfully obtains a photo or video from their victim, the threats can escalate to promises to publish the content or even hurt the child if they don’t send more. This emotionally harrowing situation can ignite shame, fear, and confusion in children who may be too embarrassed to ask for help or report the abuse.
While these criminals rarely request to meet their victims face-to-face, the emotional and physical impact of sextortion can be devastating to a child. According to the FBI, some victims report abusers who become vicious with non-stop harassment and threats. Victims can feel scared, alone, embarrassed, and increasingly desperate. Sadly, as reported in the news, this type of crime can leave some children feeling like they have no way out of the situation.
If you are a parent or caregiver, explain to your child how sextortion can happen to anyone online and why it’s important to only connect with known friends and family. Parents: Consider boosting your device security with parental controls that filter content, report your child’s online activity, and reveal potential problems.
Some essential safety protocols kids should follow online are worthy of repeating. They are:
1) Make social accounts private, don’t share personal information, and only connect with known friends
2) Ignore and block messages from strangers
3) Keep your guard up. People can pretend to be anyone online, and photos can be altered
4) Be suspect if anyone asks you to message or text with them privately
5) Never share risky photos with anyone online—even a trusted friend
6) Tell someone immediately if someone is threatening you online.
With your child, go through their apps, social networks, chats, gaming communities, and friend groups and do some editing, defriending, and blocking. Make sure both you and your child know and trust all their online connections. Remember: Open communication and an honest relationship with your child are the most powerful tools you have to keep your child safe online.
A sextortion situation for a child can be incredibly confusing and cause them to isolate and avoid telling anyone about it. Remind and be clear with your child that they would never be in trouble for coming to you with any problem. Let them know that sextortion is a crime for the perpetrator and that they have not broken any laws by sending photos (despite what an abuser might have told them).
Victims of sextortion should go to a parent or trusted adult and tell them they need help. While doing this can feel terrifying, it’s crucial for victims to know people understand and want to help. For parents and caregivers, contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or report the crime online at tips.fbi.gov.
While the bad actors online are out to exploit and ruin our digital spaces, it’s important to maintain a healthy perspective rather than responding with fear. Remind your kids that there’s an army of people even more dedicated than the criminals; people like the FBI who are out to stop online crime and keep the internet safe for families. Additionally, as a parent or caregiver, your commitment to helping your family stay informed, equipped, and empowered online is how we all win.
The post Sextortion: What Your Kids Need to Know appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Ever hear of a crime called skimming? It may not be as dramatic a crime as assault or Ponzi schemes, but it can cause significant problems to you as your savings account can be wiped out in a flash.
Picture a scrawny nerd tampering with an automated teller machine (ATM)—the machine you use with your debit card to get cash. The thief places a device over the slot through which you slide your debit card. You have no idea it’s there. You swipe your card, and the device “skims” or reads your card’s information. In the middle of the night, the thief creeps back, removes the skimming device, downloads your data, burns it to a blank ATM card, makes a fat withdrawal and goes home with the loot. Or they could download your information from the skimmer and then use your information to make online purchases or access your account. Either way, they could clean you out before you wake up next morning!
Now, to be successful, the criminal not only needs a skimming device, they also need to attach a tiny wireless camera to capture your PIN. These cameras are usually concealed in the lighting fixture above the keypad, in a brochure near the machine, or attached directly to the ATM.
To protect yourself from being skimmed, and generally staying safe when using your debit or credit cards, follow these tips:
Stay safe from skimming!
The post What is ATM Skimming? appeared first on McAfee Blog.
We have entered a world where uncertainty has become the normal operating mode for everyone. Within this new frontier, cybersecurity has become even more challenging. However, some cybersecurity professionals have stood out, using their unique skills and resourcefulness to protect the integrity of their businesses, and to withstand unpredictable and dynamically changing threats. In the end, they, and their businesses have emerged even stronger.
These accomplishments have lead them to be selected from over more than 700 Cisco Cybersecurity Advocates – who are also members of Cisco Insider Advocates – to join the League of Cybersecurity Heroes.
Cisco Insider Advocates is a peer networking community developed several years ago for Cisco customers around the globe. Currently, over 14,000 customers are using it to share technology insights, feedback, and best practices, and also to make meaningful connections with others in the industry. We at Cisco believe that when we connect, anything is possible, and the Insider Advocacy program is a great example of the great things that can happen when people come together.
As the global CISO of Mediapro, Roberto has deployed Cisco SecureX together with Umbrella, Secure Endpoint, Secure Firewall, ISE, NGIP, Threat Response, AnyConnect, and Web security. With this partnership, Mediapro has reduced its threat detection time by 90%. In addition, they have seen no false positives in their threat detection alerts. It is rare to boast of a 100% success rate, but they can boldly make that pronouncement. All of this has also benefitted Mediapro financially by incurring zero fines for any compliance issues
What do music, cybersecurity, and teaching all have in common? They all culminate in a readiness to perform. Equally, they all require collaboration, comfort with the unexpected, and a passion for the job. Blair exemplifies the best of these traits, and in doing so, he provides inspiration and excellence to all with whom he interacts. Watching Blair at work makes one wonder if there are more hours granted to him during a day than the average person. He is a time-maximizer, spending most of that time in the service of others.
Too often, cybersecurity certifications are treated derisively by some of the very professionals who need them most. This is not the case with Kevin, who can list the many benefits of attaining certifications. Kevin’s desire to improve his knowledge doesn’t stop with technology and cybersecurity. He is an avid reader of anything that can raise him up to be better than he was the day before. With a career that started in the US Marine Corps, Kevin continues to learn and grow, all the while remaining as masterful at a computer keyboard as he is his with his traditional 55-gallon-barrel BBQ smoker and grill.
Steve is a Senior Cybersecurity and Network Architect at Lake Trust Credit Union. Like most organizations, Lake Trust has had to transition to a completely remote workforce quickly, and thanks to Secure Network Analytics, they were able to transition the employees to work remotely while maintaining the same high level of visibility and protection in place. Steve was the subject of a case study about the benefits that Cisco products have brought to Lake Trust Credit Unions’ customers. He is currently collaborating to update that information to share more of his knowledge.
Being the Head of Information Technology is never an easy job. However, when food manufacturer, Leng-d’Or, was faced with a challenge during the pandemic that could have interrupted its production line, quick thinking, skilled leadership, and a close partnership with Cisco all lead to positive outcomes, and helped them to pull through stronger than before. Part of this success comes from Enric’s distinct understanding of the threats, solutions, and processes needed to bring security to a higher level for the Leng-d’Or organization. Enric also shares his success story very freely, adding immeasurable benefits to the security community.
Cybersecurity is truly a global discipline. Tony Dous proves this by practicing his craft as a Senior Network Security Engineer in Cairo, Egypt. Tony’s involvement with the Cisco community shows how no distance is too far for a motivated cybersecurity professional.
When John Patrick is on the job, there is no longer any feeling that the criminals are one-step ahead of the good guys. He adopted Umbrella together with Meraki to develop a proactive security approach inside his organization. John Patrick created a more unified network from a patchwork of disparate entities. In doing so, he reduced the complexity within the environment. Complexity is so often responsible for security gaps, and John Patrick’s work not only corrected those gaps, but he brought people together in the process. He and his team received great feedback from the employees, who enjoyed a consistent network experience.
We often hear stories about teenagers who become enamored with technology, leading to the fulfillment of a dream. Amit Gumber became interested in cybersecurity at an early age, pursued his passion and has worked in the field ever since. His sense of advocacy is best described in his own words: “I’m quite passionate about sharing knowledge and ideas with peers and participating in collaborative activities.” Amit’s use of Cisco technologies has helped HCL Technologies to stabilize and secure their environment.
One of the most important factors for success is insatiable curiosity. Mark Healey is a continuous learner, and he is an example of someone who enthusiastically shares his knowledge. Whether it is on a personal level, or through his high engagement as part of the Cisco Insider Advocates community, or as an active member of the Internet Society, Mark is an evangelist and a positive voice for cybersecurity.
