FreshRSS

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

1H 2020 Cyber Security Defined by Covid-19 Pandemic

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

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

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

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

Impact on Cybercrime

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

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

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

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

Other Highlights in 1H 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connected Car Standards – Thank Goodness!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Connected Car Standards – Thank Goodness! appeared first on .

Knowing your shared security responsibility in Microsoft Azure and avoiding misconfigurations

By Trend Micro

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are next steps for our readers?

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

 

Get started today with a 60-day free trial >

Check out our knowledge base of Azure best practice rules>

Learn more >

 

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

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

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

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

 

The post Knowing your shared security responsibility in Microsoft Azure and avoiding misconfigurations appeared first on .

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

By Trend Micro

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

Guardian enables the following security and parental controls:

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

Setup and Configuration

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

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

A Few Additional Notes

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

Protection that Goes Where Your Child Goes

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

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

The post Trend Micro Guardian: Protecting Your Kids On-the-Go appeared first on .

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

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

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

——

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

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

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

From these points, we learn the following lessons.

Software Doesn’t Wear Out

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

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

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

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

Computers Are Constrained

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

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

Computers Can Run Out of Resources

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

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

Add Capacity in Balance

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

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

Adding Staff Makes Things Worse

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

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

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

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

In Conclusion …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post “We Need COBOL Programmers!” No, You Probably Don’t appeared first on .

This Week in Security News: 5 Reasons to Move Your Endpoint Security to the Cloud Now and ICEBUCKET Group Mimics Smart TVs to Steal Ad Money

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about 5 reasons your organization should consider moving to a cloud managed solution. Also, read about a massive online fraud operation that has been mimicking smart TVs to fool online advertisers and gain unearned profits from online ads.

 

Read on:

Letter from the CEO: A Time of Kindness and Compassion

As a global company with headquarters in Japan, Trend Micro has been exposed to COVID-19 from the very early days when it first erupted in Asia. During these difficult times, Trend Micro has also witnessed the amazing power of positivity and kindness around the world. In this blog, read more about the importance of compassion during these unprecedented times from Trend Micro’s CEO, Eva Chen.

What Do Serverless Compute Platforms Mean for Security?

Developers deploying containers to restricted platforms or “serverless” containers to the likes of AWS Fargate, for example, should think about security differently – by looking upward, looking left and also looking all-around your cloud domain for opportunities to properly security your cloud native applications. 

April Patch Tuesday: Microsoft Battles 4 Bugs Under Active Exploit

Microsoft released its April 2020 Patch Tuesday security updates, its first big patch update released since the work-from-home era began, with a whopping 113 vulnerabilities. Microsoft has seen a 44% increase in the number of CVEs patched between January to April 2020 compared to the same time period in 2019, according to Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative – a likely result of an increasing number of researchers looking for bugs and an expanding portfolio of supported products.

5 Reasons to Move Your Endpoint Security to the Cloud Now

As the world adopts work from home initiatives, we’ve seen many organizations accelerate their plans to move from on-premises endpoint security and detection and response (EDR/XDR) solutions to SaaS versions. In this blog, learn about 5 reasons you should consider moving to a cloud managed solution.

Why Running a Privileged Container is Not a Good Idea

Containers are not, by any means, new. They have been consistently and increasingly adopted in the past few years, with security being a popular related topic. It is well-established that giving administrative powers to server users is not a good security practice. In the world of containers, we have the same paradigm. In this article, Trend Micro’s Fernando Cardoso explains why running a privileged container is a bad idea.

Why CISOs Are Demanding Detection and Response Everywhere

Over the past three decades, Trend Micro has observed the industry trends that have the biggest impact on its customers. One of the big things we’ve noticed is that threats move largely in tandem with changes to IT infrastructure. As digital transformation continues to remain a priority, it also comes with an expanded corporate attack surface, driving security leaders to demand enhanced visibility, detection and response across the entire enterprise — not just the endpoint.

Shift Well-Architecture Left. By Extension, Security Will Follow

Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the norm in the cloud. From CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform, Serverless Framework and ARM, the options are nearly endless. IaC allows architects and DevOps engineers to version the application infrastructure as much as the developers are already versioning the code. So, any bad change, no matter if on the application code or infrastructure, can be easily inspected or, even better, rolled back.

Work from Home Presents a Data Security Challenge for Banks

The mass relocation of financial services employees from the office to their couch, dining table or spare room to stop the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus is a significant data security concern, according to several industry experts. In this article, learn how managers can support security efforts from Trend Micro’s Bill Malik.

