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DNSTrails v1.0 – DNS intelligence database

By MaxiSoler
DNSTrails is an intelligence database, featuring IP and Domain related data such as current and historical DNS records, current and historical WHOIS, technologies used, subdomains and the ability to...

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OWASP Joomscan v0.0.1

By MaxiSoler
OWASP JoomScan (short for [Joom]la Vulnerability [Scan]ner) is an opensource project in perl programming language to detect Joomla CMS vulnerabilities and analysis them. If you want to do a...

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PoT – Phishing on Twitter v0.1

By MaxiSoler
PoT (Phishing on Twitter) is phishing tool. It is spoofing target’s friend and creating tweet like him. It all happens automatically. How it works? Collect data from target’s twitter...

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T.rex_scan v0.2 – Integrate Tools to Audit Web Sites

By MaxiSoler
T.rex_scan only facilitates the visualization when auditing a web page. With this script you can optimize your time, reducing the time you audit a page web since T.rex_scan executes the task you...

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HITB Armory – Call for Tools is OPEN! (Dubai, UAE)

By MaxiSoler
We’re pleased to announce the first ever HackInTheBox Armory! The HITB Armory is where you can showcase your security tools to the world. You will get 30 minutes to present your tools onstage,...

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

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

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

Read on:

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

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

Polish Hacking Team Triumphs in Trend Micro CTF Competition

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

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

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

Don’t Overlook the Security of Your Supply Chain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Worries CISOs Most In 2019

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

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

Here are some of their concerns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Network security simplified with Amazon VPC Ingress Routing and Trend Micro

By Trend Micro

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

Cloud network layer security by Trend Micro

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

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

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

 

Enhancing security through partnered innovation

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

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

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

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

 

What types of protection can customers expect?

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

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

 

Trend Micro™ Cloud One ­– Network Security

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

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

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

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 1: Home Network Security: Setup and Configuration

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

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

Configuration Modes

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

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

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

Some additional information about HNS’s station Modes:

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

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

Off to a Good Start

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

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

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

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

Recommended Network and Security Settings

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

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

Read on:

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

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

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

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

What Worries CISOs Most In 2019

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

Ransomware Attack Hits Major U.S. Data Center Provider

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

Stalking the Stalkerware

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

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

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

Operation ENDTRADE: Finding Multi-Stage Backdoors that TICK

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

Iran Targets Mideast Oil with ZeroCleare Wiper Malware

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

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

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

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

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

Trend Micro More Than Doubles Commitment to Underrepresented Persons in Cybersecurity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

StrandHogg Android Vulnerability Allows Malware to Hijack Legitimate Apps

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

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

Read on:

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

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

Microsoft December 2019 Patch Tuesday Plugs Windows Zero-Day

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

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

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

2020 Predictions: Black Hats Begin to Target Facial Recognition Technology

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

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

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

Trend Micro, McAfee and Bitdefender Top Cloud Workload Security List

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

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

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

Retail Cyberattacks Set to Soar 20% in 2019 Holiday Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ransomware Recap: Snatch and Zeppelin Ransomware

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

Brian Krebs is the CISO MAG Cybersecurity Person of the Year

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

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

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

How To Get The Most Out Of Industry Analyst Reports

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

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

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

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

Read on:

How to Get the Most Out of Industry Analyst Reports

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

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

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

How to Speed Up a Slow PC Running Windows OS

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

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

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

DDoS Attacks and IoT Exploits: New Activity from Momentum Botnet

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

Oil and Gas Industry Risks Escalate, Cybersecurity Should Be Prioritized

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

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

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

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

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

Credential Harvesting Campaign Targets Government Procurement Sites Worldwide

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

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

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

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

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

15 Cyber Threat Predictions for 2020

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

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

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

Into the Battlefield: A Security Guide to IoT Botnets

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

 

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

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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.

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

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)

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

Read on:

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

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

Security Study: Businesses Remain at Elevated Risk of Cyber Attack

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

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

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

Cambridge Analytica Scandal: Facebook Hit with $1.6 Million Fine

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

Why Running a Privileged Container in Docker is a Bad Idea

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

IoT Company Wyze Leaks Emails, Device Data of 2.4M

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

Looking into Attacks and Techniques Used Against WordPress Sites

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

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

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

Emotet Attack Causes Shutdown of Frankfurt’s IT Network

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

BeyondProd Lays Out Security Principles for Cloud-Native Applications

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

How MITRE ATT&CK Assists in Threat Investigation

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

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

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

Mobile Money: How to Secure Banking Applications

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

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

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The Everyday Cyber Threat Landscape: Trends from 2019 to 2020

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

Top five threats of 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to look out for in 2020

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

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

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

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

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

How to stay safe

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Trend Micro can help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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INTERPOL Collaboration Reduces Cryptojacking by 78%

By Trend Micro

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

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

Cryptomining On The Rise

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

Enter Operation Goldfish Alpha

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

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

Spectacular Success

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

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

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

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

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

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

Read on:

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

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

Operation Goldfish Alpha Reduces Cryptojacking Across Southeast Asia by 78%

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

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

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

Security Predictions for 2020 According to Trend Micro

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

The Everyday Cyber Threat Landscape: Trends from 2019 to 2020

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

5 Key Security Lessons from the Cloud Hopper Mega Hack

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

The Summit of Cybersecurity Sits Among the Clouds

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

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

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

Ransomware Recap: Clop, DeathRansom, and Maze Ransomware

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

4 Ring Employees Fired for Spying on Customers

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

Web Skimming Attack on Blue Bear Affects School Admin Software Users

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

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

Read on:

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

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

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

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

Equifax Settles Class-Action Breach Lawsuit for $380.5M

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

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

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

ICS Security in the Spotlight Due to Tensions with Iran

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

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

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

Microsoft Patches Major Crypto Spoofing Bug

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Trend Micro

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

Defend Yourself Now and in the Future Against Mobile Malware

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

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

Adware ahoy

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

Ones to watch

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

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

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

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

Is Google helping?