Wouter holds a special designation, not only as a member of the League of Cybersecurity Heroes, but also as the recipient of the “Cybersecurity Defender of the Year” award. Wouter is an active participant in the cybersecurity community, working with an almost evangelical zeal towards sharing the importance of holistic cybersecurity. His contributions stand out towards making the cyber realm a safer place.
It is often said that the job of a cybersecurity professional in an educational facility is especially challenging. When that facility happens to be the largest in an entire country, with over 4,000 schools and universities, the job of protecting it can seem insurmountable. At AzEduNet, in Azerbaijan, Bahruz and his team is tasked with securing the network for its 1.5 Million students. With Cisco Secure, the security team reduced security incidents by 80%. This not only ensures access for the students, but also keeps the data safe.
Many people want to enter the cybersecurity profession, but few have the dedication and perseverance to fully embrace the skillset required to meet that goal. Walther Noel not only had the desire to refocus his career, but he proved it by earning the CyberOps Associate Certification. His accomplishment is a prime example of how one can step outside of their comfort zone to grow and thrive.
Pascual demonstrates how important it is to make the most of the learning opportunities in Cisco Insiders Advocates. While already a successful NOC engineer, he sought to advance his professional development by studying cybersecurity. He passed the CCNA CyberOps 200-201 exam, moving him closer to propelling his career to even higher achievements.
One of the noblest expressions of knowledge is the desire to freely share that information. Inderdeep lives up to this ideal, offering his expertise to all with no expectations of reciprocity. His charitable spirit has not gone unnoticed, as he has been a previous award winner for Cisco IT Blogs, as well as a designation on the Feedspot top 100 Networking Blog.
Being the first to try a new technology can be a risky proposition. However, as a COO, risk calculations are in one’s blood. Luigi, along with the Sara Assicurazioni organization, hails as the first company in Italy to embrace cloud technology. As a company with more than one million customers, this was a bold initiative that required careful planning, keen insight, and above all, collaboration. In the end, this has resulted not only in a digital transformation, but a business transformation.
Whether it is a technical achievement, a personal triumph, or a spirit of helping others, each member of our League of Cybersecurity Heroes proves how technology and humanity can work together to accomplish the impossible. Congratulations to all of them!
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Cisco and AWS demonstrate shared responsibility that identifies Security “of” the Cloud versus Security “in” the Cloud.
Shared responsibility remains central to every cloud initiative and defines how cloud providers and customers work together to achieve maximum security across all aspects of the cloud. While shared responsibility is a common term, surprisingly few people understand the model and fewer still have implemented it correctly. The lack of consistent security controls across cloud services does not go unnoticed by attackers, as they probe for vulnerabilities and slip undetected through unsecured cracks.
Security teams should start by understanding the security controls provided by their cloud service providers to help them highlight areas that are susceptible to threats and attacks. Matrices, such as the following from Amazon Web Services (AWS), give a clear view of the shared responsibility model to guide an organization’s approach:
Once Security teams understand the areas they’re responsible for securing, they can begin to construct a security model that includes the right set solutions to serve their needs.
The most effective security model is built around centralized policy and distributed enforcement, allowing security policy to be applied consistently across operating systems, applications and data using multiple security solutions. Security teams should look for ideal solutions that seamlessly integrate into their unified policy. A good first step is to ask the cloud provider for their recommendations and visit cloud marketplaces, such as the AWS Marketplace, to find and try solutions. Customers can also utilize relationships with their security vendors to obtain best practices.
As Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” There are fundamental differences between on-premise and cloud security practices and controls. However, the way in which security teams discover best practices has not changed. New playbooks from trusted vendors and cloud providers are available to help security teams implement layered approaches to securing their organizations. Security teams should examine these concepts and build on them to protect their specific cloud services without needing to reinvent new models on their own. A good place to start is Cisco’s Cloud Security page.
Watch the recent AWS and Cisco webinar to hear industry analysts, head CISO advisors, and AWS experts discuss shared responsibility, industry challenges and the ways in which other security teams are addressing the problem, and then visit the AWS Marketplace to see the latest Cisco Secure offerings. Purchasing Cisco Secure on AWS Marketplace has the additional benefit of meeting the AWS Enterprise Discount Program commitments.
What is your experience with shared responsibility? We invite you to share your thoughts.
More Cisco and AWS blogs:
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It’s been seven years since the online cheating site AshleyMadison.com was hacked and highly sensitive data about its users posted online. The leak led to the public shaming and extortion of many Ashley Madison users, and to at least two suicides. To date, little is publicly known about the perpetrators or the true motivation for the attack. But a recent review of Ashley Madison mentions across Russian cybercrime forums and far-right websites in the months leading up to the hack revealed some previously unreported details that may deserve further scrutiny.
As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity on July 19, 2015, a group calling itself the “Impact Team” released data sampled from millions of users, as well as maps of internal company servers, employee network account information, company bank details and salary information.
The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information because ALM “profits on the pain of others,” and in response to a paid “full delete” service Ashley Madison parent firm Avid Life Media offered that allowed members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee.
According to the hackers, although the delete feature promised “removal of site usage history and personally identifiable information from the site,” users’ purchase details — including real name and address — weren’t actually scrubbed.
“Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie,” the hacking group wrote. “Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed.”
A snippet of the message left behind by the Impact Team.
The Impact Team said ALM had one month to take Ashley Madison offline, along with a sister property called Established Men. The hackers promised that if a month passed and the company did not capitulate, it would release “all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails.”
Exactly 30 days later, on Aug. 18, 2015, the Impact Team posted a “Time’s up!” message online, along with links to 60 gigabytes of Ashley Madison user data.
One aspect of the Ashley Madison breach that’s always bothered me is how the perpetrators largely cast themselves as fighting a crooked company that broke their privacy promises, and how this narrative was sustained at least until the Impact Team decided to leak all of the stolen user account data in August 2015.
Granted, ALM had a lot to answer for. For starters, after the breach it became clear that a great many of the female Ashley Madison profiles were either bots or created once and never used again. Experts combing through the leaked user data determined that fewer than one percent of the female profiles on Ashley Madison had been used on a regular basis, and the rest were used just once — on the day they were created. On top of that, researchers found 84 percent of the profiles were male.
But the Impact Team had to know that ALM would never comply with their demands to dismantle Ashley Madison and Established Men. In 2014, ALM reported revenues of $115 million. There was little chance the company was going to shut down some of its biggest money machines.
Hence, it appears the Impact Team’s goal all along was to create prodigious amounts of drama and tension by announcing the hack of a major cheating website, and then letting that drama play out over the next few months as millions of exposed Ashley Madison users freaked out and became the targets of extortion attacks and public shaming.
Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security, penned a blog post in 2015 concluding that the moral outrage professed by the Impact Team was pure posturing.
“They appear to be motivated by the immorality of adultery, but in all probability, their motivation is that #1 it’s fun and #2 because they can,” Graham wrote.
Per Thorsheim, a security researcher in Norway, told Wired at the time that he believed the Impact Team was motivated by an urge to destroy ALM with as much aggression as they could muster.
“It’s not just for the fun and ‘because we can,’ nor is it just what I would call ‘moralistic fundamentalism,'” Thorsheim told Wired. “Given that the company had been moving toward an IPO right before the hack went public, the timing of the data leaks was likely no coincidence.”
As the seventh anniversary of the Ashley Madison hack rolled around, KrebsOnSecurity went back and looked for any mentions of Ashley Madison or ALM on cybercrime forums in the months leading up to the Impact Team’s initial announcement of the breach on July 19, 2015. There wasn’t much, except a Russian guy offering to sell payment and contact information on 32 million AshleyMadison users, and a bunch of Nazis upset about a successful Jewish CEO promoting adultery.
Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 recorded a series of posts by a user with the handle “Brutium” on the Russian-language cybercrime forum Antichat between 2014 and 2016. Brutium routinely advertised the sale of large, hacked databases, and on Jan. 24, 2015, this user posted a thread offering to sell data on 32 million Ashley Madison users:
“Data from July 2015
Total ~32 Million contacts:
full name; email; phone numbers; payment, etc.”