Principles of a Cloud Migration – Security, The W5H

For as long as cloud providers have been in business, discussing the Shared Responsibility Model has been priority when it comes to customer operation teams. It defines the different aspects of control, and with that control, comes the need to secure, manage, and maintain. In this blog, Trend Micro highlights some of the requirements and discusses the organization’s layout for responsibility.

Coronavirus Update App Leads to Project Spy Android and iOS Spyware

Trend Micro discovered a potential cyberespionage campaign, dubbed Project Spy, that infects Android and iOS devices with spyware. Project Spy uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a lure, posing as an app called ‘Coronavirus Updates’. Trend Micro also found similarities in two older samples disguised as a Google service and, subsequently, as a music app. Trend Micro noted a small number of downloads of the app in Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Austria, Romania, Grenada and Russia.

Exposing Modular Adware: How DealPly, IsErIk, and ManageX Persist in Systems

Trend Micro has observed suspicious activities caused by adware, with common behaviors that include access to random domains with alternating consonant and vowel names, scheduled tasks, and in-memory execution via WScript that has proven to be an effective method to hide its operations. In this blog, Trend Micro walks through its analysis of three adware events linked to and named as Dealply, IsErIk and ManageX. 

ICEBUCKET Group Mimicked Smart TVs to Steal Ad Money

Cybersecurity firm and bot detection platform White Ops has discovered a massive online fraud operation that for the past few months has been mimicking smart TVs to fool online advertisers and gain unearned profits from online ads. White Ops has named this operation ICEBUCKET and has described it as “the largest case of SSAI spoofing” known to date.

Fake Messaging App Installers Promoted on Fraudulent Download Sites, Target Russian Users

Fake installers of popular messaging apps are being propagated via fraudulent download sites, as disclosed in a series of tweets by a security researcher from CronUp. Trend Micro has also encountered samples of the files. The sites and the apps are in Russian and are aiming to bait Russian users.

“Twin Flower” Campaign Jacks Up Network Traffic, Downloads Files, Steals Data

A campaign dubbed “Twin Flower” has been detected by Jinshan security researchers in a report published in Chinese and analyzed by Trend Micro. The files are believed to be downloaded unknowingly when visiting malicious sites or dropped into the system by another malware. The potentially unwanted application (PUA) PUA.Win32.BoxMini.A files are either a component or the main executable itself of a music downloader that automatically downloads music files without user consent.

Undertaking Security Challenges in Hybrid Cloud Environments

Businesses are now turning to hybrid cloud environments to make the most of the cloud’s dependability and dynamicity. The hybrid cloud gives organizations the speed and scalability of the public cloud, as well as the control and reliability of the private cloud. A 2019 Nutanix survey shows that 85% of its respondents regard the hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model.

How to Secure Video Conferencing Apps

What do businesses have to be wary of when it comes to their video conferencing software? Vulnerabilities, for one. Threat actors are not shy about using everything they have in their toolbox and are always on the lookout for any flaw or vulnerability they can exploit to pull off malicious attacks. In this blog, learn about securing your video conferencing apps and best practices for strengthening the security of work-from-home setups.

Monitoring and Maintaining Trend Micro Home Network Security – Part 4: Best Practices

In the last blog of this four-part series, Trend Micro delves deeper into regular monitoring and maintenance of home network security, to ensure you’re getting the best protection that Trend Micro Home Network Security can provide your connected home.

Surprised by the ICEBUCKET operation that has described as “the largest case of SSAI spoofing” known to date? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

The post This Week in Security News: 5 Reasons to Move Your Endpoint Security to the Cloud Now and ICEBUCKET Group Mimics Smart TVs to Steal Ad Money appeared first on .

Shift Well-Architecture Left. By Extension, Security Will Follow

By Raphael Bottino, Solutions Architect

A story on how Infrastructure as Code can be your ally on Well-Architecting and securing your Cloud environment

By Raphael Bottino, Solutions Architect — first posted as a medium article
Using Infrastructure as Code(IaC for short) is the norm in the Cloud. CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform, Serverless Framework, ARM… the options are endless! And they are so many just because IaC makes total sense! It allows Architects and DevOps engineers to version the application infrastructure as much as the developers are already versioning the code. So any bad change, no matter if on the application code or infrastructure, can be easily inspected or, even better, rolled back.