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

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

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

How do I stay safe?

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

Consider the following:

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

How Trend Micro Mobile Security helps

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

To use the manual scan, simply:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among its other features, Trend Micro Mobile Security also:

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

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

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

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

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

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

Read on:

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

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

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

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

Defend Yourself Now and In the Future Against Mobile Malware

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

Trend Micro Joins LOT Network to Fight ‘Patent Trolls’

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

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

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

Microsoft Leaves 250M Customer Service Records Open to the Web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NetWire RAT Hidden in IMG Files Deployed in BEC Campaign

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

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

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

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

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

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

Read on:

Security Analysis of Devices that Support SCPI and VISA Protocols

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

The Rich Are Different, but their Smartphones Aren’t

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

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

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

Avast Winds Down Jumpshot, Cites User Data Sale Privacy Concerns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Azure Flaws Could Have Let Hackers Take Over Cloud Servers

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

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

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

Inside the World’s Highest-Stakes Industrial Hacking Contest

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

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

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

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

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Four Reasons Your Cloud Security Is Keeping You Up At Night

By Trend Micro

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

Why your cloud security is keeping you up at night

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

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

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

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

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

 1. Not scanning your accounts regularly enough

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

2. Not investing in preventative measures

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

3. Not monitoring real-time activity

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

4. Not communicating risks in a timely manner

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

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

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

Stay Safe!

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

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

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

Read on:

Four Reasons Your Cloud Security is Keeping You Up at Night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vulnerability in WhatsApp Desktop Exposed User Files

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

Ryuk Ransomware Infects US Government Contractor

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

New Lemon Duck Malware Campaign Targets IoT, Large Manufacturers

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

New Extortion Campaign Threatens Victims of the 2015 Ashley Madison Breach

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

Emotet Uses Coronavirus Scare in Latest Campaign, Targets Japan

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

Researchers Use Smart Light Bulbs to Infiltrate Networks

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

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

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

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

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

1.   Threat Blocking

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

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

http://test-malware.hns.tm

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

2.   Access Control

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

Approving and Rejecting Devices

Device control is the first part of access control.

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

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

Remote Access Protection

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

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

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

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

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

Disconnecting Devices

Next, you should test Disconnecting Devices.

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

3.   Parental Controls

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

Website Filtering

Testing Website Filtering is easy.

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

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

Content Filtering

Moving forward, Content Filtering is next in our checklist.

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

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

App Controls

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

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

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

Time Limits

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

As an example:

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

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

Connection Alert & Notification

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

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

And Now, the Answer to Your Question

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

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

Go here for Parts 1 and 2 of our series:

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

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

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

By Trend Micro

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

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

The state of play

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

Three trends in the report stand out:

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

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

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

What happens now?

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

Here’s a quick checklist of elements to consider:

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

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

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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.

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

By Chris Taylor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Smart Check Validated for New Bottlerocket OS

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

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

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

Why use additional security in cloud environments

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

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

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

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

 

Why Smart Check in Bottlerocket matters

Smooth execution without security roadblocks

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

Vulnerability scanning before runtime

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

Flexible enough to fit with your pipeline

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

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

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

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

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Suddenly Teleworking, Securely

By Greg Young (Vice President for Cybersecurity)

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

A Lot of New Teleworkers All At Once

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

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

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

Help Staff Make A Secure Home Office

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

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

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

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

Operational Issues

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

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

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

Crisis Specific Risks

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

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

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

But Hang On – It Is Not All Bad News

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

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

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

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

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

 

Read on:

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

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

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

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

How to Stay Safe as Online Coronavirus Scams Spread

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

DDoS Attack Targets German Food Delivery Service

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

Suddenly Teleworking, Securely

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

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

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

New Ursnif Campaign Targets Users in Japan

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

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

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

New Variant of Paradise Ransomware Spreads Through IQY Files

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

Magecart Cyberattack Targets NutriBullet Website

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

The IIoT Threat Landscape: Securing Connected Industries

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

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

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

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

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

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

What happened this time?

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

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

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

How does it affect me?

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

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

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

What should I do next?

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

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

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

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

Step 1: Dark web monitoring works

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

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

Step 2: Password protection

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

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

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

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

How Trend Micro can help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

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

The main threats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the hackers after?

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

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

Working safely at home

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

Consider the following:

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

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

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The AWS Service to Focus On – Amazon EC2

By Trend Micro
cloud services

If we run a contest for Mr. Popular of Amazon Web Services (AWS), without a doubt Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) has ‘winner’ written all over it. However, what’s popular is not always what is critical for your business to focus on. There is popularity and then there is dependability. Let’s acknowledge how reliant we are on Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) as AWS infrastructure led-organizations.

We reflected upon our in-house findings for the AWS ‘Security’ pillar in our last blog, Four Reasons Your Cloud Security is Keeping You Up at Night, explicitly leaving out over caffeination and excessive screen time!

Drilling further down to the most affected AWS Services, Amazon EC2 related issues topped the list with 32% of all issues. Whereas Mr. Popular – Amazon S3 contributed to 12% of all issues. While cloud providers, like AWS, offer a secure infrastructure and best practices, many customers are unaware of their role in the shared responsibility model. The results showing the number of issues impacting Amazon EC2 customers demonstrates the security gap that can happen when the customer part of the shared responsibility model is not well understood.

While these AWS services and infrastructure are secure, customers also have a responsibility to secure their data and to configure environments according to AWS best practices. So how do we ensure that we keep our focus on this crucial service and ensure the flexibility, scalability, and security of a growing infrastructure?

Introducing Rules

If you thought you were done with rules after passing high school and moving out of your parent’s house, you would have soon realized that you were living a dream. Rules seem to be everywhere! Rules are important, they keep us safe and secure. While some may still say ‘rules are made to be broken’, you will go into a slump if your cloud infrastructure breaks the rules of the industry and gets exposed to security vulnerabilities.