It’s unclear whether the postdated “July 2015” statement was a typo, or if Brutium updated that sales thread at some point. There is also no indication whether anyone purchased the information. Brutium’s profile has since been removed from the Antichat forum.
Flashpoint is a threat intelligence company in New York City that keeps tabs on hundreds of cybercrime forums, as well as extremist and hate websites. A search in Flashpoint for mentions of Ashley Madison or ALM prior to July 19, 2015 shows that in the six months leading up to the hack, Ashley Madison and its then-CEO Noel Biderman became a frequent subject of derision across multiple neo-Nazi websites.
On Jan. 14, 2015, a member of the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront posted a lively thread about Ashley Madison in the general discussion area titled, “Jewish owned dating website promoting adultery.”
On July 3, 2015, Andrew Anglin, the editor of the alt-right publication Daily Stormer, posted excerpts about Biderman from a story titled, “Jewish Hyper-Sexualization of Western Culture,” which referred to Biderman as the “Jewish King of Infidelity.”
On July 10, a mocking montage of Biderman photos with racist captions was posted to the extremist website Vanguard News Network, as part of a thread called “Jews normalize sexual perversion.”
“Biderman himself says he’s a happily married father of two and does not cheat,” reads the story posted by Anglin on the Daily Stormer. “In an interview with the ‘Current Affair’ program in Australia, he admitted that if he found out his own wife was accessing his cheater’s site, ‘I would be devastated.'”
The leaked AshleyMadison data included more than three years’ worth of emails stolen from Biderman. The hackers told Motherboard in 2015 they had 300 GB worth of employee emails, but that they saw no need to dump the inboxes of other company employees.
Several media outlets pounced on salacious exchanges in Biderman’s emails as proof he had carried on multiple affairs. Biderman resigned as CEO on Aug. 28, 2015. The last message in the archive of Biderman’s stolen emails was dated July 7, 2015 — almost two weeks before the Impact Team would announce their hack.
Biderman told KrebsOnSecurity on July 19, 2015 that the company believed the hacker was some type of insider.
“We’re on the doorstep of [confirming] who we believe is the culprit, and unfortunately that may have triggered this mass publication,” Biderman said. “I’ve got their profile right in front of me, all their work credentials. It was definitely a person here that was not an employee but certainly had touched our technical services.”
Certain language in the Impact Team’s manifesto seemed to support this theory, such as the line: “For a company whose main promise is secrecy, it’s like you didn’t even try, like you thought you had never pissed anyone off.”
But despite ALM offering a belated $500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible, to this day no one has been charged in connection with the hack.
We’re excited to announce Cisco Secure Client, formerly AnyConnect, as the new version of one of the most widely deployed security agents. As the unified security agent for Cisco Secure, it addresses common operational use cases applicable to Cisco Secure endpoint agents. Those who install Secure Client’s next-generation software will benefit from a shared user interface for tighter and simplified management of Cisco agents for endpoint security.
Now, with Secure Client, you gain improved secure remote access, a suite of modular security services, and a path for enabling Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) across the distributed network. The newest capability is in Secure Endpoint as a new module within the unified endpoint agent framework. Now you can harness Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) from within Secure Client. You no longer need to deploy and manage Secure Client and Secure Endpoint as separate agents, making management more effortless on the backend.
Within Device Insights, Secure Client lets you deploy, update, and manage your agents from a new cloud management system inside SecureX. If you choose to use cloud management, Secure Client policy and deployment configuration are done in the Insights section of Cisco SecureX. Powerful visibility capabilities in SecureX Device Insights show which endpoints have Secure Client installed in addition to what module versions and profiles they are using.
The emphasis on interoperability of endpoint security agents helps provide the much-needed visibility and simplification across multiple Cisco security solutions while simultaneously reducing the complexity of managing multiple endpoints and agents. Application and data visibility is one of the top ways Secure Client can be an important part of an effective security resilience strategy.
Visit our homepage to see how Secure Client can help your organization today.
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Over her 25-year-plus career, Saleema Syed has seen the information security industry from a variety of vantage points, all while championing women in technology. Syed worked as director of business systems and data management for Duo Security before rising to vice president of information technology. Later, after Duo was acquired by Cisco, she transitioned to new roles within the larger organization and now heads up operations for Webex Marketing. In this position Syed brings structure across different functions of marketing including brand, events and technology while also serving as chief operating officer for Chief Marketing Officer Aruna Ravichandran.
“I fell in love with the culture, the kindness, the heart of this company,” Syed said.
Recently, she shared her passion for problem solving and inclusion with the Duo Blog, along with the advice she gives mentees navigating their own career paths.
Saleema Syed: I like chaos and I love putting a method to the madness. With marketing we have to react to the market, react to the business, react internally. What energizes me is there’s never a dull day and there is always this ability to bring some overall end to end process.
I love running towards a burning car and figuring out how to put it out. I love change. I know change is the only constant and rather than running away from it, I thrive in it. I like to look at it and ask, “What can we do to break it down and figure out what we need to do?”
My brain works in terms of boxes and flows and charts and spreadsheets so when I look at something I’m like, “Okay, what is a box? What is a process? How do I untangle it?” I like sitting in the discomfort and understanding what to do to get out of it.
Saleema Syed: There are three things I always keep in mind when I look at what I’m doing and where I want to be. One is, at the core of it, does it fill my cup of empathy and allow me to be true to who I am in how I treat people or how I build a team?
The second thing is, will I have the opportunity to influence and impact the people on the team or my family? How do I show myself to my daughter who is growing and seeing how to become who she is as a career person?
The third thing is, is it something new and am I learning something? Continuous learning is a huge part of who I am, so that drives me to get out of my comfort zone constantly.
When I’m changing jobs people usually say, “You’ve set up this team, you’re so comfortable. Now all you have to do is sit back and execute.” And my answer is, “That’s exactly why I am moving.”
If I am comfortable I’m not learning, and I don’t know if I’m adding any more value than I’ve set up. That means it’s time for me to move on and elevate somebody. What I’m doing is sending the elevator down to somebody on the team to grow.
That’s why I’ve had people who work for me for many years follow me through multiple organizations, which as a leader has been my pinnacle of what I call my success. Success is not my role; it is how many people I have impacted and influenced.
Saleema Syed: I keep going back to Duo because working at that organization and meeting those people defined me as a human being. One of the strategic pillars of that organization is to be kinder than necessary.
However complicated the work challenges are, those around me must be aligned with what my integral values are and who I am. They have to have empathy and kindness in their heart. If that is not there, no matter how much I love solving challenges and know I can solve them, I’m not going to go for it. I’ve been extremely lucky at Duo, Cisco and Webex that I’ve been around those kinds of people.
If you look at Webex, I love the core of what we are, the journey we are on, the inclusivity. We are not just selling Webex messaging or other products. At the heart of it we are looking at how we are influencing people and things around us by making sure that there is inclusivity in the collaboration tools that we are launching.
Saleema Syed: My leadership style is pretty simple: nobody works for me; people work with me. I lead with making sure that people know this is the problem you’re trying to solve, here is the context of what we are trying to do. Now, let’s figure out how we solve it. That is something that has helped my team be part of the problem solving that I love to do.
When I interview people my first questions are, “What does the job bring to you? How would this job fill your cup?” That throws people off every time. You can teach any technology, you can teach any skill set, but if you don’t have the basic passion, the attitude to be able to do this job, then everything else can just go out the door.
Saleema Syed: I have a very diverse background. I am an Indian by birth and grew up in the Middle East. When I went into engineering, finished my education and started my career, one of the things I realized was that as a woman of color, I always wanted to apply for positions that I was fully qualified for. I wanted to make sure I knew everything about the job because a very big fear was being asked a question in the interview I didn’t know. LinkedIn’s Gender Insights Report found that women apply for 20% fewer jobs than men despite similar job search behaviors. That has been a very challenging mental barrier for me to break.
