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With the holidays on the horizon, spirits are high—and it’s those same high spirits that hackers want to exploit. ‘Tis the season for clever social engineering attacks that play on your emotions, designed to trick you into giving up personal info or access to your accounts.
Social engineering attacks unfold much like a confidence scam. A crook takes advantage of someone’s trust, applies a little human psychology to further fool the victim, and then pulls off a theft. Online, a social engineering attack will likely involve a theft attempt of personal or account information that the crook can then use to make purchases, drain accounts, and so forth.
Not at all in the holiday spirit, right? Let’s take a look at some of their top tricks so that you can spot and avoid them.
As said, spirits can get high this time of year. There’s looking forward to gatherings with family and friends, the fun that comes along with hunting for that perfect gift, and the excitement of the holidays overall. And that’s what hackers count on—people getting caught up in the rush of the holidays, to the point where they may not look at emails, offers, shipping notices, and such with a critical eye. That’s how the scammers get their foot in the door.
Some of their favored tricks can look a little like this:
What are the holidays without that trendy “must-get” gift item, the one that’s seemingly out of stock no matter where you look? Scammers are keen on these items as well and will prop up phony ads and storefronts that pretend to sell those items but really don’t. Instead, they’re just a shady way for them to steal your debit or credit card information—or to lift a few bucks out of your pocket in return for nothing.
One way to keep from getting burned by one of these scams is to follow the old adage, “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.” In this case, crooks are using feelings of scarcity and urgency to get you to bite. Here’s where you can take a moment before you click to do some research.
Answers to these questions can separate the good businesses from the bogus ones.
Like the above, crooks will create a sense of urgency about a hot holiday item or limited time offer. The twist comes when they request payment via a gift card rather than by credit or debit card or other legitimate online payment methods. This request is highly deliberate because gift cards are much like cash. Once the money on the card is spent, it’s gone, and these cards do not offer the same protections that come with other payment methods.
You can avoid this one easily. If anyone asks you to use a gift card as payment, it’s a scam. Gift cards are for gifts, not payment, says the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). If you come across such a scam, you can report it to the FTC as well.
Donating to a charity in someone else’s name is often a popular gift. Much the same, giving a donation to a worthy cause feels particularly good this time of year. Once again, scammers will take advantage of these good intentions by propping up phony charities designed to do nothing more than dupe you out of your money. Whether that’s a flat-out phony charity or one of the many other scam charities that have been known to pocket 90 cents of every dollar donated, this is the time of year to be on the lookout for both.
The advice here is much the same as the advice for avoiding phony businesses and retailers. Do your homework. The Better Business Bureau maintains a listing of charities that can help you make good donation choices. Also, your state government’s charity officials can help you separate good charities from bad—and even file a report if you suspect a scam is at play.
And once again, if a charity is asking for donations in the form of cash, gift cards, or wire transfer, just say no. That’s a surefire sign of a scam.
Scammers know you have packages in transit this holiday season, loaded with gifts that you’re eagerly tracking. Enter another classic scam—the phony shipping notice. The idea is that you already have so many packages on their way that you won’t think twice about opening an email with a “shipping notice” that comes in the form of an attachment. Of course, that attachment is a fake. And it’s loaded with malware.
Too bad for scammers, though. This is another one you can steer clear of rather easily. Don’t open such attachments. Shipping companies will almost certainly send along notices and invoices in the body of an email, not as an attachment. If you have a question, you can always visit the shipper’s website and look up your tracking info there. Likewise, follow up with the customer service department of the company that you purchased the item from in the first place.
While the holidays are a special time for scammers too, there are several things you can do to up the level of your protection now and year ‘round. A quick list includes:
No doubt, the holidays have a feel all to themselves, one which hackers and crooks want to take advantage of. They’ll craft their tricks accordingly and try to twist the good times that roll around at the end of the year into scams that capitalize on your good intentions. As you can see, it’s not too tough to spot them for what they are if you pause and take a moment to scrutinize those emails, offers, and sales. And that’s the thing with the holidays. We can all feel pinched for time at some point or other during this stretch. Look out for their pressure tactics and seemingly clever ways of using social engineering to rip you off. That way, you can spend the holidays focusing on what’s important—your friends and family.
The post Social Engineering: Tis the Season for Tricky Hackers appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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Have you ever been online and replied to a comment or post? Maybe it was on Reddit or on an influencer’s Instagram. Did other people reply to you, and were any of them unexpectedly hostile? When you’re online, a little hostility is sadly par for the course, but most people brush it off and move on to enjoy other aspects of life online. But what would you do if that unpleasant interaction went much farther than was reasonable? What if one day you discovered the most important parts of your identity had been maliciously and intentionally revealed online? Let’s talk about doxxing – what it is and how you can avoid becoming a victim of this kind of harassment.
Doxxing, derived from the hacker term “dropping docs”, is internet slang for revealing someone’s identity online for the purposes of harassing them. It usually goes way beyond simply revealing someone’s email address or name and may involve personal information like a home address or workplace, SSN, financial information, phone number, pictures, texts, IP address, and other important details. The tricky thing about doxxing is that aspects of it may not be a crime, depending on what you’ve made publicly available online. However, the context in which doxxing occurs is crucial. Often it’s the first step taken to incite more severe harassment. For instance, the doxxer may not plan on taking action against their target but instead hope that someone else does. When put up against a recent Pew Research report showing that 41% of U.S. web users experience harassment in some form, it’s clear that Doxxing is a dangerous trend online.
Doxxing is a problem that’s grown in scope simply because there’s so much more data about us being kept online. Third-party services, called data brokers, capture our account info, the sites we visit, how long we spent on them, and other kinds of metadata to create profiles they then resell to advertisers. If someone gets access to these troves of data, they can reveal extremely damaging information about an individual, or data that allows a person to be damaged. For instance, with a phone number and a current address, some criminals were able to call in SWAT teams on innocent individuals. Political dissidents are often doxxed by the governments their protesting against. And on a lighter note, the adult website Ashley Madison, which promotes extramarital affairs, had their members’ data leaked online, to the embarrassment of a few public figures.
The response should be very similar to the one you’d take if your wallet was stolen. Move fast, stem the loss, and begin remediation as soon as possible. Here are some broad steps that can be taken.
Of course, not being doxxed in the first place is the ultimate goal of a proactive online protection plan. Here’s what we recommend:
Identity theft protection services help protect your data, monitor your online accounts like emails, SSNs, and more. In addition to online monitoring, they should also offer insurance and even theft remediation if the worst should occur.
Before you tag your location, friends, or workplace in a photo think about who has access to this information. What’s gained or lost by sharing all that info? Also, security questions for your accounts should not use the name of your pet or your first-born child if you have posted those on Facebook.
Public Wi-Fi networks at coffee shops and airports may not be secure against hackers and snooping. That’s why we recommend using a VPN whenever you’re connected online. This powerful tool hides your activity and location whenever you’re online on an unsecured network.
Googling yourself is a great way to see if anyone is using your online identity in bad ways.
Social networks allow you to control who can see your data. Usually, with a few clicks, you can restrict what you show online to a great degree. For instance, makes your payments viewable to other users as a default, but can easily be changed to hide them from the public.
Using long, complex, unique passwords for every account is convenient and maybe the best way to prevent your information from being stolen. Yes, we said convenient because with a password manager you only need to remember one key to create and manage much longer ones for all your most important accounts.
The reality is that the more we live online, the more our identities will too. This does not mean we need to live a restricted life online. In fact, using comprehensive online protection, which features most of the tools above, we can remain free to enjoy life on our terms. Doxxing is something to be aware of, but with great protection, it’s far from anything we need to be worried about as we make the most of our lives online.
The post Doxxing, The Internet, and How You Can Lock Down Your Data appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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Who loves tax season besides accountants? Scammers.
Emotions can run high during tax time. Even if you’re pretty sure you did everything right, you may still have a few doubts kicking around. Did I file correctly? Did I claim the right deductions? Will I get audited? As it turns out, these are the very same anxieties that criminals use as the cornerstone of their attacks.
So yes, crooks indeed love tax season. Particularly online. And they’ll bait your digital world with several proven types of scams in an effort to cash in on what can be a somewhat uncertain time.
The good news is that you have plenty of ways to protect yourself from these scams. Let’s look at what scammers typically have in store, along with some practical advice to protect yourself as you file your taxes—things you can do to keep crooks out of your business this tax season. Don’t delay, download McAfee’s tax season security guide to avoid the latest tax scams.
First, know that you’re probably doing a good job with your taxes. Less than 2% of returns get audited and most discrepancies or adjustments can get handled easily if you address them promptly.
Still, the wariness of the IRS and intricate tax laws makes for ripe pickings when it comes to hackers, who prey on people’s fear of audits and penalties. Common scams include fake emails, phone calls from crooks posing as IRS agents, and even robocalls that threaten jail time.