It is great if you are already following the Best Practices for Amazon EC2, but if not, how do you monitor the performance of your services day in and day out to ensure their adherence to these best practices? How can you track if all your services and resources are running as per the recommended standards?

We’re here to help with that. Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity ‘Rules’ provide you with that visibility for some of the most critical services like Amazon EC2.

What is the Rule?

A ‘Rule’ is the definition of the best practice used as a basis for an assessment that is run by Conformity on a particular piece of your Cloud infrastructure. When a rule is run against the infrastructure (resources) associated with your AWS account, the result of the scan is referred to as a Check. For example, an Amazon EC2 may have 60 Rules (Checks) scanning for various risks/vulnerabilities. Checks are either a SUCCESS or a FAILURE.

Conformity has about 540 Rules and 60 of them are for monitoring your Amazon EC2 services best practices. Conformity Bot scans your cloud accounts for these Rules and presents you with the ‘Checks’ to prioritize and remediate the issues keeping your services healthy and prevent security breaches.

Amazon EC2 Best Practices and Rules

Here are just a few examples of how Conformity Rules have got you covered for some of the most critical Amazon EC2 best practices:

  1. To ensure Security, ensure IAM users and roles are used and management policies are established for access policies.
  2. For managing Storage, keep EBS volumes separate for operating systems and data, and check that the Amazon EC2 instances provisioned outside of the AWS Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) have Termination Protection safety feature enabled to protect your instances from being accidentally terminated.
  3. For efficient Resource Management, utilize custom tags to track and identify resources, and keep on top of your stated Amazon EC2 limits.
  4. For full confident Backup and Recovery, regularly test the process of recovering instances and EBS volumes should they fail, and create and use approved AMIs for easier and consistent future instance deployment.

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

Stay Safe!

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Cloud-First but Not Cloud-Only: Why Organizations Need to Simplify Cybersecurity

By Wendy Moore

The global public cloud services market is on track to grow 17% this year, topping $266 billion. These are impressive figures, and whatever Covid-19 may do short-term to the macro-economy, they’re a sign of where the world is heading. But while many organizations may describe themselves as “cloud-first”, they’re certainly not “cloud-only.” That is, hybrid cloud is the name of the game today: a blend of multiple cloud providers and multiple datacenters.

Whilst helping to drive agility, differentiation and growth, this new reality also creates cyber risk. As IT leaders try to chart a course for success, they’re crying out for a more holistic, simpler way to manage hybrid cloud security.

Cloud for everyone

Organizations are understandably keen to embrace cloud platforms. Who wouldn’t want to empower employees to be more productive and DevOps to deliver agile, customer-centric services? But digital transformation comes with its own set of challenges. Migration often happens at different rates throughout an organization. That makes it hard to gain unified visibility across the enterprise and manage security policies in a consistent manner — especially when different business units and departments are making siloed decisions. An estimated 85% of organizations are now using multiple clouds, and 76% are using between two and 15 hybrid clouds.

To help manage this complexity, organisations are embracing containers and serverless architectures to develop new applications more efficiently. However, the DevOps teams using these technologies are focused primarily on time-to-market, sometimes at the expense of security. Their use of third-party code is a classic example: potentially exposing the organization to buggy or even malware-laden code.

A shared responsibility

The question is, how to mitigate these risks in a way that respects the Shared Responsibility model of cloud security, but in a consistent manner across the organization? It’s a problem exacerbated by two further concerns.

First, security needs to be embedded in the DevOps process to ensure that the applications delivered are secure, but not in a way that threatens the productivity of teams. They need to be able to use the tools and platforms they want to, but in a way that doesn’t expose the organization to unnecessary extra risk. Second, cloud complexity can often lead to human error: misconfigurations of cloud services that threaten to expose highly regulated customer and corporate data to possible attacks. The Capital One data breach, which affected an estimated 100 million consumers, was caused partly by a misconfigured Web Application Firewall.

Simplifying security

Fortunately, organizations are becoming more mature in their cloud security efforts. We see customers that started off tackling cyber risk with multiple security tools across the enterprise, but in time developed an operational excellence model. By launching what amount to cloud centers of excellence, they’re showing that security policies and processes can be standardized and rolled out in a repeatable way across the organization to good effect.

But what of the tools security teams are using to achieve this? Unfortunately, in too many cases they’re relying on fragmented, point products which add cost, further complexity and dangerous security gaps to the mix. It doesn’t have to be like this.

Cloud One from Trend Micro brings together workload security, container security, application security, network security, file storage security and cloud security posture management (CSPM). The latter, Cloud One – Conformity offers a simple, automated way to spot and fix misconfigurations and enhance security compliance and governance in the cloud.

Whatever stage of maturity you are at with your cloud journey, Cloud One offers simple, automated protection from a single console. It’s simply the way cloud security needs to be.

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Using Zoom? Here’s how to keep your business and employees safe

By Bharat Mistry

Cyber-criminals are always looking for new opportunities to make money and steal data. Globally trending events are a tried-and-tested way of doing just this, and they don’t come much bigger than the current Covid-19 pandemic. It’s sparking a wave of phishing, BEC, extortion, ransomware and data breach attempts. And as increasing numbers of global workers are sent home, new opportunities are opening up to compromise video conferencing apps.

Although not alone in being targeted, Zoom has been the subject of some of the highest-profile incidents so far this year. Fortunately, there are things you can do to keep your business safe.

Under the microscope

The video conferencing app is in many ways a victim of its own success. Security concerns have been raised about it in the past, after researchers revealed zero-day flaw in the Mac Zoom client which could have allowed hackers to spy on users via their webcams. Later the same year, separate research revealed an API-targeted enumeration attack affecting the platform. Neither of these are thought to have been exploited in the wild.