Trey Boynton, who was at Duo and now she’s leading Cisco in a beautiful journey of diversity as the senior director of inclusion and collaboration strategy always said, “We have to have that bicycle lane on the road, whether it is for females, whether it is for people of color or any LGBTQIA+ community members. That is how we get people to bring that confidence in to learn, grow and then they can merge easily.”
“Passion is a part of who I am and is contributing to my growth.” – Saleema Syed
Whatever I faced as I was growing up, whether it was my dark skin, whether it was my accent, whether it was, “Oh, you’re way too passionate” has been some of the feedback that I’ve gotten. In my career if I’m told I’m way too passionate I turn that around and say, “Passion is a part of who I am and is contributing to my growth.”
Saleema Syed: Within Webex, within Cisco, I try to be part of anything that I can do in terms of giving back to the community. I’m definitely a big proponent of women in technology. In the local Dallas area I run a program by myself and go into schools and advocate for girls in STEM. Cisco is amazing in how it gives us time to volunteer. I love that educating kids is part of my journey of giving back. That’s the generation you can influence.
How do we enable children and women to be more open to technology and being part of the technology field? Let’s look at the percentage of diversity in the technology field and be aware of it. It’s not only about the diversity numbers, but are we bringing in candidates at the leadership level and giving them not just a seat at the table but a voice at the table, too?
You also have to talk about what you do and with passion and energy because if you don’t, people get intimidated. If you can influence one person who comes from an underrepresented community, imagine what you are doing, not just for that person, but for his household, for his family, for his extended community. I have a lot more to do, but as I get into the next decade of my life and my career, that is something that is a huge focus for me.
Saleema Syed: First and foremost it’s very important to spend time and understand the business and the products in whatever industry you’re going into. It is key to your growth. Especially if it’s a security industry, take time to understand the products, the technology or the function that you’re trying to get into. Contextual understanding and product understanding are extremely important.
The second piece is to keep learning. Cisco is amazing in trying to help you learn and support you financially to be able to do it. I went back and got my executive MBA four years ago. Give yourself a goal of learning a new something, whether it is a new function, new technology or new leadership skill.
The third piece is to create a spreadsheet of where you want to be in two years. Put that out there and then work back just like you would do a project plan. Work back month by month, quarter by quarter. What are the skill sets you need to learn to get there?
The last part is: Do the job you want versus the job you are in. Of course, you have to do the job you are in, but do the job you want to get to. Don’t wait for a title, don’t wait for a promotion to act. No. What do you want to be? Show that to your leaders and yourself. The title will come, money will come, everything will come, but am I doing the job that I want and enjoy and I want to get to?
To learn more about Webex, Cisco and Duo Security and how you can apply your passion, advocacy and problem solving to make a difference in cybersecurity, browse our open roles.
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Cisco Secure Social Channels
Our personal and professional lives are becoming increasingly intertwined with the online world. Regular internet usage has made us all prone to cyber-security risks. You leave a digital footprint every time you use the internet, which is a trace of all your online activities.
When you create new accounts or subscribe to different websites, you give them explicit (or implicit, through their family of apps or subsidiary websites) access to your personal and credit card information. In other cases, websites might track basic information without your knowledge, such as your location and search history.
There is an industry of data brokers specifically dedicated to keeping track of user data, packaging it, and supplying it to tech companies who use it to run targeted ads and enhance on-platform user experience. Given the widespread use of the internet and exponential improvements in technology, data has become a valuable commodity — creating a need for the sale and purchase of user data.
This article discusses how data brokers sell your personal information and how you can minimize risk.
Data brokers are companies that aggregate user information from various sources on the internet. They collect, collate, package, and sometimes even analyze this data to create a holistic and coherent version of you online. This data is then supplied to tech companies to fuel their third-party advertising-centered business models.
Companies interested in buying data include but are not limited to:
These companies and social media platforms use your data to better understand target demographics and the content with which they interact. While the practice isn’t unethical in and of itself (personalizing user experiences and creating more convenient UIs are usually cited as the primary reasons for it), it does make your data vulnerable to malicious attacks targeted toward big-tech servers.
Most of your online activities are related. Devices like your phone, laptop, tablets, and even fitness watches are linked to each other. Moreover, you might use one email ID for various accounts and subscriptions. This online interconnectedness makes it easier for data brokers to create a cohesive user profile.
Mobile phone apps are the most common way for data brokerage firms to collect your data. You might have countless apps for various purposes, such as financial transactions, health and fitness, or social media.
A number of these apps usually fall under the umbrella of the same or subsidiary family of apps, all of which work toward collecting and supplying data to big tech platforms. Programs like Google’s AdSense make it easier for developers to monetize their apps in exchange for the user information they collect.
Data brokers also collect data points like your home address, full name, Social Security number, phone number, and date of birth. They have automated scraping tools to quickly collect relevant information from public profiles.[Text Wrapping Break]
Lastly, data brokers can gather data from other third parties that track your cookies or even place trackers or cookies on your browsers. Cookies are small data files that track your online activities when visiting different websites. They track your IP address and browsing history, which third parties can exploit. Cookies are also the reason you see personalized ads and products.
Data brokers collate your private information into one package and sell it to “people search” websites like Spokeo or TruePeopleSearch. You or a tech business can use these websites to search for people and get extensive consumer data. People search sites also contain public records like voter registration information, marriage records, and birth certificates. This data is used for consumer research and large-scale data analysis.
Next, marketing and sales firms are some of data brokers’ biggest clients. These companies purchase massive data sets from data brokers to research your data profile. They have advanced algorithms to segregate users into various consumer groups and target you specifically. Their predictive algorithms can suggest personalized ads and products to generate higher lead generation and conversation percentages for their clients.
We tend to accept the terms and conditions that various apps ask us to accept without thinking twice or reading the fine print. You probably cannot proceed without letting the app track certain data or giving your personal information. To a certain extent, we trade some of our privacy for convenience. This becomes public information, and apps and data brokers collect, track, and use our data however they please while still complying with the law.
There is no comprehensive privacy law in the U.S. on a federal level. This allows data brokers to collect personal information and condense it into marketing insights. While not all methods of gathering private data are legal, it is difficult to track the activities of data brokers online (especially on the dark web). As technology advances, there are also easier ways to harvest and exploit data.
Vermont and California have already enacted laws to regulate the data brokerage industry. In 2018, Vermont passed the country’s first data broker legislation. This requires data brokers to register annually with the Secretary of State and provide information about their data collection activities, opt-out policies, purchaser credentialing practices, and data breaches.
California has passed similar laws to make data brokering a more transparent industry. For risk mitigation of data brokerage, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has published reports and provided recommendations to Congress to reduce the engagement of data broker firms. Giving individuals the right to opt-out of the sale of their personal data is a step toward a more rigorous law regarding data privacy.
Some data brokers let you remove your information from their websites. There are also extensive guides available online that list the method by which you can opt-out of some of the biggest data brokering firms. For example, a guide by Griffin Boyce, the systems administrator at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, provides detailed information on how to opt-out of a long list of data broker companies.
Acxiom, LLC is one of the largest data brokering firms and has collected data for approximately 68% of people who have an online presence. You can opt-out of their data collection either through their website or by calling them directly.
Epsilon Data Management is another big player in the data broker industry that operates as a marketing service and marketing analytics company. You can opt-out of their website through various methods such as by email, phone, and mail. Credit rating agencies like Experian and Equifax are also notorious for collecting your data. Similarly, you can opt-out through their websites or by calling them.
McAfee is a pioneer in providing online and offline data protection to its customers. We offer numerous cybersecurity services for keeping your information private and secure.
With regard to data brokers, we enable users to do a personal data clean-up. Cleaning up your personal data online may be a difficult task, as it requires you to reach out to multiple data brokers and opt out. Instead, sign up for McAfee’s Personal Data Cleanup feature to do a convenient and thorough personal data clean-up. We will search for traces of your personal data and assist in getting it removed.
The post How Data Brokers Sell Your Identity appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Whether using the internet for play or work, you want to spend your time online enjoying the peace of mind that comes with having a secure network.