What are crooks looking to do with their scams? Several things:
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about at tax time without crooks in the mix.
Investigating the landscape even more closely, we can turn to the authority itself, as the IRS has published its most recent top 12 tax season scams, a broad list that includes:
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For a comprehensive look at each one of these scams, and for ways, you can steer clear of them, check our Guide to IRS & Tax Season Scams. However, there are some common threads to many of these scams.
For starters, plenty of tax scams involve crooks posing as an IRS employee, perhaps via a phone call or email, to glean personal information from you, or to demand payment—sometimes under the threat of penalties or even jail time. Crooks won’t hesitate to use strong-arm tactics like these and play on your fears. The good news is that such tactics are typically a sign that the contact isn’t legitimate. In fact, a quick way to spot a scam is to know what the IRS won’t do when they contact you. From the IRS.gov website, the IRS will not:
What will the IRS do? Usually, the IRS will first mail a notification to any taxpayer who owes taxes. IRS collection employees might call on the phone or make an unannounced visit to your home or business. If they require payment, the payment will always be to the U.S. Treasury. Read about other ways to know what the IRS won’t do when they contact you.
Scammers won’t limit themselves to posing as the IRS. They’ll act as an imposter in several other ways as well. For example, they may pose as a popular do-it-yourself tax brand, a tax preparer, or even as a phony charitable organization that promises any donations you make are tax-deductible.
Here, they may send you phony emails or direct messages or even ring you up with bogus telemarketing or robocalls designed to steal personal information.
In the cases where the scammers reach you online, the emails and messages they send will vary in their tone and polish—in other words, how authentic they appear. Some will look nearly legitimate and cause even the most hardened of digital skeptics to click on a phony link or download a sketchy attachment. Others, well, will look clearly like spam, complete with spelling and grammatical errors, along with clumsy use of logos, layouts, and design.
Taken together, both are ways that scammers get people to visit sites designed to compromise personal information … or to download malware like keyloggers that skim account passwords and ransomware that encrypt a victim’s files hold them hostage for a price.
Social media attacks also made the IRS Dirty Dozen. In a social media attack, scammers harvest information from social media profiles and turn it against their victims. Per the IRS, because “social media enables anyone to share information with anyone else on the Internet, scammers use that information as ammunition for a wide variety of scams. These include emails where scammers impersonate someone’s family, friends, or co-workers.”
With those personal details gleaned from social media, scammers will send phony links to scam sites, promote bogus charities, or flat-out ask for money or gift cards to “help them out” at tax time.
No question that bogus emails, messages, and phone calls remain a popular way for scammers to steal personal and financial information. Spam emails, messages, and the malicious links associated with them abound this time of year as well. It’s always to keep a critical eye open for these, and it’s particularly true during tax season.
View all emails with attachments and links with suspicion, even if they appear to come from a person, business, or brand you know. Confirm attachments with the people you know before opening. And if you receive a message or alert about an account of yours, visit that company or organization’s website directly to enquire into the status of your account rather than taking a chance by clicking on a link that could send you to a phony website.
One way to protect yourself from an identity thief from claiming a return in your name is to file yours before they do. In fact, many victims of identity theft find out they’ve been scammed when they receive an IRS notification that their tax claim has already been filed. Simply put, file early.
Here’s another tool that can help you fight identity theft. And get this: it’s not only helpful, but it’s also free. Through the Federal Trade Commission, you are entitled to a free copy of your credit report from each of the three major credit reporting companies once every 12 months. In this report, you can find inaccuracies in your credit or evidence of all-out identity theft.
Keep in mind that you get one report from each of the reporting companies each year. That works out to three reports total in one year. Consider this: if you request one report from one credit reporting company every four months, you can spread your free credit report coverage across the whole year.
As with much of the guidance we offer around social media, one of the best ways to prevent such social media tax attacks is to make your profiles private so that only friends and family can see them. That way, scammers will have a far more difficult time reaching you. Moreover, consider paring back the information you share in your social media profiles, like your alma maters, birthday, mother’s maiden name, pet names—any personal information that a scammer may use to compromise your accounts or the security questions associated with them.
Protecting your devices with comprehensive online protection software can help block the phishing emails and suspicious links that make up many of these tax attacks. Likewise, it can further protect you from ransomware attacks like mentioned above. Additionally, our online Protection Score looks for weak spots in your protection and helps you shore them up, such as if discovers that your info was compromised or part of a data breach. From there, it guides you through the steps to correct the problem.
Further, consider online protection software that offers identity theft protection as well. A strong identity theft protection package offers cyber monitoring that scans the dark web to detect misuse of your personal info. With our identity protection service, we help relieve the burden of identity theft if the unfortunate happens to you with $1M coverage for lawyer fees, travel expenses, lost wages, and more.
The IRS offers steps you can take in the event you suspect fraud or theft. Their current resources include:
As mentioned above, you can get even more up to speed on the different tricks hackers are using by downloading our Guide to IRS & Tax Season Scams. It’s free, and it offers more ways you can protect your identity and information this tax season and year ‘round.
The post The IRS “Dirty Dozen” – Top Tax Season Scams to Steer Clear of This Year appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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This month, McAfee celebrates three years of maintaining pay parity. Compensating employees equally for their contributions, regardless of gender or ethnicity, is one of the many ways we create a culture where all can belong and an environment where everyone is valued.
But equal pay sounds like a given, right?
It absolutely should be. However, unconscious bias and a slew of contributing factors, such as differences in how men and women negotiate pay raises and starting salaries, means inequality can slowly creep in across a business and become pervasive unless actively monitored. This means maintaining pay parity requires constant work and attention.
As the first cybersecurity company to achieve pay parity, we know first-hand the commitment involved in such an undertaking. We also know the overall impact for our employees, including greater trust, engagement, and loyalty. More than this, we believe simply, that pay parity is the right thing to do.
Today, I’m sharing more about our journey, our process, and our work to maintain pay parity.
How we began
Our pay parity journey began in 2018. Few companies had achieved pay parity at the time, but we realized it was an essential part of ‘walking the walk.’ It’s well documented that diverse teams perform higher, and when employees feel seen and valued for their contributions, they are more productive and increasingly innovative.
We developed a framework and conducted our first annual audit in late 2018. At the time, McAfee had experienced various changes. We had been a public company, then acquired by a $70 billion hardware company, and later sold to private equity. The result of all this change and being a newly private company creating a new identity and standing up new programs, had led to inconsistencies. The results revealed pay disparities across nine of our 45 countries. With our Board’s full support, we were unwavering in our commitment to resolve swiftly and invest in adjusting salaries immediately to ensure full pay parity in that year. Once we dissected the data, we couldn’t wait to reach parity over time, it had to be immediate. We also had full commitment to put measures in place to maintain any pay parity ‘drift’.
Our process
In its simplest form, we adhere to the following framework for achieving and maintaining pay parity:
Staying the course
Maintaining pay parity is a year-long exercise and is now part of our culture. At McAfee, we run quarterly audits and use a third-party vendor to help remove the notion of any perceived bias and subjectivity. If discrepancies are identified, we address them immediately. It’s important to note that pay parity can change daily based on new hires coming in and market changes. So, it can’t be a once-a-year review, you have to stay on top of it to ensure your organization is at parity.
We also work hard to keep pay parity front of mind for people leaders and hiring managers. Through regular training on diversity topics, we remind people leaders of the science behind unconscious bias and how to overcome it. To further remove any bias, we overlay promotions, awards, and relevant employee programs with a Diversity Impact Analysis to ensure allocation of awards is statistically aligned to the diverse population of that team or organization.
It’s the combination of these efforts that resulted in an exciting milestone: our latest independent audit revealed no disparity. This tells us our commitment to equality permeates our culture. The absence of any discrepancies did not happen by accident – it’s the result of intentional focus from our leaders, recruitment team, and hiring managers.
What the future holds
Since we began our journey three years ago, the world has experienced tremendous change and challenging times – some may feel more divided than united. This makes our commitment to pay parity and building an inclusive culture even more important.
We will continue to maintain parity, ask what we can do better, and share the best practices we continue to follow, as well as learnings along the way.
Ready to join a company that stands for equality? Search our openings at Careers.McAfee.com.
The post Three Years of Pay Parity: Lessons in Maintaining Equality appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Millions of U.S. government employees and contractors have been issued a secure smart ID card that enables physical access to buildings and controlled spaces, and provides access to government computer networks and systems at the cardholder’s appropriate security level. But many government employees aren’t issued an approved card reader device that lets them use these cards at home or remotely, and so turn to low-cost readers they find online. What could go wrong? Here’s one example.
A sample Common Access Card (CAC). Image: Cac.mil.
KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader — we’ll call him “Mark” because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press — who works in IT for a major government defense contractor and was issued a Personal Identity Verification (PIV) government smart card designed for civilian employees. Not having a smart card reader at home and lacking any obvious guidance from his co-workers on how to get one, Mark opted to purchase a $15 reader from Amazon that said it was made to handle U.S. government smart cards.
The USB-based device Mark settled on is the first result that currently comes up one when searches on Amazon.com for “PIV card reader.” The card reader Mark bought was sold by a company called Saicoo, whose sponsored Amazon listing advertises a “DOD Military USB Common Access Card (CAC) Reader” and has more than 11,700 mostly positive ratings.
The Common Access Card (CAC) is the standard identification for active duty uniformed service personnel, selected reserve, DoD civilian employees, and eligible contractor personnel. It is the principal card used to enable physical access to buildings and controlled spaces, and provides access to DoD computer networks and systems.
Mark said when he received the reader and plugged it into his Windows 10 PC, the operating system complained that the device’s hardware drivers weren’t functioning properly. Windows suggested consulting the vendor’s website for newer drivers.
The Saicoo smart card reader that Mark purchased. Image: Amazon.com
So Mark went to the website mentioned on Saicoo’s packaging and found a ZIP file containing drivers for Linux, Mac OS and Windows:
Image: Saicoo
Out of an abundance of caution, Mark submitted Saicoo’s drivers file to Virustotal.com, which simultaneously scans any shared files with more than five dozen antivirus and security products. Virustotal reported that some 43 different security tools detected the Saicoo drivers as malicious. The consensus seems to be that the ZIP file currently harbors a malware threat known as Ramnit, a fairly common but dangerous trojan horse that spreads by appending itself to other files.
Image: Virustotal.com
Ramnit is a well-known and older threat — first surfacing more than a decade ago — but it has evolved over the years and is still employed in more sophisticated data exfiltration attacks. Amazon said in a written statement that it was investigating the reports.
“Seems like a potentially significant national security risk, considering that many end users might have elevated clearance levels who are using PIV cards for secure access,” Mark said.
Mark said he contacted Saicoo about their website serving up malware, and received a response saying the company’s newest hardware did not require any additional drivers. He said Saicoo did not address his concern that the driver package on its website was bundled with malware.
In response to KrebsOnSecurity’s request for comment, Saicoo sent a somewhat less reassuring reply.
“From the details you offered, issue may probably caused by your computer security defense system as it seems not recognized our rarely used driver & detected it as malicious or a virus,” Saicoo’s support team wrote in an email.
“Actually, it’s not carrying any virus as you can trust us, if you have our reader on hand, please just ignore it and continue the installation steps,” the message continued. “When driver installed, this message will vanish out of sight. Don’t worry.”
Saicoo’s response to KrebsOnSecurity.
The trouble with Saicoo’s apparently infected drivers may be little more than a case of a technology company having their site hacked and responding poorly. Will Dormann, a vulnerability analyst at CERT/CC, wrote on Twitter that the executable files (.exe) in the Saicoo drivers ZIP file were not altered by the Ramnit malware — only the included HTML files.
Dormann said it’s bad enough that searching for device drivers online is one of the riskiest activities one can undertake online.
“Doing a web search for drivers is a VERY dangerous (in terms of legit/malicious hit ratio) search to perform, based on results of any time I’ve tried to do it,” Dormann added. “Combine that with the apparent due diligence of the vendor outlined here, and well, it ain’t a pretty picture.”
But by all accounts, the potential attack surface here is enormous, as many federal employees clearly will purchase these readers from a myriad of online vendors when the need arises. Saicoo’s product listings, for example, are replete with comments from customers who self-state that they work at a federal agency (and several who reported problems installing drivers).
A thread about Mark’s experience on Twitter generated a strong response from some of my followers, many of whom apparently work for the U.S. government in some capacity and have government-issued CAC or PIV cards.
Two things emerged clearly from that conversation. The first was general confusion about whether the U.S. government has any sort of list of approved vendors. It does. The General Services Administration (GSA), the agency which handles procurement for federal civilian agencies, maintains a list of approved card reader vendors at idmanagement.gov (Saicoo is not on that list). [Thanks to @MetaBiometrics and @shugenja for the link!]
The other theme that ran through the Twitter discussion was the reality that many people find buying off-the-shelf readers more expedient than going through the GSA’s official procurement process, whether it’s because they were never issued one or the reader they were using simply no longer worked or was lost and they needed another one quickly.
“Almost every officer and NCO [non-commissioned officer] I know in the Reserve Component has a CAC reader they bought because they had to get to their DOD email at home and they’ve never been issued a laptop or a CAC reader,” said David Dixon, an Army veteran and author who lives in Northern Virginia. “When your boss tells you to check your email at home and you’re in the National Guard and you live 2 hours from the nearest [non-classified military network installation], what do you think is going to happen?”
Interestingly, anyone asking on Twitter about how to navigate purchasing the right smart card reader and getting it all to work properly is invariably steered toward militarycac.com. The website is maintained by Michael Danberry, a decorated and retired Army veteran who launched the site in 2008 (its text and link-heavy design very much takes one back to that era of the Internet and webpages in general). His site has even been officially recommended by the Army (PDF). Mark shared emails showing Saicoo itself recommends militarycac.com.
Image: Militarycac.com.
“The Army Reserve started using CAC logon in May 2006,” Danberry wrote on his “About” page. “I [once again] became the ‘Go to guy’ for my Army Reserve Center and Minnesota. I thought Why stop there? I could use my website and knowledge of CAC and share it with you.”
Danberry did not respond to requests for an interview — no doubt because he’s busy doing tech support for the federal government. The friendly message on Danberry’s voicemail instructs support-needing callers to leave detailed information about the issue they’re having with CAC/PIV card readers.
Dixon said Danberry has “done more to keep the Army running and connected than all the G6s [Army Chief Information Officers] put together.”
In many ways, Mr. Danberry is the equivalent of that little known software developer whose tiny open-sourced code project ends up becoming widely adopted and eventually folded into the fabric of the Internet. I wonder if he ever imagined 15 years ago that his website would one day become “critical infrastructure” for Uncle Sam?
Some of more tech-savvy Democrats in the U.S. Senate are asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate identity-proofing company ID.me for “deceptive statements” the company and its founder allegedly made over how they handle facial recognition data collected on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service, which until recently required anyone seeking a new IRS account online to provide a live video selfie to ID.me.
In a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan, the Senators charge that ID.me’s CEO Blake Hall has offered conflicting statements about how his company uses the facial scan data it collects on behalf of the federal government and many states that use the ID proofing technology to screen applicants for unemployment insurance.
The lawmakers say that in public statements and blog posts, ID.me has frequently emphasized the difference between two types of facial recognition: One-to-one, and one-to-many. In the one-to-one approach, a live video selfie is compared to the image on a driver’s license, for example. One-to-many facial recognition involves comparing a face against a database of other faces to find any potential matches.
Americans have particular reason to be concerned about the difference between these two types of facial recognition, says the letter to the FTC, signed by Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.):
“While one-to-one recognition involves a one-time comparison of two images in order to confirm an applicant’s identity, the use of one-to-many recognition means that millions of innocent people will have their photographs endlessly queried as part of a digital ‘line up.’ Not only does this violate individuals’ privacy, but the inevitable false matches associated with one-to-many recognition can result in applicants being wrongly denied desperately-needed services for weeks or even months as they try to get their case reviewed.”
“This risk is especially acute for people of color: NIST’s Facial Recognition Vendor Test found that many facial recognition algorithms have rates of false matches that are as much as 100 times higher for individuals from countries in West Africa, East Africa and East Asia than for individuals from Eastern European countries. This means Black and Asian Americans could be disproportionately likely to be denied benefits due to a false match in a one-to-many facial recognition system.”
The lawmakers say that throughout the latter half of 2021, ID.me published statements and blog posts stating it did not use one-to-many facial recognition and that the approach was “problematic” and “tied to surveillance operations.” But several days after a Jan. 16, 2022 post here about the IRS’s new facial ID requirement went viral and prompted a public backlash, Hall acknowledged in a LinkedIn posting that ID.me does use one-to-many facial recognition.
“Within days, the company edited the numerous blog posts and white papers on its website that previously stated the company did not use one-to-many to reflect the truth,” the letter alleges. “According to media reports, the company’s decision to correct its prior misleading statements came after mounting internal pressure from its employees.”
Cyberscoop’s Tonya Riley published excerpts from internal ID.me employee Slack messages wherein some expressed dread and unease with the company’s equivocation on its use of one-to-many facial recognition.
In February, the IRS announced it would no longer require facial scans or other biometric data from taxpayers seeking to create an account at the agency’s website. The agency also pledged that any biometric data shared with ID.me would be permanently deleted.