However, things have changed today: with much of the world using the platform to hold business meetings and personal video calls, scrutiny of its security posture has never been greater.

From bugs to bombing

There are several risks to be aware of. The first is of several new vulnerabilities discovered in the platform: one of which could allow hackers to steal Windows passwords, and another two which could enable attackers to remotely install malware on affected Macs and eavesdrop on meetings.

Most news coverage, however, is focused on “Zoombombing” — when uninvited users crash meetings. This often happens when large-scale semi-public events are held, and meeting IDs are shared on social media. If there’s no password for the meeting and attendees aren’t screened, then Zoombombers may turn up. Once in the ‘meeting’, crashers often post offensive comments, stream adult content or do other things to disrupt the event.

The same underlying techniques could be used by hackers to eavesdrop on or disrupt business meetings. It’s all about taking advantage of unsecure settings in the app, (and possibly using brute-force tools to crack meeting IDs).

With access to a meeting, hackers could harvest highly sensitive and/or market-critical corporate information, or even spread malware via a file transfer feature.

The final threat is from phishing attacks. Hackers know users are looking en masse for ways to communicate during government lockdowns. By creating legitimate-looking Zoom links and websites, they could steal financial details, spread malware or harvest Zoom ID numbers, allowing them to infiltrate virtual meetings. One vendor discovered 2,000 new domains had been registered in March alone, over two-thirds of the total for the year so far.

What you can do

The good news is that there are several things you can do to mitigate the security risks associated with Zoom.

The most basic are:

  • Ensure Zoom is always on the latest software version
  • Build awareness of Zoom phishing scams into user training programs. Users should only download the Zoom client from a trusted site and check for anything suspicious in the meeting URL when joining a meeting
  • Ensure all home workers have anti-malware including phishing detection installed from a reputable vendor

Next, it’s important to revisit those administrative settings in the app, to reduce the opportunities for hackers and Zoombombers.

The most important revolve around the Zoom Personal Meeting ID (a 9-11 digit number every user has). If a hacker gets hold of this, and the meeting is not password protected, they could access it. A leaked email or simple brute-force/guessing techniques could enable a hacker to compromise the ID and associated URL. For reoccurring meetings, the threat persists.

Fortunately, automatically generated passwords are now switched on by default, and the use of personal meeting IDs are switched off, meaning Zoom will create a random, one-off ID for each meeting.

These setting should be kept as is. But organisations can do more, including:

  • Ensure you also generate a meeting ID automatically for recurring meetings
  • Set screen-sharing to “host only” to prevent uninvited guests from sharing disruptive content
  • Don’t share any meeting IDs online
  • Disable “file transfers” to mitigate risk of malware
  • Make sure that only authenticated users can join meetings
  • Lock the meeting once it’s started to prevent anyone new joining
  • Use waiting room feature, so the host can only allow attendees from a pre-assigned register
  • Play a sound when someone enters or leaves the room
  • Allow host to put attendees on hold, temporarily removing them from a meeting if necessary

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This Week in Security News: More Than 8,000 Unsecured Redis Instances Found in the Cloud and Wiper Malware Called “Coronavirus” Spreads Among Windows Victims

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about 8,000 Redis instances running unsecured in different parts of the world, even deployed in public clouds. Also, read about a new Windows malware, called “Coronavirus,” that makes disks unusable by overwriting the master boot record (MBR).

Read on:

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

In light of the current COVID-19 crisis, shelter-in-place orders have forced many companies to support remote work. However, hackers are primed and ready to take advantage of home workers, whose machines and devices may not be as secure as those in the office. In this blog, learn about some of the major threats to home workers and their organizations, and what can be done to keep hackers at bay.

Vulnerability Researchers Focus on Zoom App’s Security

Researchers have turned up security and privacy flaws in Zoom, which has had success during the pandemic. In late March, one red-team member found that Zoom would display universal naming convention (UNC) paths as links, which, if clicked, would send a username and password hash to an attacker-controlled system. In this article, Brian Gorenc of Trend Micro’s ZDI program shares insight into Zoom vulnerabilities.

More Than 8,000 Unsecured Redis Instances Found in the Cloud

Trend Micro discovered 8,000 Redis instances running unsecured across the globe, even deployed in public clouds. The instances have been found without Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption and are not password protected. When left unsecured and allowed to be internet-facing or integrated into IoT devices, cybercriminals can find and abuse Redis servers to launch attacks such as SQL injections, cross-site scripting, malicious file uploads, and even remote code execution, among others.

Vulnerable VPN Appliances at Healthcare Organizations Open Doors for Ransomware Gangs

The increased enterprise VPN use due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the work-from-home shift has not gone unnoticed by ransomware gangs, Microsoft warns. Microsoft has pinpointed several dozens of hospitals with vulnerable gateway and VPN appliances in their infrastructure and decided to notify them directly about it and offer advice on how to keep safe.

Cloud-First but Not Cloud-Only: Why Organizations Need to Simplify Cybersecurity

The global public cloud services market is on track to grow 17% this year, topping $266 billion. However, while many organizations may describe themselves as “cloud-first”, they’re certainly not “cloud-only.” Hybrid cloud is the name of the game today: a blend of multiple cloud providers and multiple datacenters. While driving agility, differentiation and growth, this new reality also creates cyber risk.

Magecart Hackers Inject iFrame Skimmers in 19 Sites to Steal Payment Data

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an ongoing new Magecart skimmer campaign that has successfully compromised at least 19 different e-commerce websites to steal payment card details. According to a recent report, RiskIQ researchers spotted a new digital skimmer, dubbed “MakeFrame,” that injects HTML iframes into webpages to phish payment data.

The AWS Service to Focus On – Amazon EC2

Trend Micro recently analyzed the most affected AWS Services, finding that EC2-related issues topped the list with 32% of all issues and S3 contributed to 12% of all issues. While cloud providers offer a secure infrastructure and best practices, many customers are unaware of their role in the shared responsibility model. In this blog, learn how to secure data and configure environments with AWS best practices.