You don’t want to contend with someone taking your personal data — whether it’s credit card information, passwords, or bank account details — via malware or a data breach on your Android, Windows, or Apple iOS device.
Fortunately, with some sensible precautions and simple steps, you can use your connected devices productively without worrying about cybercriminals and malicious software. This article explains how to stop hackers from getting access to your sensitive data.
You can take steps to protect your different computing and mobile devices and operating systems. These steps can be divided into technological solutions and the right awareness and information to provide a comforting measure of self-protection.
It’s like learning karate for self-defense, giving you confidence as you negotiate the wider world (and hoping that you never have to use it).
When it comes to identity protection software, McAfee provides a proven solution with our identity protection and privacy services. The protection includes alerts if your sensitive information is found on the dark web (up to 10 months sooner than other providers), personal data cleanup from sites gathering and selling your information, and an unlimited virtual public network (VPN) service that protects your privacy as you use public Wi-Fi networks.
You’ll also get up to $1 million in identity theft coverage and hands-on restoration support to help you reclaim your identity.
Simple, obvious passwords and passcodes (like your street address, your birthday, your kids’ or pets’ names, or “1234” or “abcd”) are easy for cybercriminals to crack, giving them unwanted access to your private data.
The stronger your password, the better your protection. Some best password practices include:
It’s important not to be a standing target. Just as you should use different passwords for everything, you should regularly change your passwords. You should do this a few times a year (although some cyber experts say this might not be necessary if you have a long and very complicated password).
If you have a number of passwords that you update often, it might be worth getting a password manager like McAfee True Key to keep track of them. Not only will you not be faced with remembering all your different passwords or writing them down (also a no-no), but it can also help you create and store unique passwords.
The software uses the strongest encryption algorithms available to protect your passwords, scrambling them so no one else can access them. It’ll also suggest new passwords and automatically log you into your online accounts with just one master password.
Another important line of defense is multi-factor authentication (sometimes known as two-factor authentication). This system uses a password and a second piece of verification — often an SMS message sent to your Android device or iPhone — to authenticate your identity.
This provides hard-to-beat protection even if a hacker has your password. Besides receiving SMS codes, there are also code-generating apps and physical security keys.
Thinking before you click on an email or text is a very important defense against phishing scams. Your bank won’t send you an email or text notifying you that there’s been suspicious activity on your account.
Does getting a large refund from your phone company sound too good to be true? It is. Similarly, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) won’t text to tell you that you owe them money, and princes aren’t going to give you a fortune out of the blue.
Internet users beware: If you’re not absolutely certain that the text message you received is from a legitimate and trusted source, delete it. You can always contact the business or person directly to confirm that the message is legit.
Any operating system or app you use is open to malicious cyberattacks. This is why you should keep all your software up to date with the latest versions. Software developers are continually fixing holes in their products and offering cybersecurity patches to make them as safe and hacker-proof as possible.
Make sure your software, firmware, and security settings are up to date on your home’s Wi-Fi router, as well. You can often change your settings to allow for automatic updates.
Sure, who doesn’t like to go to a cafe, library, or hotel lobby to use the free Wi-Fi? But security is often weak in these public networks. If you open your online banking account or access personal information, you may unwittingly be giving a personal invitation to eavesdropping cybercriminals.
This is where the bank-grade level of protection of McAfee Secure VPN comes in, which automatically turns on when you need it and keeps you safe on public Wi-Fi networks.
Even if your device does get hacked, you can protect vital information on your Windows or macOS system with an encryption program like BitLocker or FileVault. You can protect any hard drive you use, including portable ones and USB keys.
It’s also a good idea to only shop at encrypted websites marked with the prefix “HTTPS” in their URLs.
One of the best ways to surf the web in comfort while keeping hackers at bay is with the comprehensive solutions provided by McAfee Total Protection.
Your protection includes proactive measures (meaning we’ll guide you to the best choices for prevention), early detection, and expert identity theft support.
This means you’ll get identity monitoring, up to $1 million in identity theft coverage, lost wallet protection, premium antivirus software, a secure VPN, and personal data removal. In particular, our Personal Data Cleanup service will help find and remove your personal information from data broker websites and people search sites.
With McAfee, you don’t have to be afraid of hackers. Let us deal with them.
The post How to Stay One Step Ahead of Hackers appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Chief Information Officers and other technology decision makers continuously seek new and better ways to evaluate and manage their investments in innovation – especially the technologies that may create consequential decisions that impact human rights. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more prominent in vendor offerings, there is an increasing need to identify, manage, and mitigate the unique risks that AI-based technologies may bring.
Cisco is committed to maintaining a responsible, fair, and reflective approach to the governance, implementation, and use of AI technologies in our solutions. The Cisco Responsible AI initiative maximizes the potential benefits of AI while mitigating bias or inappropriate use of these technologies.
Gartner® Research recently published “Innovation Insight for Bias Detection/Mitigation, Explainable AI and Interpretable AI,” offering guidance on the best ways to incorporate AI-based solutions that facilitates “understanding, trust and performance accountability required by stakeholders.” This newsletter describes Cisco’s approach to Responsible AI governance and features this Gartner report.
At Cisco, we are committed to managing AI development in a way that augments our focus on security, privacy, and human rights. The Cisco Responsible AI initiative and framework governs the application of responsible AI controls in our product development lifecycle, how we manage incidents that arise, engage externally, and its use across Cisco’s solutions, services, and enterprise operations.
Our Responsible AI framework comprises:
We base our Responsible AI initiative on principles consistent with Cisco’s operating practices and directly applicable to the governance of AI innovation. These principles—Transparency, Fairness, Accountability, Privacy, Security, and Reliability—are used to upskill our development teams to map to controls in the Cisco Secure Development Lifecycle and embed Security by Design, Privacy by Design, and Human Rights by Design in our solutions. And our principle-based approach empowers customers to take part in a continuous feedback cycle that informs our development process.
We strive to meet the highest standards of these principles when developing, deploying, and operating AI-based solutions to respect human rights, encourage innovation, and serve Cisco’s purpose to power an inclusive future for all.
Check out Gartner recommendations for integrating AI into an organization’s data systems in this Newsletter and learn more about Cisco’s approach to Responsible Innovation by reading our introduction “Transparency Is Key: Introducing Cisco Responsible AI.”
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Just like the myriad expanding galaxies seen in the latest images from the James Webb space telescope, the cybersecurity landscape consists of a growing number of security technology vendors, each with the goal of addressing the continually evolving threats faced by customers today. In order to be effective, cybersecurity tools have to be collaborative—be it sharing relevant threat intelligence, device & user insights, acting on detection and remediation workflows, and more.
We at Cisco Secure have embraced this concept for a while now with our continually growing ecosystem of multi-vendor technology integrations. At the RSA Conference 2022 earlier this year, Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration, spoke of how the ‘cybersecurity poverty line’ is widening and how malicious actors are taking advantage of this gaping hole to unleash persistent attacks. It is imperative that cybersecurity vendors interact with and collaborate with each other to lower this gap. To do this, security vendors must adopt open ecosystems of APIs to easily integrate with each other to provide effective ways for mutual customers to defend and react to cybersecurity attacks.
Like in prior years, this fiscal year 2022 saw us growing to include new ecosystem partners and integrations. With 22 new partners and 51 new integrations in our ecosystem, Cisco Secure Technical Alliance (CSTA) now boasts over 450 integrations, including technical integrations with Cisco Duo and Cisco Kenna. This allows our mutual customers the freedom to implement the cybersecurity tools of their choice with the knowledge that these tools can integrate with each other if they need to, thus realizing a better return on investment in their cybersecurity spending and improving cybersecurity posture.
In this annual round-up of our ecosystem, we congratulate our new partners in CSTA and existing partners as well, who have either created new integrations across our portfolio or augmented existing ones. For more details on each partner integration in this announcement, please read through the individual partner highlights below.
Happy integrating!