For the rest of this article, let’s use CloudFormation as reference. And, if you are new to IaC, check how to create a new S3 bucket on AWS as code:

Pretty simple, right? And you can easily create as many buckets as you need using the above template (if you plan to do so, remove the BucketName line, since names are globally unique on S3!). For sure, way simpler and less prone to human error than clicking a bunch of buttons on AWS console or running commands on CLI.

Pretty simple, right? And you can easily create as many buckets as you need using the above template (if you plan to do so, remove the BucketName line, since names are globally unique on S3!). For sure, way simpler and less prone to human error than clicking a bunch of buttons on AWS console or running commands on CLI.

Well, it’s not that simple…

Although this is a functional and useful CloudFormation template, following correctly all its rules, it doesn’t follow the rules of something bigger and more important: The AWS Well-Architected Framework. This amazing tool is a set of whitepapers describing how to architect on top of AWS, from 5 different views, called Pillars: Security, Cost Optimization, Operational Excellence, Reliability and Performance Efficiency. As you can see from the pillar names, an architecture that follows it will be more secure, cheaper, easier to operate, more reliable and with better performance.

Among others, this template will generate a S3 bucket that doesn’t have encryption enabled, doesn’t enforce said encryption and doesn’t log any kind of access to it–all recommended by the Well-Architected Framework. Even worse, these misconfigurations are really hard to catch in production and not visibly alerted by AWS. Even the great security tools provided by them such as Trusted Advisor or Security Hub won’t give an easy-to-spot list of buckets with those misconfigurations. Not for nothing Gartner states that 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault¹.

The DevOps movement brought to the masses a methodology of failing fast, which is not exactly compatible with the above scenario where a failure many times is just found out whenever unencrypted data is leaked or the access log is required. The question is, then, how to improve it? Spoiler alert: the answer lies on the IaC itself 🙂

Shifting Left

Even before making sure a CloudFormation template is following AWS’ own best practices, the first obvious requirement is to make sure that the template is valid. A fantastic open-source tool called cfn-lint is made available by AWS on GitHub² and can be easily adopted on any CI/CD pipeline, failing the build if the template is not valid, saving precious time. To shorten the feedback loop even further and fail even faster, the same tool can be adopted on the developer IDE³ as an extension so the template can be validated as it is coded. Pretty cool, right? But it still doesn’t help us with the misconfiguration problem that we created with that really simple template in the beginning of this post.

Conformity⁴ provides, among other capabilities, an API endpoint to scan CloudFormation templates against the Well-Architected Framework, and that’s exactly how I know that template is not adhering to its best practices. This API can be implemented on your pipeline, just like the cfn-lint. However, I wanted to move this check further left, just like the cfn-lint extension I mentioned before.

The Cloud Conformity Template Scanner Extension

With that challenge in mind, but also with the need for scanning my templates for misconfigurations fast myself, I came up with a Visual Studio Code extension that, leveraging Conformity’s API, allows the developer to scan the template as it is coded. The Extension can be found here⁵ or searching for “Conformity” on your IDE.

After installing it, scanning a template is as easy as running a command on VS Code. Below it is running for our template example:

This tool allows anyone to shift misconfiguration and compliance checking as left as possible, right on developers’ hands. To use the extension, you’ll need a Conformity API key. If you don’t have one and want to try it out, Conformity provides a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. If you like it but feels that this time period is not enough for you, let me know and I’ll try to make it available to you.

But… What about my bucket template?

Oh, by the way, if you are wondering how a S3 bucket CloudFormation template looks like when following the best practices, take a look:

   
A Well-Architected bucket template

Not as simple, right? That’s exactly why this kind of tool is really powerful, allowing developers to learn as they code and organizations to fail the deployment of any resource that goes against the AWS recommendations.

References

[1] https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/why-cloud-security-is-everyones-business

[2] https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/cfn-python-lint

[3] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=kddejong.vscode-cfn-lint

[4] https://www.cloudconformity.com/

[5] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=raphaelbottino.cc-template-scanner

The post Shift Well-Architecture Left. By Extension, Security Will Follow appeared first on .

Cloud Native Application Development Enables New Levels of Security Visibility and Control

By Trend Micro

We are in unique times and it’s important to support each other through unique ways. Snyk is providing a community effort to make a difference through AllTheTalks.online, and Trend Micro is proud to be a sponsor of their virtual fundraiser and tech conference.

In today’s threat landscape new cloud technologies can pose a significant risk. Applying traditional security techniques not designed for cloud platforms can restrict the high-volume release cycles of cloud-based applications and impact business and customer goals for digital transformation.