Wiper Malware Called “Coronavirus” Spreads Among Windows Victims

A new Windows malware has emerged that makes disks unusable by overwriting the master boot record (MBR). It takes its cue from the COVID-19 pandemic, calling itself simply “Coronavirus.” Overwriting the MBR is the same trick that the infamous NotPetya wiper malware used in 2017 in a campaign that caused widespread, global financial damage.

Raccoon Stealer’s Abuse of Google Cloud Services and Multiple Delivery Techniques

Raccoon Malware as a Service (MaaS) can steal login credentials, credit card information, cryptocurrency wallets and browser information. It can arrive on a system through delivery techniques such as exploit kits, phishing and bundled with other malware. In this blog, Trend Micro investigates campaigns that used exploit kits Fallout and Rig, and observes its use of Google Drive as part of its evasion tactics.

Developing Story: COVID-19 Used in Malicious Campaigns

The COVID-19 pandemic is being used in a variety of malicious campaigns including email spam, BEC, malware, ransomware and malicious domains.  As the number of those afflicted continue to surge by thousands, campaigns that use the disease as a lure also increase. Trend Micro researchers are periodically sourcing for samples on COVID-19-related malicious campaigns.

Threat Actors Abuse Evernote, Other Shared Platforms for Credential Phishing

Trend Micro researchers found campaigns that abuse the note-taking platform Evernote to host credential-phishing pages. The campaigns also exploit other shared platforms for editing images, making infographics and charts, and creating brand templates. Evernote’s notebook sharing functionality that uses public links is what threat actors exploited to spread malicious PDF files via phishing emails. 

Malicious Domains and Files Related to Zoom Increase, ‘Zoom Bombing’ on the Rise

As the use of video conferencing platforms has increased with many people working from home due to the COVID-19 outbreak, cases of “Zoom Bombing” and malicious domains and files related to Zoom have also been on the rise. Registrations of domains that reference the name of Zoom has significantly increased, and other communication apps such as Google Classroom have been targeted as well.

Russian Investigators Bust Credit Card Fraud Ring

Russian federal investigators have arrested at least 25 people accused of operating a credit card fraud ring, according to a statement released by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Those charged allegedly included a card fraud kingpin and two dozen associates linked to more than 90 websites that sold stolen credit card data and operated internationally.

Microsoft Corrects Misstatement Of 775 Percent Surge in Demand for Cloud Services Amid Coronavirus Outbreak

A recent Microsoft blog reported the tech giant had seen a “775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders.” That line was wrong: the almost 8x increase only pertained to monthly users of the Microsoft’s Teams collaboration platform, and only in a one-month period in Italy, a region of the world particularly impacted by the virus.

Using Zoom? Here’s How to Keep Your Business and Employees Safe

The COVID-19 crisis has sparked a new wave of phishing, BEC, extortion, ransomware and data breach attempts, and although it’s not the only platform being targeted, Zoom has been the subject of some of the highest-profile incidents so far. Fortunately, there are things organizations can do to protect their business and their employees. In this blog, learn about best practices you can use to help secure your Zoom conferences.

Have you or your organization been a victim of “Zoom Bombing”? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

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NCSA Small Business Webinar Series

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

Working from home? How do you keep your employees cyber-safe and cyber-secure? How do you protect your reputation, profit, and cash flow when you depend on your IT infrastructure as never before?

The National Cyber Security Alliance is hosting a series of webinars for small business owners, and we’re proud to support this effort with guest speakers to share our threat intelligence and security expertise.

The topics will help small companies deal with the challenges of COVID-19. The agenda is at https://staysafeonline.org/event_category/cybersecure-my-business/.

Here’s a quick overview of each session and why it might benefit your organization to tune in.

Telework Cybersecurity Best Practices – April 7: Many small business owners rely on face-to-face meetings with their teams. But, social distancing and work-from-home directives interrupt that way of doing things. In this session, we’ll discuss how to adjust your business to deal with a remote workforce. For some managers, not seeing every member of the team can be unsettling. We’ll talk about ways to overcome that barrier. For many organizations, using remote tools can put an extra burden on your IT gear and staff. We’ll talk about alternatives to lighten that load. And for most organizations, the new way of working can expose new and different information security vulnerabilities. We’ll offer some good practices to reduce your exposure.

Guest speakers from Trend Micro will be Greg Young and Ed Cabrera.

Spring has Sprung! Time for a Digital Spring Cleaning – April 14: One way to cut down on IT resource use is to get rid of unnecessary stuff. This webcast will suggest tactics to reduce the burden on your infrastructure. You will learn about cleaning up your storage, getting off unnecessary email lists, improving your – and your customers’ – privacy, and lowering your attack profile by getting rid of stale applications and services.

E-Commerce Security During COVID-19 – April 21, 2020: Businesses that rely on foot traffic are pivoting to on-line offerings. Restaurants support demand with delivery or curbside pick-up, which both put a strain on your IT resources. Unfortunately, the bad guys are exploiting weaknesses in on-line ordering and payment systems. We’ll talk about measures small businesses should consider to protect their reputation, cash flow, and profits during this transition.

Guest speakers from Trend Micro will be myself and Mitchel Chang.

How to Avoid COVID-19 Scams – May 5, 2020: Bad guys are trying to make money off Covid-19 worries. In this session, Lesley Fair, a Senior Attorney with the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission talks about different kinds of scams and what to do about them, hopefully before anyone gets conned, and what steps you can take if you think you might have gotten stung. Ths session will be repeated on May 26.

Guest speakers from Trend Micro will be myself and Jon Clay.

What Are Phishing, Vishing and Smishing? How Can I Protect My Small Business From These Threats? – May 12, 2020: This session will discuss attacks that can arrive through email, messages, and video chats. Small businesses are targets as well as big firms and the public at large – the bad guys are going anywhere they can to make a (dishonest) buck. You’ll help your employees and customers protect themselves with some good advice, practices, and tools.