The AlienApp for Cisco Secure Endpoint enables you to automate threat detection and response activities between USM Anywhere and Cisco Secure Endpoint. It also enhances the threat response capabilities of USM Anywhere by providing orchestration and response actions to isolate or un-isolate hosts based on risks identified in USM Anywhere. In addition, it allows you to collect hourly events from Cisco Secure Endpoint through the USM Anywhere Job Scheduler. Read more here.
AttackIQ automates the evaluation of Cisco Secure Endpoint against the tactic categories as outlined by MITRE ATT&CK. The AttackIQ and Cisco partnership and technical integration enables organizations to validate that the Cisco Secure Endpoint is deployed correctly and configured optimally, ensuring protection for your endpoints against the latest threats. Read more here.
With Certego Tactical Response for Cisco Secure Endpoint, monitored endpoints are monitored by the Certego PanOptikon SOAR platform. When Certego IRT detects malicious activities on a specific host in the customer’s network, it can isolate compromised hosts to block the attack, even without requiring the user to access the Cisco Secure Endpoint Console. Read more about the Certego here.
Cisco Secure Endpoint is now certified for the ServiceNow ITSM San Diego release. The Cisco Secure Endpoint App on ServiceNow provides users with the ability to integrate event data from the Cisco Secure Endpoint into ServiceNow by creating ITSM incidents. The app automates the collection of events from Cisco Secure Endpoint and groups them into single incidents. Read more here.
FAMOC manage from Techstep, a Gartner-recognized MMS provider, is an MDM designed to give IT a complete view and absolute control over mobile devices used by the workforce, so that people can work more effectively and securely. With the Cisco Security Connector for iOS integration, FAMOC MDM extends its enterprise mobility management with an extra layer of network security and traffic analysis tool, giving IT admins tools to make actionable decisions and design access control policies. Read more here.
Elastic Security now supports event ingestion from Cisco Umbrella, providing visibility into user activity and attempts to access potentially malicious domains. This new integration supports Umbrella proxy, cloud firewall, IP, and DNS logs. This integration enables security analysts to detect threats and visualize Cisco Umbrella data, and also correlate Umbrella events with other data sources including endpoint, cloud, and network. This integration expands on Elastic’s on-going expansion of Cisco integrations including ASA, Nexus, Meraki, Duo and Secure Firewall Threat Defense. Read more here.
FortiSIEM brings together visibility, correlation, automated response, and remediation in a single, scalable solution. It reduces the complexity of managing network and security operations to effectively free resources, improve breach detection, and even prevent breaches. Read more here.
Hunters ingests Cisco Umbrella log and alert information into our SOC Platform; the Platform then correlates that information with all of the other (vendor agnostic) customer security telemetry, including EDR, Identity and Cloud/Network log data, in the customer’s infrastructure to synthesize and detect incidents with a higher fidelity than any single tool alone can produce. Read more here.
LearnSafe equips school leaders (K-12) with evidence-based information to better understand which students are exhibiting behavioral issues and in need of help based on what they are using, saying, and doing on the school-owned computer. With Cisco Umbrella, LearnSafe administrators are able to block access to domains their students should not be accessing. Read more here.
The Cisco Umbrella solution for Microsoft Azure Sentinel is now live! This integration enables your customers to ingest Cisco Umbrella events stored in Amazon S3 into Microsoft Sentinel using the Amazon S3 REST API. Read more here.
Sumo Logic’s cloud-native collector supports automatic ingestion of logs from Cisco Umbrella’s hosted AWS S3 buckets. Data collected from Umbrella can then be routed to Sumo’s Cloud SIEM, where it is then automatically normalized and applied to our rule’s engine. Several built-in rules for Umbrella have been created that, when triggered, will generate security signals in the platform. These and other security signals are then clustered together based on related entities (IP, email, domain name, URL, etc.) to create insights for review by the SOC. Read more here.
The Secure Firewall team and Alkira have validated Secure Firewall (Virtual) Version 7.1 to run on Alkira’s cloud network as-a-service (CNaaS) platform. The solution offers on-demand hybrid and multi-cloud connectivity, integrated network and security services, end-to-end visibility, controls and governance. Read more here.
The Secure Firewall team has validated Cyware’s STIX 1.2 threat intelligence feed for interoperability with Secure Firewall’s Threat Intelligence Director. Customers can quickly operationalize the inbound data to protect the network from the latest threats. Read more here.
Dragos protects critical infrastructure and has joined the CSTA program. Dragos inventories assets, determines risk and vulnerabilities and generates firewall policy objects that administrators can apply to their Cisco Secure Firewall deployment through its REST API. Read more here.
The Secure Firewall team and Equinix have validated Secure Firewall (Virtual) to run on Equinix’s Network Edge as a Service platform. Equinix Fabric allows you to connect digital infrastructure and services on demand via secure, software-defined interconnection (Ecosystem). Read more here.
Fastvue has joined the CSTA program. The Fastvue Site Clean engine intelligently interprets Cisco Secure Firewall log data so that non-technical employees can easily see what people are actually doing online. The data use to keep companies compliant with workplace and school policies. Read more here.
Alef Nula has developed a new integration with ISE. The Alef Nula Identity Bridge consumes identity updates published by pxGrid and serves them to ASA firewalls using the CDA/Radius protocol. Using pxGrid v2.0, it replaces unsupported Cisco CDA and allows ASA firewalls to become an identity consumer of ISE context. It can read the full identity database and can update registered ASA firewalls in Full Download mode. Read more here.
Forescout’s pxGrid Plugin integrates with existing Cisco ISE deployments so that you can benefit from Forescout visibility and assessment for policy decisions, while continuing to use ISE as an enforcement point. The pxGrid Plugin enables Forescout platform policies to detect ISE-related properties on endpoints, and to apply Cisco ISE ANC policies, including policies that assign Security Groups to devices. Read more here.
FortiManager provides automation-driven centralized management of Fortinet devices from a single console, enabling full administration and visibility of your network devices through streamlined provisioning and innovative automation tools. FortiManager dynamically collects updates from Cisco ISE with pxGrid and forwards them to FortiGate using the Fortinet Single Sign On (FSSO) protocol. This enables the use of session information collected by Cisco ISE to be leveraged in FortiOS security policies. Read more here.
Radiflow provides OT ICS policy creation and enforcement with the Radiflow iSID IDS. They recently completed a new integration with ISE leveraging pxGrid. With this integration Cisco ISE receives enriched data of OT devices from Radiflow iSID and will process it according to the profiles and policies which have been configured. Enriching ISE with OT specific insights available with iSID’s DPI engine enables better decision making within ISE by providing additional context to categorize devices by their type/function within the OT environment. Read more here.
XTENDISE is a simple web application connected to Cisco ISE. It is designed for administrators, helpdesk, operators or anyone who needs to work with ISE and helps them with everyday routine tasks related to 802.1X without the need to train them in Cisco ISE. XTENDISE saves administrators’ time, prevents errors and increases network security. Read more here.
The Cisco Secure Malware Analytics Add-On for Splunk leverages the Threat Grid API to enrich events within Splunk. The add-on is now updated for Splunk 8 and is available on Splunkbase. Read more here.
Censys now has an integration with SecureX threat response, which returns Sightings of IP and IPv6 Observables (IOCs) in an investigation. Read more about the Censys relay module here.
The new Exabeam integration empowers users to investigate an observable and determine if it is contained in a log message stored in Exabeam Fusion SIEM Data Lake. It provides users with the date and time the observable was seen in the log, the forwarder that sent the log, and the raw log messages. When you pivot into Exabeam and search for an observable in all the log messages, the results of the search are displayed in the Exabeam UI. This integration allows you to query IPv4, IPv6, SHA-1, SHA-256, MD5, domain, URL, file path, user and email data types and it returns sightings of an observable from each log message. Read more here.
The LogRhythm integration empowers users to investigate an observable and determine if it is contained in an event stored in LogRhythm. It provides users with the date and time the observable was seen in the event and the raw event data. This integration allows you to query IPv4 and IPv6 data types and it returns sightings of an observable from each event. Read more here.