But the IRS still requires new account applicants to sign up with either ID.me or Login.gov, a single sign-on solution already used to access 200 websites run by 28 federal agencies. It also still offers the option of providing a live selfie for verification purposes, although the IRS says this data will be deleted automatically.
Asked to respond to concerns raised in the letter from Senate lawmakers, ID.me instead touted its successes in stopping fraud.
“Five state workforce agencies have publicly credited ID.me with helping to prevent $238 billion dollars in fraud,” the statement reads. “Conditions were so bad during the pandemic that the deputy assistant director of the FBI called the fraud ‘an economic attack on the United States.’ ID.me played a critical role in stopping that attack in more than 20 states where the service was rapidly adopted for its equally important ability to increase equity and verify individuals left behind by traditional options. We look forward to cooperating with all relevant government bodies to clear up any misunderstandings.”
As Cyberscoop reported on Apr. 14, the House Oversight and Reform Committee last month began an investigation into ID.me’s practices, with committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) saying the committee’s questions to the company would help shape policy on how the government wields facial recognition technology.
A copy of the letter the senators sent to the FTC is here (PDF).
In part one of this issue of our Black Hat Asia NOC blog, you will find:
Cisco Meraki was asked by Black Hat Events to be the Official Wired and Wireless Network Equipment, for Black Hat Asia 2022, in Singapore, 10-13 May 2022; in addition to providing the Mobile Device Management (since Black Hat USA 2021), Malware Analysis (since Black Hat USA 2016), & DNS (since Black Hat USA 2017) for the Network Operations Center. We were proud to collaborate with NOC partners Gigamon, IronNet, MyRepublic, NetWitness and Palo Alto Networks.
To accomplish this undertaking in a few weeks’ time, after the conference had a green light with the new COVID protocols, Cisco Meraki and Cisco Secure leadership gave their full support to send the necessary hardware, software licenses and staff to Singapore. Thirteen Cisco engineers deployed to the Marina Bay Sands Convention Center, from Singapore, Australia, United States and United Kingdom; with two additional remote Cisco engineers from the United States.
From attendee to press to volunteer – coming back to Black Hat as NOC volunteer by Humphrey Cheung
Loops in the networking world are usually considered a bad thing. Spanning tree loops and routing loops happen in an instant and can ruin your whole day, but over the 2nd week in May, I made a different kind of loop. Twenty years ago, I first attended the Black Hat and Defcon conventions – yay Caesars Palace and Alexis Park – a wide-eyed tech newbie who barely knew what WEP hacking, Driftnet image stealing and session hijacking meant. The community was amazing and the friendships and knowledge I gained, springboarded my IT career.
In 2005, I was lucky enough to become a Senior Editor at Tom’s Hardware Guide and attended Black Hat as accredited press from 2005 to 2008. From writing about the latest hardware zero-days to learning how to steal cookies from the master himself, Robert Graham, I can say, without any doubt, Black Hat and Defcon were my favorite events of the year.
Since 2016, I have been a Technical Solutions Architect at Cisco Meraki and have worked on insanely large Meraki installations – some with twenty thousand branches and more than a hundred thousand access points, so setting up the Black Hat network should be a piece of cake right? Heck no, this is unlike any network you’ve experienced!
As an attendee and press, I took the Black Hat network for granted. To take a phrase that we often hear about Cisco Meraki equipment, “it just works”. Back then, while I did see access points and switches around the show, I never really dived into how everything was set up.
A serious challenge was to secure the needed hardware and ship it in time for the conference, given the global supply chain issues. Special recognition to Jeffry Handal for locating the hardware and obtaining the approvals to donate to Black Hat Events. For Black Hat Asia, Cisco Meraki shipped:
Let’s start with availability. iPads and iPhones are scanning QR codes to register attendees. Badge printers need access to the registration system. Training rooms all have their separate wireless networks – after all, Black Hat attendees get a baptism by fire on network defense and attack. To top it all off, hundreds of attendees gulped down terabytes of data through the main conference wireless network.
All this connectivity was provided by Cisco Meraki access points, switches, security appliances, along with integrations into SecureX, Umbrella and other products. We fielded a literal army of engineers to stand up the network in less than two days… just in time for the training sessions on May 10 to 13th and throughout the Black Hat Briefings and Business Hall on May 12 and 13.
Let’s talk security and visibility. For a few days, the Black Hat network is probably one of the most hostile in the world. Attendees learn new exploits, download new tools and are encouraged to test them out. Being able to drill down on attendee connection details and traffic was instrumental on ensuring attendees didn’t get too crazy.
On the wireless front, we made extensive use of our Radio Profiles to reduce interference by tuning power and channel settings. We enabled band steering to get more clients on the 5GHz bands versus 2.4GHz and watched the Location Heatmap like a hawk looking for hotspots and dead areas. Handling the barrage of wireless change requests – enable or disabling this SSID, moving VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks), enabling tunneling or NAT mode, – was a snap with the Meraki Dashboard.
While the Cisco Meraki Dashboard is extremely powerful, we happily supported exporting of logs and integration in major event collectors, such as the NetWitness SIEM and even the Palo Alto firewall. On Thursday morning, the NOC team found a potentially malicious Macbook Pro performing vulnerability scans against the Black Hat management network. It is a balance, as we must allow trainings and demos connect to malicious websites, download malware and execute. However, there is a Code of Conduct to which all attendees are expected to follow and is posted at Registration with a QR code.
The Cisco Meraki network was exporting syslog and other information to the Palo Alto firewall, and after correlating the data between the Palo Alto Dashboard and Cisco Meraki client details page, we tracked down the laptop to the Business Hall.
We briefed the NOC management, who confirmed the scanning was violation of the Code of Conduct, and the device was blocked in the Meraki Dashboard, with the instruction to come to the NOC.
The device name and location made it very easy to determine to whom it belonged in the conference attendees.
A delegation from the NOC went to the Business Hall, politely waited for the demo to finish at the booth and had a thoughtful conversation with the person about scanning the network.
Coming back to Black Hat as a NOC volunteer was an amazing experience. While it made for long days with little sleep, I really can’t think of a better way to give back to the conference that helped jumpstart my professional career.
Meraki MR, MS, MX and Systems Manager by Paul Fidler
With the invitation extended to Cisco Meraki to provide network access, both from a wired and wireless perspective, there was an opportunity to show the value of the Meraki platform integration capabilities of Access Points (AP), switches, security appliances and mobile device management.
The first amongst this was the use of the Meraki API. We were able to import the list of MAC addresses of the Meraki MRs, to ensure that the APs were named appropriately and tagged, using a single source of truth document shared with the NOC management and partners, with the ability to update en masse at any time.
On the first day of NOC setup, the Cisco team walked around the venue to discuss AP placements with the staff of the Marina Bay Sands. Whilst we had a simple Powerpoint showing approximate AP placements for the conference, it was noted that the venue team had an incredibly detailed floor plan of the venue. This was acquired in PDF and uploaded into the Meraki Dashboard; and with a little fine tuning, aligned perfectly with the Google Map.
Meraki APs were then placed physically in the venue meeting and training rooms, and very roughly on the floor plan. One of the team members then used a printout of the floor plan to mark accurately the placement of the APs. Having the APs named, as mentioned above, made this an easy task (walking around the venue notwithstanding!). This enabled accurate heatmap capability.
The Location Heatmap was a new capability for Black Hat NOC, and the client data visualized in NOC continued to be of great interest to the Black Hat management team, such as which training, briefing and sponsor booths drew the most interest.
The ability to use SSID Availability was incredibly useful. It allowed ALL of the access points to be placed within a single Meraki Network. Not only that, because of the training events happening during the week, as well as TWO dedicated SSIDs for the Registration and lead tracking iOS devices (more of which later), one for initial provisioning (which was later turned off), and one for certificated based authentication, for a very secure connection.
We were able to monitor the number of connected clients, network usage, the persons passing by the network and location analytics, throughout the conference days. We provided visibility access to the Black Hat NOC management and the technology partners (along with full API access), so they could integrate with the network platform.
Meraki alerts are exactly that: the ability to be alerted to something that happens in the Dashboard. Default behavior is to be emailed when something happens. Obviously, emails got lost in the noise, so a web hook was created in SecureX orchestration to be able to consume Meraki alerts and send it to Slack (the messaging platform within the Black Hat NOC), using the native template in the Meraki Dashboard. The first alert to be created was to be alerted if an AP went down. We were to be alerted after five minutes of an AP going down, which is the smallest amount of time available before being alerted.
The bot was ready; however, the APs stayed up the entire time!