Mitchel Chang will be a guest panelist.

How to Avoid COVID-19 Scams – May 26, 2020: A second session of the May 5 discussion. This time Jon Clay and Myla Pilao will be guest speakers from Trend Micro.

Telework Cybersecurity Best Practices – June 9, 2020: A second session of the April 7 event. Greg and Ed will give a repeat performance attendees.

Each session starts at 2:00 PM Eastern time. NCSA will record each session, but you should register to listen in and ask questions live. While the information is tuned to meet the needs of small businesses, individuals at larger organizations, and the general public, will find good ideas and helpful hints an tips to stay safe and cope with this challenging time. We hope to see you soon.

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

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Principles of a Cloud Migration – From Step One to Done

By Jason Dablow
cloud

Boiling the ocean with the subject, sous-vide deliciousness with the content.

Cloud Migrations are happening every day.  Analysts predict over 75% of mid-large enterprises will migrate a workload to the cloud by 2021 – but how can you make sure your workload is successful? There are not just factors with IT teams, operations, and security, but also with business leaders, finance, and many other organizations of your business. In this multi-part series, I’ll explore best practices, forward thinking, and use cases around creating a successful cloud migration from multiple perspectives.  Whether you’re a builder in the cloud or an executive overseeing the transformation, you’ll learn from my firsthand experience and knowledge on how to bring value into your cloud migration project.

Here are just a few advantages of a cloud migration:

  • Technology benefits like scalability, high availability, simplified infrastructure maintenance, and an environment compliant with many industry certifications
  • The ability to switch from a CapEx to an OpEx model
  • Leaving the cost of a data center behind

While there can certainly be several perils associated with your move, with careful planning and a company focus, you can make your first step into cloud a successful one.  And the focus of a company is an important step to understand. The business needs to adopt the same agility that the cloud provides by continuing to learn, grow, and adapt to this new environment. The Phoenix Project and the Unicorn Project are excellent examples that show the need and the steps for a successful business transformation.

To start us off, let’s take a look at some security concepts that will help you secure your journey into this new world. My webinar on Principles to Make Your Cloud Migration Journey Secure is a great place to start: https://resources.trendmicro.com/Cloud-One-Webinar-Series-Secure-Cloud-Migration.html

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Cloud Transformation Is The Biggest Opportunity To Fix Security

By Greg Young (Vice President for Cybersecurity)

This overview builds on the recent report from Trend Micro Research on cloud-specific security gaps, which can be found here.

Don’t be cloud-weary. Hear us out.

Recently, a major tipping point was reached in the IT world when more than half of new IT spending was on cloud over non- cloud. So rather than being the exception, cloud-based operations have become the rule.

However, too many security solutions and vendors still treat the cloud like an exception – or at least not as a primary use case. The approach remains “and cloud” rather than “cloud and.”

Attackers have made this transition. Criminals know that business security is generally behind the curve with its approach to the cloud and take advantage of the lack of security experience surrounding new cloud environments. This leads to ransomware, cryptocurrency mining and data exfiltration attacks targeting cloud environments, to name a few.

Why Cloud?

There are many reasons why companies transition to the cloud. Lower costs, improved efficiencies and faster time to market are some of the primary benefits touted by cloud providers.

These benefits come with common misconceptions. While efficiency and time to market can be greatly improved by transitioning to the cloud, this is not done overnight. It can take years to move complete data centers and operational applications to the cloud. The benefits won’t be fully realized till the majority of functional data has been transitioned.

Misconfiguration at the User Level is the Biggest Security Risk in the Cloud

Cloud providers have built in security measures that leave many system administrators, IT directors and CTOs feeling content with the security of their data. We’ve heard it many times – “My cloud provider takes care of security, why would I need to do anything additional?”

This way of thinking ignores the shared responsibility model for security in the cloud. While cloud providers secure the platform as a whole, companies are responsible for the security of their data hosted in those platforms.

Misunderstanding the shared responsibility model leads to the No. 1 security risk associated with the cloud: Misconfiguration.

You may be thinking, “But what about ransomware and cryptomining and exploits?” Other attack types are primarily possible when one of the 3 misconfigurations below are present.

You can forget about all the worst-case, overly complex attacks: Misconfigurations are the greatest risk and should be the No. 1 concern. These misconfigurations are in 3 categories:

  1. Misconfiguration of the native cloud environment
  2. Not securing equally across multi-cloud environments (i.e. different brands of cloud service providers)
  3. Not securing equally to your on-premises (non-cloud) data centers

How Big is The Misconfiguration Problem?

Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity identifies an average of 230 million misconfigurations per day.

To further understand the state of cloud misconfigurations, Trend Micro Research recently investigated cloud-specific cyber attacks. The report found a large number of websites partially hosted in world-writable cloud-based storage systems. Despite these environments being secure by default, settings can be manually changed to allow more access than actually needed.

These misconfigurations are typically put in place without knowing the potential consequences. But once in place, it is simple to scan the internet to find this type of misconfiguration, and criminals are exploiting them for profit.

Why Do Misconfigurations Happen?

The risk of misconfigurations may seem obvious in theory, but in practice, overloaded IT teams are often simply trying to streamline workflows to make internal processes easier. So, settings are changed to give read and/or write access to anyone in the organization with the necessary credentials. What is not realized is that this level of exposure can be found and exploited by criminals.

We expect this trend will increase in 2020, as more cloud-based services and applications gain popularity with companies using a DevOps workflow. Teams are likely to misconfigure more cloud-based applications, unintentionally exposing corporate data to the internet – and to criminals.

Our prediction is that through 2025, more than 75% of successful attacks on cloud environments will be caused by missing or misconfigured security by cloud customers rather than cloud providers.

How to Protect Against Misconfiguration

Nearly all data breaches involving cloud services have been caused by misconfigurations. This is easily preventable with some basic cyber hygiene and regular monitoring of your configurations.