When organizations are moving to the cloud, security can be seen as an obstacle. Often, the focus is on replicating security controls used in existing environments, however, the cloud actually enables new levels of visibility and controls that weren’t possible before.

With today’s increased attention on cyber threats, cloud vulnerabilities provide an opportunistic climate for novice and expert hackers alike as a result of dependencies on modern application development tools, and lack of awareness of security gaps in build pipelines and deployment environments.

Public clouds are capable of auditing API calls to the cloud management layer. This gives in-depth visibility into every action taken in your account, making it easy to audit exactly what’s happening, investigate and search for known and unknown attacks and see who did what to identify unusual behavior.

Join Mike Milner, Global Director of Application Security Technology at Trend Micro on Wednesday April 15, at 11:45am EST to learn how to Use Observability for Security and Audit. This is a short but important session where we will discuss the tools to help build your own application audit system for today’s digital transformation. We’ll look at ways of extending this level of visibility to your applications and APIs, such as using new capabilities offered by cloud providers for network mirroring, storage and massive data handling.

Register for a good cause and learn more at https://www.allthetalks.org/.

The post Cloud Native Application Development Enables New Levels of Security Visibility and Control appeared first on .

COVID-19: How Do I Work from Home Securely?

By Trend Micro

The coronavirus pandemic—the infection officially designated as COVID-19—is causing upheaval across the globe. Aside from the serious economic and public health implications, one very practical impact of shelter-in-place dictums is to force many companies to support remote working where they can. The most recent data tells us that in 2017, eight million Americans worked from home at least some of the week — amounting to around 5% of US workers. However, the events of the past few weeks are driving what is being described in certain sectors as the biggest shift to home working since 9/11.

This will ensure that many companies can continue functioning while helping to achieve social distancing to minimise the spread of the virus. But there are challenges, particularly to smaller businesses who don’t have IT security teams to assist with the transition. Hackers are primed and ready to take advantage of home workers, whose machines and devices may not be as secure as those in the office. There’s also a risk that workers are more distracted by current events when working at home, creating more opportunities for cyber-criminals to strike.

This isn’t just about hackers stealing your personal log-ins and information to sell on the dark web. In a home-working context, corporate data and systems may also be at risk. It takes just one unsecured remote worker to let the bad guys in. The damage they end up doing may be particularly difficult for employers to weather given the extreme economic pressures already on many firms.

With that in mind, therefore, let’s take a look at some of the major threats to home workers and their organizations, and what can be done to keep the hackers at bay.

The main threats

Phishing messages are by far the number one threat to home workers. Cyber-criminals are using widespread awareness of COVID-19, and a desire for more information on the outbreak, to trick users into clicking on malicious links or opening booby-trapped attachments. Many are spoofed to appear as if sent by trusted organizations such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the World Health Organization (WHO). They may claim to offer more information on the spread of the outbreak, tips on staying safe, and even provide details of how to get a non-existent vaccine online.

If you click through on a malicious link, the next stage of the attack could:

  • Take you to a convincing-looking log-in page (e.g., for Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, or any popular cloud apps) where your username and password could be harvested by hackers. With these, they have a foothold in the organization which could provide the foundation for a serious information-stealing attack.
  • Covertly initiate a malware download. This malware could exploit unpatched vulnerabilities on your computer to infect not just your machine but the entire corporate network it’s connected to, with ransomware, cryptojacking malware, banking trojans, information-stealing threats, and much more.

Brute forcing is another way for hackers to hijack your cloud accounts. They use previously breached username/password combos and run them through automation software to try them across billions of websites and apps. Because users reuse passwords across numerous accounts, the bad guys often get lucky and are able to unlock additional accounts in this way. Home workers using Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom and other cloud platforms for collaboration and productivity may be targeted.

Malicious smartphone apps are another threat to home workers. These may be disguised to trick the user into believing they’re downloading a COVID-19 tracker, for example. In reality, it could infect the device with ransomware, info-stealers, or other malware. That device could then spread the same malware to the corporate network, if it is connected to it via the home network.

Smart device threats are also a concern for home workers. More and more of us are investing in smart home devices. From voice assistants to smart speakers, connected refrigerators to smart TVs, it’s estimated that there’ll be as many as 128 million smart homes in the US by the end of this year. However, often these consumer-grade devices don’t have strong built-in protection. They may use weak, factory default passwords and/or contain multiple software vulnerabilities which are rarely patched by the manufacturer, if at all. The risk is that hackers could hijack one or more of these devices and use them as a stepping stone into the home and then corporate network – as we’ve demonstrated in previous research.