Applying the lessons learned at Black Hat Europe 2021, for the initial configuration of the conference iOS devices, we set up the Registration iPads and lead retrieval iPhones with Umbrella, Secure Endpoint and WiFi config. Devices were, as in London, initially configured using Apple Configurator, to both supervise and enroll the devices into a new Meraki Systems Manager instance in the Dashboard.
However, Black Hat Asia 2022 offered us a unique opportunity to show off some of the more integrated functionality.
System Apps were hidden and various restrictions (disallow joining of unknown networks, disallow tethering to computers, etc.) were applied, as well as a standard WPA2 SSID for the devices that the device vendor had set up (we gave them the name of the SSID and Password).
We also stood up a new SSID and turned-on Sentry, which allows you to provision managed devices with, not only the SSID information, but also a dynamically generated certificate. The certificate authority and radius server needed to do this 802.1x is included in the Meraki Dashboard automatically! When the device attempts to authenticate to the network, if it doesn’t have the certificate, it doesn’t get access. This SSID, using SSID availability, was only available to the access points in the Registration area.
Using the Sentry allowed us to easily identify devices in the client list.
One of the alerts generated with SysLog by Meraki, and then viewable and correlated in the NetWitness SIEM, was a ‘De Auth’ event that came from an access point. Whilst we had the IP address of the device, making it easy to find, because the event was a de auth, meaning 802.1x, it narrowed down the devices to JUST the iPads and iPhones used for registration (as all other access points were using WPA2). This was further enhanced by seeing the certificate name used in the de-auth:
Along with the certificate name was the name of the AP: R**
One of the inherent problems with iOS device location is when devices are used indoors, as GPS signals just aren’t strong enough to penetrate modern buildings. However, because the accurate location of the Meraki access points was placed on the floor plan in the Dashboard, and because the Meraki Systems Manager iOS devices were in the same Dashboard organization as the access points, we got to see a much more accurate map of devices compared to Black Hat Europe 2021 in London.
When the conference Registration closed on the last day and the Business Hall Sponsors all returned their iPhones, we were able to remotely wipe all of the devices, removing all attendee data, prior to returning to the device contractor.
Meraki Scanning API Receiver by Christian Clasen
Leveraging the ubiquity of both WiFi and Bluetooth radios in mobile devices and laptops, Cisco Meraki’s wireless access points can detect and provide location analytics to report on user foot traffic behavior. This can be useful in retail scenarios where customers desire location and movement data to better understand the trends of engagement in their physical stores.
Meraki can aggregate real-time data of detected WiFi and Bluetooth devices and triangulate their location rather precisely when the floorplan and AP placement has been diligently designed and documented. At the Black Hat Asia conference, we made sure to properly map the AP locations carefully to ensure the highest accuracy possible.
This scanning data is available for clients whether they are associated with the access points or not. At the conference, we were able to get very detailed heatmaps and time-lapse animations representing the movement of attendees throughout the day. This data is valuable to conference organizers in determining the popularity of certain talks, and the attendance at things like keynote presentations and foot traffic at booths.
This was great for monitoring during the event, but the Dashboard would only provide 24-hours of scanning data, limiting what we could do when it came to long-term data analysis. Fortunately for us, Meraki offers an API service we can use to capture this treasure trove offline for further analysis. We only needed to build a receiver for it.
The Scanning API requires that the customer stand up infrastructure to store the data, and then register with the Meraki cloud using a verification code and secret. It is composed of two endpoints:
Returns the validator string in the response body
[GET] https://yourserver/
This endpoint is called by Meraki to validate the receiving server. It expects to receive a string that matches the validator defined in the Meraki Dashboard for the respective network.
Accepts an observation payload from the Meraki cloud
[POST] https://yourserver/
This endpoint is responsible for receiving the observation data provided by Meraki. The URL path should match that of the [GET] request, used for validation.
The response body will consist of an array of JSON objects containing the observations at an aggregate per network level. The JSON will be determined based on WiFi or BLE device observations as indicated in the type parameter.
What we needed was a simple technology stack that would contain (at minimum) a publicly accessible web server capable of TLS. In the end, the simplest implementation was a web server written using Python Flask, in a Docker container, deployed in AWS, connected through ngrok.
In fewer than 50 lines of Python, we could accept the inbound connection from Meraki and reply with the chosen verification code. We would then listen for the incoming POST data and dump it into a local data store for future analysis. Since this was to be a temporary solution (the duration of the four-day conference), the thought of registering a public domain and configuring TLS certificates wasn’t particularly appealing. An excellent solution for these types of API integrations is ngrok (https://ngrok.com/). And a handy Python wrapper was available for simple integration into the script (https://pyngrok.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html).
We wanted to easily re-use this stack next time around, so it only made sense to containerize it in Docker. This way, the whole thing could be stood up at the next conference, with one simple command. The image we ended up with would mount a local volume, so that the ingested data would remain persistent across container restarts.
Ngrok allowed us to create a secure tunnel from the container that could be connected in the cloud to a publicly resolvable domain with a trusted TLS certificate generated for us. Adding that URL to the Meraki Dashboard is all we needed to do start ingesting the massive treasure trove of location data from the Aps – nearly 1GB of JSON over 24 hours.
This “quick and dirty” solution illustrated the importance of interoperability and openness in the technology space when enabling security operations to gather and analyze the data they require to monitor and secure events like Black Hat, and their enterprise networks as well. It served us well during the conference and will certainly be used again going forward.
Check out part two of the blog, Black Hat Asia 2022 Continued: Cisco Secure Integrations, where we will discuss integrating NOC operations and making your Cisco Secure deployment more effective:
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to the Cisco Meraki and Cisco Secure Black Hat NOC team: Aditya Sankar, Aldous Yeung, Alejo Calaoagan, Ben Greenbaum, Christian Clasen, Felix H Y Lam, George Dorsey, Humphrey Cheung, Ian Redden, Jeffrey Chua, Jeffry Handal, Jonny Noble, Matt Vander Horst, Paul Fidler and Steven Fan.
Also, to our NOC partners NetWitness (especially David Glover), Palo Alto Networks (especially James Holland), Gigamon, IronNet (especially Bill Swearington), and the entire Black Hat / Informa Tech staff (especially Grifter ‘Neil Wyler’, Bart Stump, James Pope, Steve Fink and Steve Oldenbourg).
For more than 20 years, Black Hat has provided attendees with the very latest in information security research, development, and trends. These high-profile global events and trainings are driven by the needs of the security community, striving to bring together the best minds in the industry. Black Hat inspires professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in the United States, Europe and Asia. More information is available at: blackhat.com. Black Hat is brought to you by Informa Tech.
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Cisco Secure Social Channels
In part one of our Black Hat Asia 2022 NOC blog, we discussed building the network with Meraki:
In this part two, we will discuss:
SecureX: Bringing Threat Intelligence Together by Ian Redden
In addition to the Meraki networking gear, Cisco Secure also shipped two Umbrella DNS virtual appliances to Black Hat Asia, for internal network visibility with redundancy, in addition to providing:
Cisco Secure Threat Intelligence (correlated through SecureX)
Donated Partner Threat Intelligence (correlated through SecureX)
alphaMountain.ai threat intelligence
Open-Source Threat Intelligence (correlated through SecureX)
Continued Integrations from past Black Hat events
New Integrations Created at Black Hat Asia 2022
Device type spoofing event by Jonny Noble
Overview
During the conference, a NOC Partner informed us that they received an alert from May 10 concerning an endpoint client that accessed two domains that they saw as malicious:
Client details from Partner:
Based on the user agent, the partner derived that the device type was an Apple iPhone.
SecureX analysis
Umbrella Investigate analysis
Umbrella Investigate positions both domains as low risk, both registered recently in Poland, and both hosted on the same IP:
Despite the low-risk score, the nameservers have high counts of malicious associated domains:
Targeting users in ASA, UK, and Nigeria:
Meraki analysis
Based on the time of the incident, we can trace the device’s location (based on its IP address). This is thanks to the effort we invested in mapping out the exact location of all Meraki APs, which we deployed across the convention center with an overlay of the event map covering the area of the event:
Further analysis and conclusions
The device name (LAPTOP-8MLGXXXXXX) and MAC address seen (f4:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX) both matched across the partner and Meraki, so there was no question that we were analyzing the same device.
Based on the useragent captured by the partner, the device type was an Apple iPhone. However, Meraki was reporting the Device and its OS as “Intel, Android”
A quick look up for the MAC address confirmed that the OUI (organizationally unique identifier) for f42679 was Intel Malaysia, making it unlikely that this was an Apple iPhone.
The description for the training “Web Hacking Black Belt Edition” can be seen here:
https://www.blackhat.com/asia-22/training/schedule/#web-hacking-black-belt-edition–day-25388
It is highly likely that the training content included the use of tools and techniques for spoofing the visibility of useragent or device type.