Your data and applications in the cloud are only as secure as you make them. There are enough tools available today to make your cloud environment – and the majority of your IT spend – at least as secure as your non-cloud legacy systems.

You can secure your cloud data and applications today, especially knowing that attackers are already cloud-aware and delivering vulnerabilities as a service. Here are a few best practices for securing your cloud environment:

  • Employ the principle of least privilege: Access is only given to users who need it, rather than leaving permissions open to anyone.
  • Understand your part of the Shared Responsibility Model: While cloud service providers have built in security, the companies using their services are responsible for securing their data.
  • Monitor your cloud infrastructure for misconfigured and exposed systems: Tools are available to identify misconfigurations and exposures in your cloud environments.
  • Educate your DevOps teams about security: Security should be built in to the DevOps process.

To read the complete Trend Micro Research report, please visit: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/virtualization-and-cloud/exploring-common-threats-to-cloud-security.

For additional information on Trend Micro’s approach to cloud security, click here: https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/business/products/hybrid-cloud.html.

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

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This Week in Security News: Exploring Common Threats to Cloud Security and Zoom Removes Meeting IDs from App Title Bar to Improve Privacy

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about why Zoom has released an update for its Linux, Mac, and Windows apps that removes the meeting ID from the app’s title bar. Also, read about Trend Micro’s latest research on cloud-specific security, with examples of threats and risks that organizations could face when migrating to the cloud or using cloud services.

Read on:

Trend Micro Study Shows Cloud Misconfiguration as Major Threat

This week, Trend Micro released new research findings concerning cloud security, a major area of concern for enterprises of all sizes. The research confirms the role of both human errors and complex deployments in creating cloud-based cyber threats; above all, Trend Micro notes the dangers of cloud misconfiguration to cloud environments.  

NCSA Small Business Webinar Series

The National Cyber Security Alliance is hosting a series of webinars for small business owners, and Trend Micro is proud to support this effort with guest speakers sharing threat intelligence and security expertise. The topics will help small companies deal with the challenges of COVID-19, including sessions on telework, digital spring cleaning, e-commerce security, how to avoid COVID-19 scams and more.

Cisco ‘Critical Update’ Phishing Attack Steals Webex Credentials

An ongoing phishing campaign is reeling in victims with a recycled Cisco security advisory that warns of a critical vulnerability. The campaign urges victims to “update,” only to steal their credentials for Cisco’s Webex web conferencing platform instead. The campaign is looking to leverage the wave of remote workers who have come to rely on online conferencing tools like Webex and other platforms.

Principles of a Cloud Migration – From Step One to Done

Cloud migrations are happening every day and analysts predict over 75% of mid-size to large enterprises will migrate a workload to the cloud by 2021 – but how can you make sure your workload is successful? In this multi-part blog series, Trend Micro explores best practices, forward thinking, and use cases around creating a successful cloud migration from multiple perspectives.  

Zoomed In: A Look into a Coinminer Bundled with Zoom Installer

Trend Micro recently found a Coinminer bundled with the legitimate installer of video conferencing app Zoom, luring users who want to install the software but end up downloading a malicious file. The compromised files are assumed to come from fraudulent websites. Trend Micro has been working with Zoom to ensure that they are able to communicate this to their users appropriately.

Investigation into a Nefilim Attack Shows Signs of Lateral Movement, Possible Data Exfiltration

Trend Micro’s Managed XDR (MxDR) and Incident Response (IR) teams recently investigated an incident involving a company that was hit by the Nefilim ransomware, which was initially discovered in March 2020. What makes Nefilim especially devious is that the threat actors behind the attack threaten to release the victim’s stolen data on an online leak site.

Zoom Removes Meeting IDs from App Title Bar to Improve Privacy

Video conferencing service Zoom has released an update for its Linux, Mac, and Windows apps that removes the meeting ID from the app’s title bar. The update comes after the company’s users have often leaked their meeting IDs, and even meeting passwords, when sharing screenshots of their meetings on social media.

Analysis: Suspicious “Very Hidden” Formula on Excel 4.0 Macro Sheet

A malicious Microsoft Excel 4.0 Macro sheet with a suspicious formula that is set as “Very Hidden” was submitted by a customer and further analyzed by Trend Micro researchers. The sheet is not readily accessible via the Microsoft Excel User Interface (UI) due to a feature documented in the Microsoft website that allows users to hide sheets. The compromised files were commonly used as an attachment in spam.

Actively Exploited MS Exchange Flaw Present on 80% of Exposed Servers

Attackers looking to exploit CVE-2020-0688, a critical Microsoft Exchange flaw patched by Microsoft in February 2020, don’t have to look hard to find a server they can attack: according to an internet-wide scan performed by Rapid7 researchers, there are at least 315,000 and possibly as many as 350,000 vulnerable on-premise Exchange servers (out of 433,464 total) out there.

Misconfigured Docker Daemon API Ports Attacked for Kinsing Malware Campaign

A campaign that targets misconfigured Docker Daemon API ports through Kinsing malware was reported by security researchers from Aqua Security. The campaign exploited the ports to run an Ubuntu container. According to the researchers, Kinsing malware’s strings revealed that it is a Golang-based Linux agent.

Threat Actors Deliver Courier-Themed Spam Campaign with Attached ACE Files

Trend Micro researchers detected a new courier service-themed malicious spam campaign that uses ACE files as attachments. The samples were gathered from Trend Micro’s honeypot. The email poses as a shipment arrival notification with a fake receipt attached. It then convinces receivers to download the attachment by asking them to check if the address on the receipt is correct.blo

Exploring Common Threats to Cloud Security

Trend Micro’s recent cloud research provides examples of threats and risks organizations could face when migrating to the cloud or using cloud services. No matter the cloud service or platform, the common theme is that misconfiguration continues to be one of the major pitfalls of cloud security, affecting both companies who subscribe to cloud services and users of software that are hosted on the cloud.