A proof-of-concept integration with RSA NetWitness SIEM was built for the RSAC SOC and Black Hat NOCs. The SecureX Concrete Relay implementation using NetWitness as a third-party Cyber Threat Intelligence service provider. The Relay itself is just a simple application written in Python that can be easily packaged and deployed. Read more here.
Cisco SecureX threat response integration with SecOps is now certified for the ServiceNow San Diego release. The module allows ServiceNow SecOps to leverage the Verdicts, Refer and Response capabilities provided by SecureX threat response to assist the security analyst in their investigation workflow. Read more here.
The Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM integration provides security analysts with enhanced visibility across the enterprise to thoroughly understand the impact and context of an attack. Streamlined workflows automatically triage alerts to maximize security analyst efficiency and focus. This integration indicates to users that the observable in an investigation is contained in an insight and/or signal within Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM. It allows you to query IPv4, IPv6, SHA-1, SHA-256, MD5, domain, and URL data types. It also returns sightings and indicators of an observable from each insight and signal retrieved from Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM. Read more here.
APIVoid provides JSON APIs useful for cyber threat analysis, threat detection and threat prevention. The following APIVoid atomic actions for SecureX Orchestration Workflows are now available: Get Domain Reputation, Get IP Reputation, Get URL Reputation, Get URL Status. Access the workflows here.
Censys is a company that allows users to discover the devices, networks, and infrastructure on the Internet and monitor how it changes over time. SecureX orchestration atomic actions for Censys is now available and includes: Basic Search. Access the workflows here.
This integration radically reduces the time and resources enterprises spend to detect, investigate, and remediate ransomware threats to data. It empowers SecOps, ITOps and NetOps with visibility and automation to collaborate in countering ransomware — regardless of whether data resides on-premises or in the cloud — delivering enterprise-wide confidence in deterring, detecting, and recovering fast from cyberattacks. Cohesity’s next-gen data management enhances Cisco SecureX by adding visibility and context to data, complementing Cisco’s existing capabilities for networks, endpoints, clouds, and apps. Read more here.
SecureX orchestration atomic actions for workflows are now available for Farsight Security DNSDB. They include various items like DKIM key inspections, DNS Resource Records and more. Access the workflows here.
SecureX orchestration workflows for Fortinet FortiGate are now available: Block URL, IP and Domain Threat Containment. Access the workflows here.
SecureX orchestration workflows for Jamf Pro include: Lock Computer, Lock Mobile Device. Access the workflows here.
SecureX orchestration workflows for Palo Alto Networks Panorama are now available: Block URL, IP, Domain Threat Containment. Access the workflows here.
A new Orchestration action provides top MacOS IR Indicators to ServiceNow This workflow runs multiple Orbital queries on the endpoint provided to look for top incident response indicators of compromise. The results are then posted to a ServiceNow incident. Supported observables: ip, mac_address, amp_computer_guid, hostname. Access the workflow here.
Shodan is a database of billions of publicly available IP addresses, and it’s used by security experts to analyze network security. SecureX orchestration atomic actions for Shodan include: Basic Search. Access the workflows here.
Earlier this year we announced SecureX Device Insights which provides comprehensive endpoint inventory in a single unified view. Endpoint searching and reporting allows you to assess device security configuration on employee-owned, contractor-owned, company owned, and IoT/OT devices—without risking business disruption. With Device Insights you can
Device insights supports the following third-party sources in its initial release: Jamf Pro, Microsoft Intune, Ivanti MobileIron and VMware Workspace ONE (formerly AirWatch).
Bitglass’ Next-Gen CASB provides data protection, threat protection, access management, and visibility, while Duo offers identity verification options like SSO and MFA. The Duo and Bitglass integration provide a synergistic solution that funnels traffic through Duo’s SSO and verifies users via its MFA so Bitglass can deliver real-time data loss prevention and granular adaptive access control. Because of Bitglass’ agentless architecture, the joint solution can secure any app, any device, anywhere. Read more about the integration here. A joint solution brief is also available here.
Cmd helps companies authenticate and manage user security in Linux production environments without slowing down teams — you don’t need to individually configure identities and devices. Cmd integrates with Duo to put 2FA checkpoints into Linux-based data centers and cloud infrastructure. The combination of Cmd and Duo enables development teams to run at the modern, agile pace they are accustomed to without any security-induced slowdowns. Read more here.
Darktrace is an AI-native platform that delivers self-learning cyber defense and AI investigations and seamlessly integrates with other tools via an open and extensible architecture. Darktrace’s Security Module for Duo provides coverage over access, user sessions and platform administration within the Duo platform. Read more here.
Dashlane is a password manager that now supports Duo using Duo SSO. The integration lets IT Administrators easily deploy Duo + Dashlane and set up access policies. End users can easily access Dashlane and their passwords with SSO from Duo. Read more here.
HashiCorp Vault is an identity-based secrets and encryption management system. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API encryption keys, passwords, and certificates. Add another layer of protection and protect access to secrets within HashiCorp Vault with Duo Security MFA. Read more here. A recording of the Cisco Duo + HashiCorp webinar is available to view here.
Oort discovers vulnerabilities across an entire user population (or a segment of it). Trigger notifications related to behavioral anomalies or best practices, or policies not being followed. Oort integrates with Duo for identity analytics and threat detection to provide a complete picture of the user behavior and highlight any anomalous activity or identify risks. Read more here.
Perimeter 81 simplifies cyber and network security for the hybrid workforce, ensuring secure access to local networks, applications, and cloud infrastructure. Their integration with Duo provides protection for administrators and end-users who need to log in to Perimeter 81. Read more here.
Specops Software, a leading provider of password management and authentication solutions, protects businesses by securing user authentication across high-risk tasks including account unlocks and password recovery via self-service or the IT service desk. Organizations can extend Duo authentication to secure user verification across these use cases. Read about the integration here. A blog on the integration is also available here.
Sectona is a Privileged Access Management company that delivers integrated privilege management components for securing dynamic remote workforce access across on-premises or cloud workloads, endpoints, and machine-to-machine communication. Duo’s secure access multi-factor authentication can be used to ensure that each user authenticates using multiple methods (factors) while accessing Sectona Privileged Access Management. Read more here.
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As Technology Audit Director at Cisco, Jacob Bolotin focuses on assessing Cisco’s technology, business, and strategic risk. Providing assurance that residual risk posture falls within business risk tolerance is critical to Cisco’s Audit Committee and executive leadership team, especially during the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) process.
Bolotin champions the continued advancement of the technology audit profession and received a master’s degree in cybersecurity from the University of California Berkeley. After completing the program in 2020, he spearheaded a grant from Cisco to fund research conducted by the university’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, which included identifying best practices around cybersecurity risk and risk management in the M&A process, captured in this co-authored report.
When asked about his approach to evaluating risk management, Bolotin likens the corporate dynamics to a Formula One racing team, whose success depends on the effective collaboration of experts to meet the challenges of the most demanding racecourses. In Bolotin’s analogy, a corporation (say, Cisco) is the Formula One vehicle, and the business (i.e., executive and functional leaders) races the car on the track. In the pit, you have IT and technology support, which maintains operations and optimizes efficiencies to ensure the vehicle’s peak performance. Meanwhile, InfoSec is the designer and implementor of risk management capabilities (for instance, ensuring the latest technology is deployed and within expected specifications). These groups converge to help keep the business running and help ensure the vehicle is race-day-worthy.
An M&A deal is a significant business opportunity and represents the transition to a new Formula One race car. In this scenario, the business cannot physically get behind the wheel and test drive it. Frequently, the car cannot be inspected, and critical data is not available for review before the deal. The competitive balance and sensitive nature of M&A deals require the business to trust that the car will perform as expected. “Laser-focused due diligence enables you to understand where the paved roads [the most efficient paths to data security, for example] may lie. This is where the Cisco Security and Trust M&A team plays an integral role,” says Bolotin. “They can look down those paved roads and determine, from a cybersecurity perspective, which capabilities Cisco should own, and which ones are better for the acquired business to manage. This team understands what to validate, so the audit committee and key stakeholders can be confident that the business will be able to drive the new Formula One car successfully and win the race.”