There is also a high probability that the two domains observed were used as part of the training activity, rather than this being part of a live attack.
It is clear that integrating the various Cisco technologies (Meraki wireless infrastructure, SecureX, Umbrella, Investigate) used in the investigation of this incident, together with the close partnership and collaboration of our NOC partners, positioned us where we needed to be and provided us with the tools we needed to swiftly collect the data, join the dots, make conclusions, and successfully bring the incident to closure.
Self Service with SecureX Orchestration and Slack by Matt Vander Horst
Overview
Since Meraki was a new platform for much of the NOC’s staff, we wanted to make information easier to gather and enable a certain amount of self-service. Since the Black Hat NOC uses Slack for messaging, we decided to create a Slack bot that NOC staff could use to interact with the Meraki infrastructure as well as Palo Alto Panorama using the SecureX Orchestration remote appliance. When users communicate with the bot, webhooks are sent to Cisco SecureX Orchestration to do the work on the back end and send the results back to the user.
Design
Here’s how this integration works:
Workflow #1: Handle Slash Commands
Slash commands are a special type of message built into Slack that allow users to interact with a bot. When a Slack user executes a slash command, the command and its arguments are sent to SecureX Orchestration where a workflow handles the command. The table below shows a summary of the slash commands our bot supported for Black Hat Asia 2022:
Here’s a sample of a portion of the SecureX Orchestration workflow that powers the above commands:
And here’s a sample of firewall logs as returned from the “/pan_traffic_history” command:
Workflow #2: Handle Interactivity
A more advanced form of user interaction comes in the form of Slack blocks. Instead of including a command’s arguments in the command itself, you can execute the command and Slack will present you with a form to complete, like this one for the “/update_vlan” command:
These forms are much more user friendly and allow information to be pre-populated for the user. In the example above, the user can simply select the switch to configure from a drop-down list instead of having to enter its name or serial number. When the user submits one of these forms, a webhook is sent to SecureX Orchestration to execute a workflow. The workflow takes the requested action and sends back a confirmation to the user:
Conclusion
While these two workflows only scratched the surface of what can be done with SecureX Orchestration webhooks and Slack, we now have a foundation that can be easily expanded upon going forward. We can add additional commands, new forms of interactivity, and continue to enable NOC staff to get the information they need and take necessary action. The goal of orchestration is to make life simpler, whether it is by automating our interactions with technology or making those interactions easier for the user.
Future Threat Vectors to Consider – Cloud App Discovery by Alejo Calaoagan
Since 2017 (starting in Black Hat USA – Las Vegas), Cisco Umbrella has provided DNS security to the Black Hat attendee network, added layers of traffic visibility previously not seen. Our efforts have largely been successful, identifying thousands of threats over the years and mitigating them via Umbrella’s blocking capabilities when necessary. This was taken a step further at Black Hat London 2021, where we introduced our Virtual Appliances to provide source IP attribution to the devices making requests.
Here at Black Hat Asia 2022, we’ve been noodling on additional ways to provide advanced protection for future shows, and it starts with Umbrella’s Cloud Application Discovery’s feature, which identified 2,286 unique applications accessed by users on the attendee network across the four-day conference. Looking at a snapshot from a single day of the show, Umbrella captured 572,282 DNS requests from all cloud apps, with over 42,000 posing either high or very high risk.
Digging deeper into the data, we see not only the types of apps being accessed…
…but also see the apps themselves…
…and we can flag apps that look suspicious.
We also include risk downs breaks by category…
…and drill downs on each.
While this data alone won’t provide enough information to take action, including this data in analysis, something we have been doing, may provide a window into new threat vectors that may have previously gone unseen. For example, if we identify a compromised device infected with malware or a device attempting to access things on the network that are restricted, we can dig deeper into the types of cloud apps those devices are using and correlate that data with suspicious request activity, potential uncovering tools we should be blocking in the future.
I can’t say for certain how much this extra data set will help us uncover new threats, but, with Black Hat USA just around the corner, we’ll find out soon.
Using SecureX sign-on to streamline access to the Cisco Stack at Black Hat by Adi Sankar
From five years ago to now, Cisco has tremendously expanded our presence at Black Hat to include a multitude of products. Of course, sign-on was simple when it was just one product (Secure Malware Analytics) and one user to log in. When it came time to add a new technology to the stack it was added separately as a standalone product with its own method of logging in. As the number of products increased, so did the number of Cisco staff at the conference to support these products. This means sharing usernames and passwords became tedious and not to mention insecure, especially with 15 Cisco staff, plus partners, accessing the platforms.
The Cisco Secure stack at Black Hat includes SecureX, Umbrella, Malware Analytics, Secure Endpoint (iOS clarity), and Meraki. All of these technologies support using SAML SSO natively with SecureX sign-on. This means that each of our Cisco staff members can have an individual SecureX sign-on account to log into the various consoles. This results in better role-based access control, better audit logging and an overall better login experience. With SecureX sign-on we can log into all the products only having to type a password one time and approve one Cisco DUO Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) push.
How does this magic work behind the scenes? It’s actually rather simple to configure SSO for each of the Cisco technologies, since they all support SecureX sign-on natively. First and foremost, you must set up a new SecureX org by creating a SecureX sign-on account, creating a new organization and integrating at least one Cisco technology. In this case I created a new SecureX organization for Black Hat and added the Secure Endpoint module, Umbrella Module, Meraki Systems Manager module and the Secure Malware Analytics module. Then from Administration à Users in SecureX, I sent an invite to the Cisco staffers that would be attending the conference, which contained a link to create their account and join the Blackhat SecureX organization. Next let’s take a look at the individual product configurations.
Meraki:
In the Meraki organization settings enable SecureX sign-on. Then under Organization à Administrators add a new user and specify SecureX sign-on as the authentication method. Meraki even lets you limit users to particular networks and set permission levels for those networks. Accepting the email invitation is easy since the user should already be logged into their SecureX sign-on account. Now, logging into Meraki only requires an email address and no password or additional DUO push.
Umbrella:
Under Admin à Authentication configure SecureX sign-on which requires a test login to ensure you can still login before using SSO for authentication to Umbrella. There is no need to configure MFA in Umbrella since SecureX sign-on comes with built in DUO MFA. Existing users and any new users added in Umbrella under Admin à Accounts will now be using SecureX sign-on to login to Umbrella. Logging into Umbrella is now a seamless launch from the SecureX dashboard or from the SecureX ribbon in any of the other consoles.
Secure Malware Analytics:
A Secure Malware Analytics organization admin can create new users in their Threat Grid tenant. This username is unique to Malware Analytics, but it can be connected to a SecureX sign-on account to take advantage of the seamless login flow. From the email invitation the user will create a password for their Malware Analytics user and accept the EULA. Then in the top right under My Malware Analytics Account, the user has an option to connect their SecureX sign-on account which is a one click process if already signed in with SecureX sign-on. Now when a user navigates to Malware Analytics login page, simply clicking “Login with SecureX Sign-On” will grant them access to the console.
Secure Endpoint:
The Secure Endpoint deployment at Blackhat is limited to IOS clarity through Meraki Systems Manager for the conference IOS devices. Most of the asset information we need about the iPhones/iPads is brought in through the SecureX Device Insights inventory. However, for initial configuration and to view device trajectory it is required to log into Secure Endpoint. A new Secure Endpoint account can be created under Accounts à Users and an invite is sent to corresponding email address. Accepting the invite is a smooth process since the user is already signed in with SecureX sign-on. Privileges for the user in the Endpoint console can be granted from within the user account.
Conclusion:
To sum it all up, SecureX sign-on is the standard for the Cisco stack moving forward. With a new SecureX organization instantiated using SecureX sign-on any new users to the Cisco stack at Black Hat will be using SecureX sign-on. SecureX sign-on has helped our user management be much more secure as we have expanded our presence at Black Hat. SecureX sign-on provides a unified login mechanism for all the products and modernized our login experience at the conference.
Malware Threat Intelligence made easy and available, with Cisco Secure Malware Analytics and SecureX by Ben Greenbaum
I’d gotten used to people’s reactions upon seeing SecureX in use for the first time. A few times at Black Hat, a small audience gathered just to watch us effortlessly correlate data from multiple threat intelligence repositories and several security sensor networks in just a few clicks in a single interface for rapid sequencing of events and an intuitive understanding of security events, situations, causes, and consequences. You’ve already read about a few of these instances above. Here is just one example of SecureX automatically putting together a chronological history of observed network events detected by products from two vendors (Cisco Umbrella and NetWitness) . The participation of NetWitness in this and all of our other investigations was made possible by our open architecture, available APIs and API specifications, and the creation of the NetWitness module described above.