Friends and family could also introduce new cyber-threats, as they will also be confined largely to the home. That means they’ll be logging on to the home network with their own mobile devices, which may not be as well protected from threats as they should be. Once again, such threats could spread quickly from the home network to infect the enterprise network if it’s connected without adequate security controls. Another risk is of children using unsecured remote learning platforms, which may offer cybercriminals opportunities to hijack accounts, steal information and spread malware onto the network.

What are the hackers after?

Home workers represent an attractive target in their own right. After all, personal information and log-ins (home banking, Netflix, webmail etc) can be easily sold for a profit on dark web marketplaces. However, organizations represent a much bigger, potentially more lucrative pay day for cyber-criminals. While corporate PCs and networks might be fairly well secured, the rush to support home working may have left gaps the bad guys are keen to exploit.

By first compromising the home worker, and then pivoting through unsecured channels to the corporate network, hackers could spread ransomware, steal sensitive company IPs, infect work networks with crypto-mining malware, or steal large volumes of customer data. They may also look to hijack employees’ corporate email or other accounts as the first part of a multi-stage information-stealing attack. There have even been new warnings of Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks in which employees (usually those working in the finance department) are contacted by someone posing as a senior exec and ordered to wire business funds to a new bank account.

Working safely at home

With so many techniques at their disposal, it’s easy to imagine that the bad guys have the upper hand. But by putting a few best practices in place, there are things businesses and employees can do today to reduce home working security risks.

Consider the following:

  • User awareness exercises to improve the ability of home workers to spot phishing attacks.
  • Ensure all home workers are outfitted with anti-malware for any devices used for work. Trend Micro Maximum Security is an excellent place to start for PCs and Macs, while Trend Micro Mobile Security can help secure Android and Mobile devices.
  • Require strong, unique passwords for all accounts, stored in a password manager, such as Trend Micro Password Manager.
  • Enhance the above by switching on two-factor authentication for all enterprise accounts that have it (including any cloud platforms).
  • Always use a VPN for communication between home and corporate networks.
  • Ensure staff have a clear route to report any security incidents.
  • Switch on automatic updates for all home computer systems (operating systems and software).
  • Ensure smart home devices are on latest software version and have strong passwords or 2FA.
  • Use a network security solution like Trend Micro Home Network Security to secure your home network. It not only provides a secure baseline for working at home, with its web and content threat protections; you can block your kids’ use of the internet and YouTube while you’re having conference calls or doing other bandwidth-intensive work on the remotely-accessed corporate network.
  • Tightly enforce endpoint security policies: if possible, only allow work devices to connect to the corporate network, and/or employee devices that have been previously scanned for threats.

We don’t know how long COVID-19 will last. But by adapting to the new reality as quickly as possible, businesses and their home workers can at least close down any security gaps, enabling them to be as productive as possible — while most importantly, staying safe and healthy.

The post COVID-19: How Do I Work from Home Securely? appeared first on .

How to Stay Safe as Online Coronavirus Scams Spread

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

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

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

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

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

Phishing for trouble

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

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

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

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

Watch out for these scams

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

‘Official’ updates

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

Coronavirus map

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

Corporate updates

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

Donations

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

Click here for a cure

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

Tax refunds

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

How to stay safe

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

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

How Trend Micro can help

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

What do they want?

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

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

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

Look out for these scams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to do

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

Here are a few other recommendations:

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

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

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

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

How Trend Micro can help

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

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

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

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

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

The Summit of Cybersecurity Sits Among the Clouds

By Trend Micro

Trend Micro Apex One™ as a Service

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

Internet Access Threats are Real

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

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

Parental Controls: Your Silent Partner

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

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

Parental Controls that Work for You

Protecting your family members online starts with Adding a Profile.

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

Website Filtering

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

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

Content Filtering

Moving on, you can also set up Content Filtering.

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

App Controls

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

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

Time Limits and Notifications

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

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

Connection Alerts

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

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

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

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

Stalking the Stalkerware

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

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

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

What is stalkerware?

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

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

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

Breaking the law

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

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

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

How do I know if my phone has been hit?

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

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

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

How do I keep my device secure?

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

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

How Trend Micro can help

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Stalking the Stalkerware appeared first on .

❌