Risk management, assessment, and assurance are vital to establishing this confidence. The technology audit team conducts risk assessments across all of Cisco, including M&As, for key technology risk areas, including product build and operation. In addition to risk management oversight, Bolotin and the technology audit team are responsible for assuring the Audit Committee that the acquired entity can be operationalized within Cisco’s capabilities without undermining the asset’s valuation.
“We don’t want to run duplicate processes and systems, especially when we have bigger economies of scale to leverage,” Bolotin says. “We must operationalize the acquisition. That is table stakes. And we must do it while maintaining the integrity and security of the entity we are acquiring.”
In 2019, Bolotin resurrected a working group of technology audit director peers from companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and VMware, called the “Silicon Valley IT Audit Director Working Group”. The directors meet regularly to share insights and explore issues around technology risk, risk management, and business risk tolerance. “I wanted to get with my peers and understand how they do their job,” he says. “We collaborate on defining ‘what good looks like,’ as we co-develop audit and risk management programs to help move the industry forward”.
Bolotin, along with a few other members of the working group, was selected to participate in a separate research study conducted by the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, aimed at developing a generalized framework for improving cybersecurity risk management and oversight within M&A. Among the research questions, the working group members were asked to identify their key cybersecurity risks and where those risks sit in the M&A process.
“In my opinion, the biggest cybersecurity risks today are cloud security posture and third-party software inventory and bill of materials, or SBOM,” says Bolotin. “These risks impact not only product acquisitions but our ability to secure and operationalize business capabilities within Cisco. Whether we transition capabilities to run within Cisco or leave them for the acquired company to operate, we must have a thorough understanding of any third-party risks that may exist in IT, in the technologies and systems used by the acquired company, or anywhere else. Especially those that may impact the broader Cisco enterprise as the new entity is integrated.”
Cybersecurity risk is attached to talent management and moral hazards as well. “It’s not uncommon to lose talent in acquisition deals,” Bolotin says, “and these days, much of this talent is cybersecurity focused. This potential loss is a huge risk for us and can sometimes be due to cultural differences between Cisco and the acquired entity. People who would rather be on a swift and elegant sailboat do not readily choose to be a passenger on a massive cruise ship, no matter how grand or impressive.”
Moral hazards are always a concern in M&A. Red flags can include ongoing data breaches and either downplaying or providing misleading information about a security incident. The Cisco Security and Trust M&A team does a tremendous amount of due diligence around these hazards, sometimes augmented by investigative techniques from a Cisco security partner, such as trolling the dark web. Companies can protect themselves against the risk of moral hazards through clauses inserted in the acquisition contract.
Concerning contracts, Bolotin advises companies to ensure the risk management commitments they set down are realistic. “Companies need to be very sure they have received the right inputs to enable them to manage every relevant cybersecurity vulnerability, whether it is a misconfiguration on the acquisition’s security firewall, within their network, their product in the cloud, or any other significant vulnerability, based on contractual obligations. You need to be sure you can commit to privacy investigation and breach event readiness, and notification process the acquired entity needs and have a clear sense of how fast you can meet these requirements.”
Bolotin ardently reminds companies that risk management in cybersecurity is not owned by a solitary group. Managing risk is a collective effort that transcends different organizations, each of which should understand its role in helping to mitigate the risks.
“Risk management begins in the production environment, with the engineers building code and downloading software to help them create new products and capabilities,” says Bolotin. “It’s essential that everyone understands how to identify and properly manage cybersecurity risks in their everyday work, including the tools and services used to enable the business, and work to mitigate applicable risks, especially in these critical areas.”
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Are you hoping to buy a house or apply for a car, personal, or business loan at some point? A great credit score helps to achieve all those things. You never know the twists and turns life might take you, so even if these financial milestones aren’t on your radar now, it’s nice to know that a great credit score will open many doors for you when you’re ready. The better your credit score, the more likely you are to get the loan you want at the best interest rate. People spend years (even decades!) working to improve their credit scores to unlock numerous opportunities. In the blink of an eye though, a credit fraudster can erase all that hard work and inflict long-term credit damage. It can cost huge sums to repair and take years to correct.
Many people feel lost on how to prevent these problems or what to do if they suspect identity theft. Luckily, new McAfee services called credit lock and security freeze, which includes credit freeze, are great tools to add to your credit protection toolbelt. They’ll help protect your most personal information from thieves, and both services will help give you the peace of mind you need to confidently go about your day.
Keep reading to learn more about McAfee’s credit lock and security freeze and find out how you can use them to help you from the negative consequences of identity theft.
Credit fraud is a type of identity theft where a criminal uses your information to borrow money, open a new credit or debit card, or uses your card to make purchases that they never intend to pay off. Then, when the loan defaults and the bills stack up, the victim is often left with their credit score in shambles.
According to the FTC, credit fraud is the most common type of identity theft in 2020 and 2021, receiving nearly 18,000 reports from people saying that someone used their information to gain illegal access to their credit card accounts.1
To make sure we’re all on the same page, here are quick definitions of McAfee’s credit lock and security freeze services.
A credit lock and a credit freeze both stop companies from accessing your credit information without your consent when an application for a loan or credit card is submitted. The main difference lies in their speed and credit bureau coverage. By toggling a switch in the McAfee Protection Center, turning on a credit lock is almost instantaneous. A credit freeze can take up to a day to enable or remove; however, it may offer stronger financial loss protection in most U.S. states if an unauthorized line of credit goes through while all three credit bureaus are frozen. Also, McAfee’s credit lock stops one credit bureau from accessing your account, while a credit freeze enables you to halt all three.
Just make sure that you unlock and unfreeze your credit before you do the following:
These are all situations where a bank or creditor will need to access your credit files. Luckily, with significant purchases and financing opportunities like these, you usually plan ahead, so you should have plenty to time to enable access to your credit. To unlock your credit, just click the credit lock toggle. To unlock a freeze, use the same provided links, sign into your account, and follow the instructions from there.
To further help you decide which service may be best for your needs, here are the situations where credit lock and credit freeze would be most helpful.
McAfee credit lock lets you simply toggle on and off one credit bureau’s ability to access your credit report. Usually, filing a lock on your credit with a bureau requires filling out forms and remembering a PIN to apply or remove a lock. Not with McAfee’s credit lock! You can turn a lock on and off at will through the McAfee Protection Center.
Convenience and blazing speed are ideal in situations where you’re worried that a criminal has your personal information and may use it to open accounts in your name that could then damage your well-earned great credit. Some people may choose to always have the credit lock enabled and only unlock it when they’re applying for a credit card or loan. That way, they can feel better about the safety of their credit score.
Credit freeze provides protection and peace of mind just like credit lock; however it enables you to freeze your account at all three major credit bureaus. When creditors check your credit score, they could do so with any credit bureau. If you only freeze one bureau’s access to your information, that still leaves the other two to make inquiries, so it’s important to set up a freeze for each one to cover all your bases.
As mentioned, a credit freeze is just one type of security freeze offered by McAfee. If you’re worried about an identity thief opening not just credit cards, but also utility and/or bank accounts in your name, McAfee’s utility freeze and bank freeze may be additional services for you. Security freeze helps stop unauthorized fraud attempts by giving you quick links and phone numbers. Having all these contact details in one place really speeds up the process and takes the guesswork out of if you’re contacting the correct offices.
Dealing with identity theft or credit fraud is a scary and stressful situation. That’s why McAfee is here with tools that help you protect you. Credit lock and credit freeze may help you feel calmer in a situation of suspected or real identity theft and gives you peace of mind to help prevent credit fraud from happening in the first place. Speed is of the utmost importance when foiling a criminal, so both solutions are easy to use with intuitive design so you’re not wasting time trying to figure out how they work. Plus, neither will affect your credit score. They just stop creditors from looking at your credit files, while you continue to boost your credit with your smart habits.
With both credit lock or credit freeze in your back pocket, you can feel more secure knowing you’re better protected from credit fraud.
1Fortunly, “20 Worrying Identity Theft Statistics for 2022”
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