In addition to the traffic and online activities of hundreds of user devices on the network, we were responsible for monitoring a handful of Black Hat-owned devices as well. Secure X Device Insights made it easy to access information about these assets, either en masse or as required during an ongoing investigation. iOS Clarity for Secure Endpoint and Meraki System Manager both contributed to this useful tool which adds business intelligence and asset context to SecureX’s native event and threat intelligence, for more complete and more actionable security intelligence overall.
SecureX is made possible by dozens of integrations, each bringing their own unique information and capabilities. This time though, for me, the star of the SecureX show was our malware analysis engine, Cisco Secure Malware Analytics (CSMA). Shortly before Black Hat Asia, the CSMA team released a new version of their SecureX module. SecureX can now query CSMA’s database of malware behavior and activity, including all relevant indicators and observables, as an automated part of the regular process of any investigation performed in SecureX Threat Response.
This capability is most useful in two scenarios:
1: determining if suspicious domains, IPs and files reported by any other technology had been observed in the analysis of any of the millions of publicly submitted file samples, or our own.
2: rapidly gathering additional context about files submitted to the analysis engine by the integrated products in the Black Hat NOC.
The first was a significant time saver in several investigations. In the example below, we received an alert about connections to a suspicious domain. In that scenario, our first course of action is to investigate the domain and any other observables reported with it (typically the internal and public IPs included in the alert). Due to the new CSMA module, we immediately discovered that the domain had a history of being contacted by a variety of malware samples, from multiple families, and that information, corroborated by automatically gathered reputation information from multiple sources about each of those files, gave us an immediate next direction to investigate as we hunted for evidence of those files being present in network traffic or of any traffic to other C&C resources known to be used by those families. From the first alert to having a robust, data-driven set of related signals to look for, took only minutes, including from SecureX partner Recorded Future, who donated a full threat intelligence license for the Black Hat NOC.
The other scenario, investigating files submitted for analysis, came up less frequently but when it did, the CSMA/SecureX integration was equally impressive. We could rapidly, nearly immediately, look for evidence of any of our analyzed samples in the environment across all other deployed SecureX-compatible technologies. That evidence was no longer limited to searching for the hash itself, but included any of the network resources or dropped payloads associated with the sample as well, easily identifying local targets who had not perhaps seen the exact variant submitted, but who had nonetheless been in contact with that sample’s Command and Control infrastructure or other related artifacts.
And of course, thanks to the presence of the ribbon in the CSMA UI, we could be even more efficient and do this with multiple samples at once.
SecureX greatly increased the efficiency of our small volunteer team, and certainly made it possible for us to investigate more alerts and events, and hunt for more threats, all more thoroughly, than we would have been able to without it. SecureX truly took this team to the next level, by augmenting and operationalizing the tools and the staff that we had at our disposal.
We look forward to seeing you at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas, 6-11 August 2022!
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to the Cisco Meraki and Cisco Secure Black Hat NOC team: Aditya Sankar, Aldous Yeung, Alejo Calaoagan, Ben Greenbaum, Christian Clasen, Felix H Y Lam, George Dorsey, Humphrey Cheung, Ian Redden, Jeffrey Chua, Jeffry Handal, Jonny Noble, Matt Vander Horst, Paul Fidler and Steven Fan.
Also, to our NOC partners NetWitness (especially David Glover), Palo Alto Networks (especially James Holland), Gigamon, IronNet (especially Bill Swearington), and the entire Black Hat / Informa Tech staff (especially Grifter ‘Neil Wyler’, Bart Stump, James Pope, Steve Fink and Steve Oldenbourg).
About Black Hat
For more than 20 years, Black Hat has provided attendees with the very latest in information security research, development, and trends. These high-profile global events and trainings are driven by the needs of the security community, striving to bring together the best minds in the industry. Black Hat inspires professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in the United States, Europe and Asia. More information is available at: blackhat.com. Black Hat is brought to you by Informa Tech.
Cisco Secure Firewall stops threats faster, empowers collaboration between teams, and enables consistency across your on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. With an included entitlement for Cisco SecureX, our XDR and orchestration platform, you’ll experience efficiency at scale and maximize your productivity. New streamlined Secure Firewall integrations make it easier to use SecureX capabilities to increase threat detection, save time and provide the rapid and deeper investigations you require. These new features and workflows provide the integration and automation to simplify your security.
The entire suite of Firewall Management Center APIs is now available in the cloud. This means that existing APIs can now be executed from the cloud. Cisco makes this even easier for you by delivering fully operational workflows as well as pre-built drag-n-drop code blocks that you can use to craft your own custom workflows. SecureX is able to proxy API calls from the cloud to the SSE connector embedded in the FMC codebase. This integration between Firewall 7.2 and SecureX provides your Firewall with modern cloud-based automation.
We’ve dramatically reduced the amount of time needed to fully integrate Firewall into Securex. Even existing Firewall customers who use on-premises Firewall Management Center will be able to upgrade to version 7.2 and start automating/orchestrating in under 15 minutes — a huge time savings! The 7.2 release makes the opportunities for automating your Firewall deployment limitless with our built-in low code orchestration engine.
Previously Firewall admins had to jump through hoops to link their smart licensing account with SecureX which resulted in a very complicated integration process. With the new one-click integration, simply click “Enable SecureX” in your Firewall Management Center and log into SecureX. That’s it! Your Firewalls will automatically be onboarded to SecureX.
Cisco Secure Firewall users now get immense value from SecureX with the orchestration capability built natively into the Firewall. Previously Firewall admins would have to deploy an on-premises virtual machine in vCenter to take advantage of Firewall APIs in the cloud which was a major hurdle to overcome. With the 7.2 release, orchestration is built right into your existing Firewall Management Center. There is no on-premises connector required; SecureX orchestration is able to communicate directly with Firewall APIs highlighting the power of Cisco-on-Cisco integrations.
The PSIRT impact monitoring workflows helps customers streamline their patch management process to ensure their network is always up to date and not vulnerable to CVE’s. This workflow will check for new PSIRTs, determine if device versions are impacted, and suggest a fixed version to upgrade to. By scheduling this workflow to run once a week customers can be notified via email if there is any potential impact from a PSIRT.
This workflow will run every 15 minutes to pull a health report from FMC and proactively notify customers via email if any devices are unhealthy. This means customers can rest assured that their fleet of devices is operating as expected or be notified of things like high CPU usage, low disk space, or interfaces going down.
This workflow highlights the power of automation and showcases what is possible by using the orchestration proxy to use FMC API’s. Managing policy is always an on-going effort but can be made easier by introducing automation. This workflow can be run once a week to search through Firewall policies and determine if any rules are going to expire soon. This makes managing policy much easier because customers will be notified before rules expire and can make changes accordingly.
This workflow is a one-click response action available from the threat response pivot menu. With the click of a button a URL is added to an object in a block rule of your access control policy. This action can be invoked during an investigation in SecureX or from any browser page using the SecureX browser extension. Reducing time to remediation is a critical aspect of keeping your business secure. This workflow turns a multi-step policy change into a single click by taking advantage of Secure Firewall’s integration with SecureX.
A recent Forrester Economic Impact Study of Secure Firewall show that deploying these types of workflows in SecureX with Secure Firewall increased operational efficiency.
In fact, SecureX in combination with Secure Firewall helped to dramatically reduce the risk of a material breach. It’s clear that the integration of the two meant a significant time savings for already overburdened teams.
We continue to innovate new features and workflows that prioritize the efficacy of your teams and help drive the security resilience of your organization.
Ready to add SecureX capabilities to your Firewall environment? Start here.
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Netflix has a new documentary series airing next week — “Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies & the Internet” — in which Yours Truly apparently has a decent amount of screen time. The debut episode explores the far-too-common harassment tactic of “swatting” — wherein fake bomb threats or hostage situations are phoned in to police as part of a scheme to trick them into visiting potentially deadly force on a target’s address.
Image: Netflix.com
The producers of the Netflix show said footage from an interview I sat for in early 2020 on swatting and other threats should appear in the first episode. They didn’t specify what additional topics the series would scrutinize, but Netflix’s teaser for the show suggests it concerns cybercrimes that result in deadly, real-world kinetic attacks.
“Conspiracy. Fraud. Violence. Murder,” reads the Netflix short description for the series. “What starts out virtual can get real all too quickly — and when the web is worldwide, so are the consequences.”
Our family has been victimized by multiple swatting attacks over the past decade. Our first swatting, in March 2013, resulted in Fairfax County, Va. police surrounding our home and forcing me into handcuffs at gunpoint. For an excruciating two minutes, I had multiple police officers pointing rifles, shotguns and pistols directly at me.
More recently, our family was subjected to swatting attacks by a neo-Nazi group that targeted journalists, judges and corporate executives. We’ve been fortunate that none of our swatting events ended in physical harm, and that our assailants have all faced justice.
But these dangerous hoaxes can quickly turn deadly: In March 2019, 26-year-old serial swatter Tyler Barriss was sentenced to 20 years in prison for making a phony emergency call to police in late 2017 that resulted in the shooting death of an innocent Kansas resident.
In 2021, an 18-year-old Tennessee man who helped set in motion a fraudulent distress call to police that led to the death of a 60-year-old grandfather in was sentenced to five years in prison.
The first season of the new documentary series will be available on Netflix starting June 15. See you on TV!
It’s a busy month for cybersecurity, with the return of in-person RSAC in San Francisco, followed by Cisco Live in very lively Las Vegas! With so much happening, and so many announcements from every security vendor out there, it can be hard to keep track of everything going on. Let us help give you the highlights from a Cisco SecureX perspective!
We have been busy this past year, with our acquisition of Kenna Security and our recent innovations around device insights – all helping to expand and strengthen SecureX and our extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities.
Let’s start with device insights. We know that correlation of incidents and alerts is a vital capability for every good XDR offering, but what about correlating and aggregating information about the devices themselves? With the growing number of devices in many customer environments there is also a growing number of products with information about those devices. This can cause duplicate records and multiple alerts from the same device – which means more potentially false positive incidents to investigate, and more headaches trying to manually correlate and connect device information. With device insights organizations can discover, normalize, and consolidate information about all the devices in your environment – so you can avoid duplicate alerts, and discover devices that may be sneaking through gaps in your security. Device insights gives you a comprehensive view into each device’s security posture and management status.
Now, a more insightful view of all the devices across your infrastructure is a must-have, but so is the ability to view and manage vulnerabilities across these endpoints. With Cisco’s acquisition of Kenna Security last year, and our on-going integration of Kenna offerings into the Cisco Secure portfolio, we’re continuing to fortify SecureX and our XDR capabilities with industry leading risk-based vulnerability management. Kenna vulnerability management has already started integrations with Cisco Secure Endpoint, providing vulnerability scores on the OS version, as well as any available fixes. On the SecureX side, Kenna integrations are being leveraged to automatically enrich threat detections with vulnerability information, and automatically create ticketing workflows for Kenna.VM customers using ServiceNow.
With these integrations, and more innovations planned for the near future, risk-based vulnerability management will become a cornerstone for all endpoint and XDR deployments.
Check out our recent blog posts for more information about device insights and Kenna and SecureX orchestration!
Visit us at RSAC at booth 6045 for Cisco Secure, and booth 6362 for Kenna, and at Cisco Live in the World of Solutions to learn more.
This article is part of a series in which we will explore several features, principles, and the building blocks of a security detection engine within an extended detection and response (XDR) solution.
In this second installment, we will look at ways of structuring the presentation of machine-generated alerts, so that each alert offers a cohesive and compelling narrative, as if written by a human analyst, at scale and in realtime.
In cyber security, we are used to two types of stories.
The first story is common for reports written by humans. It contains sections such as “impact,” “reproduction,” and “remediation” to help us understand what is at stake and what we need to fix. For example:
IMPACT: An SSH server which supports password authentication is susceptible to brute-forcing attacks.
REPRODUCTION: Use the `ssh` command in verbose mode (`ssh -v`) to determine supported authentication methods. Look for “keyboard-interactive” and “password” methods.
REMEDIATION: Disable unneeded authentication methods.
The second story comes from machine detections. It is much terser in content and sometimes leaves us scratching our heads. “Malware,” the machine says with little explanation, followed by a horde of gibberish-looking data of network flows, executable traces, and so on.
The challenge is now to get the best of both worlds: to enhance machine-generated alerts with the richness of human-written reports. The following sections explain how this can be approached.
In our example of a report written by a human, the “reproduction” section would help us understand, from a factual perspective, how exactly the conclusions were derived.
On the other hand, the machine-generated horde of data provides evidence in a very nondescript way. We would need to be smart enough to spot or reverse-engineer what algorithm the machine was following on said data. Most security analysts do not wish to do this. Instead, they attempt to seek the first story type. “Surely, someone must have written a blog or something more descriptive about this already,” they would say. Then, they would copy-paste anything that looks like a searchable term – an IP address, domain, SHA checksum – and start searching it, either on a threat intelligence search site or even a general-purpose search engine.
Having such cryptic machine-generated alerts is leading us to our first two issues: first, when the story is incomplete or misunderstood, it may lead the analyst astray. For example, the security event might involve requests to communicate with an IP address, and the analyst would say, “This IP address belongs to my DNS server, so the traffic is legitimate.” However, the detection engine was really saying, “I suspect there is DNS tunnelling activity happening through your DNS server—just look at the volume.”
Second, when an analyst seeks explanations from elsewhere, the main function of an advanced detection engine — finding novel, localized, and targeted attacks — cannot work. Information on attacks is generally available only after they have been discovered and analyzed, not when they happen initially.
A common approach to remedy this situation is to include a short description of the algorithm. “This detector works by maintaining a baseline of when during the day a user is active and then reports any deviations,” a help dialog would say. “Okay, that’s clever,” an analyst would reply. But this is not enough. “Wait, what is the baseline, and how was it violated in this particular security event?” To find the answer, we need to go back to the horde of data.
To mimic the “reproduction” section of the human-written report, our security events are enriched with an annotation—a short summary of the behavior described by the event. Here are a few examples of such annotated events:
In the first and second cases, the story is relatively straightforward: in the horde of data, successful communication with said hostnames was observed. An inference through threat intelligence associates these hostnames to the Sality malware.
The third line informs us that, on a factual basis, only a communication with an IP address was observed. Further chain of inferences is that this IP address was associated by a passive DNS mechanism to a hostname which is in turn associated to the Sality malware.
In the fourth event, we have an observation of full HTTP URL requests, and inference through a pattern matcher associates this URL to the Sality malware. In this case, neither the hostname nor the IP address is important to the detector.
In all these annotated events, an analyst can easily grasp the factual circumstances and what the detection engine infers and thinks about the observations. Note that whether these events describe benign, malicious, relevant, or irrelevant behavior, or whether they lead to true or false positives, is not necessarily the concern. The concern is to be specific about the circumstances of the observed behavior and to be transparent about the inferences.
When we eventually succeed in explaining the security events, we might not be finished with the storytelling yet. The analyst would face another dilemma. They would ask: “What relevance does this event have in my environment? Is it part of an attack, an attack technique perhaps? What should I look for next?”
In the human-written report, the “impact” section provides a translation between the fact-based technical language of “how” and the business language of “what.” In this business language, we talk about threats, risks, attacker objectives, their progress, and so on.
This translation is an important part of the story. In our previous example about DNS tunnelling, we might want to express that “an anomaly in DNS traffic is a sign of an attacker communicating with their command-and-control infrastructure,” or that “it is a sign of exfiltration,” or perhaps both. The connotation is that both techniques are post-infection, and that there is probably already a foothold that the attacker has established. Perhaps other security events point to this, or perhaps it needs to be sought after by the analyst.
When it is not explicit, the analyst needs to mentally perform the translation. Again, an analyst might look up some intelligence in external sources and incorrectly interpret the detection engine’s message. Instead, they might conclude that “an anomaly in DNS traffic is a policy violation, user error, or reconnaissance activity,” leading them astray from pivoting and searching for the endpoint foothold that performs the command-and-control activity.
We take special attention not to mix these two different dictionaries. Rather, we express separately the factual observations versus the conclusions in the form of threats and risks. Inbetween, there are the various chains of inferences. Based on the complexity, the depth of the story varies, but the beginning and the end will always be there: facts versus conclusions.
This is very similar to how an analyst would set up their investigation board to organize what they know about the case. Here is an elaborate example:
In this case, from top to bottom:
In all points, the “what” and “how” languages are distinguished from each other. Finally, the whole story is stitched together into one alert by using the alert fusion algorithm described in the Intelligent alert management blog post.
Have we bridged the storytelling gap between machine-generated and human-generated reports?
Threat detections need to be narrated in sufficient detail, so that our users can understand them. Previously, we relied on the human aspect—we would need to document, provide support, and even reverse-engineer what the detection algorithms said.
The two solutions, distinguishing the “what/how” languages and the annotated events, provide the bandwidth to transmit the details and the expert knowledge directly from the detection algorithms. Our stories are now rich with detail and are built automatically in real time.
The result allows for quick orientation in complex detections and lowers the time to triage. It also helps to correctly convey the message, from our team, through the detection engine, and towards the analyst, lowering the possibility of misinterpretation.
This capability is part of Cisco Global Threat Alerts, currently available within Cisco Secure Network Analytics and Cisco Secure Endpoint, and has been continually improved based on customer feedback. In the future, it will also be available in Cisco SecureX XDR.
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