PowerPoint ‘Weakness’ Opens Door to Malicious Mouse-Over Attack

A researcher is sounding the alarm over what he believes could be a novel attack vector which allows a hacker to manipulate a PowerPoint file to download and begin the installation of malware, simply by hovering over a hypertext link. The technique does require a victim to accept one pop-up dialogue box to run or install a program. For those reasons, Microsoft does not consider this a vulnerability.

Cloud Transformation Is the Biggest Opportunity to Fix Security

Lower costs, improved efficiencies and faster time to market are some of the primary benefits of transitioning to the cloud. However, it’s not done overnight. It can take years to move complete data centers and operational applications to the cloud and the benefits won’t be fully realized until most functional data have been transitioned.

Who is World Wired Labs and Why Are They Selling an Android Trojan?

A company advertising a remote access tool frequently used by criminals and nation-state hackers may be serving as a front for a Chinese hacking group, according to research published by BlackBerry Cylance. In a report on remote access trojans (RAT), researchers detail an Android malware variant, which they call PWNDROID4, that can be used to monitor targets’ phone calls, record audio, send and receive text messages, and track victims’ GPS location.

Is your organization looking to migrate to the cloud? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

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What do serverless compute platforms mean for security?

By Trend Micro

By Kyle Klassen Product Manager – Cloud Native Application Security at Trend Micro

Containers provide many great benefits to organizations – they’re lightweight, flexible, add consistency across different environments and scale easily.

One of the characteristics of containers is that they run in dedicated namespaces with isolated resource requirements. General purpose OS’s deployed to run containers might be viewed as overkill since many of their features and interfaces aren’t needed.

A key tenant in the cybersecurity doctrine is to harden platforms by exposing only the fewest number of interfaces and applying the tightest configurations required to run only the required operations.

Developers deploying containers to restricted platforms or “serverless” containers to the likes of AWS Fargate for example, should think about security differently – by looking upward, looking left and also looking all-around your cloud domain for opportunities to properly security your cloud native applications. Oh, and don’t forget to look outside. Let me explain…

Looking Upward

As infrastructure, OS, container orchestration and runtimes become the domain of the cloud provider, the user’s primary responsibility becomes securing the containers and applications themselves. This is where Trend Micro Cloud One™, a security services platform for cloud builders, can help Dev and Ops teams better implement build pipeline and runtime security requirements.  Cloud One – Application Security embeds a security library within the application itself to provide defense against web application attacks and to detect malicious activity.

One of the greatest benefits of this technology is that once an application is secured in this manner, it can be deployed anywhere and the protection comes along for the ride. Users can be confident their applications are secure whether deployed in a container on traditional hosts, into EKS on AWS Bottlerocket, serverless on AWS Fargate, or even as an AWS Lambda function!

Looking Left

It’s great that cloud providers are taking security seriously and providing increasingly secure environments within which to deploy your containers. But you need to make sure your containers themselves are not introducing security risks. This can be accomplished with container image scanning to identify security issues before these images ever make it to the production environment.

Enter Deep Security Smart Check – Container Image Scanning part of the Cloud One offering. Scans must be able to detect more than just vulnerabilities. Developer reliance on code re-use, public images, and 3rd party contributions mean that malware injection into private images is a real concern. Sensitive objects like secrets, keys and certificates must be found and removed and assurance against regulatory requirements like PCI, HIPAA or NIST should be a requirement before a container image is allowed to run.

Looking All-Around

Imagine taking the effort to ensure your applications, containers and functions are built securely, comply with strict security regulations and are deployed into container optimized cloud environments only to find out that you’ve still become a victim of an attack! How could this be? Well, one common oversight is recognizing the importance of disciplined configuration and management of the cloud resources themselves – you can’t assume they’re secure just because they’re working.

But, making sure your cloud services are secure can be a daunting task – likely comprised of dozens of cloud services, each with as many configuration options – these environments are complex. Cloud One – Conformity is your cloud security companion and gives you assurance that any hidden security issues with your cloud configurations are detected and prioritized. Disabled security options, weak keys, open permissions, encryption options, high-risk exposures and many, many more best practice security rules make it easy to conform to security best practices and get the most from your cloud provider services.

Look Outside

All done? Not quite. You also need to think about how the business workflows of your cloud applications ingest files (or malware?).  Cloud storage like S3 Buckets are often used to accept files from external customers and partners.  Blindly accepting uploads and pulling them into your workflows is an open door for attack.

Cloud One – File Storage Security incorporates Trend Micro’s best-in-class malware detection technology to identify and remove files infected with malware. As a cloud native application itself, the service deploys easily with deployment templates and runs as a ‘set and forget’ service – automatically scanning new files of any type, any size and automatically removing malware so you can be confident that all of your downstream workflows are protected.

It’s still about Shared Responsibility

Cloud providers will continue to offer security features for deploying cloud native applications – and you should embrace all of this capability.  However, you can’t assume your cloud environment is optimally secure without validating your configurations. And once you have a secure environment, you need to secure all of the components within your control – your functions, applications, containers and workflows. With this practical approach, Trend Micro Cloud One™ perfectly complements your cloud services with Network Security, Workload Security, Application Security, Container Security, File Storage Security and Conformity for cloud posture management, so you can be confident that you’ve got security covered no matter which way you look.

To learn more visit Trendmicro.com/CloudOne and join our webinar on cloud native application threats https://resources.trendmicro.com/Cloud-One-Webinar-Series-Cloud-Native-Application-Threats.html

 

 

 

 

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

By Raphael Bottino, Solutions Architect

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it’s not that simple…

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

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

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

Shifting Left

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

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

The Cloud Conformity Template Scanner Extension

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

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

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

But… What about my bucket template?

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

   
A Well-Architected bucket template

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

References

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

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

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

[4] https://www.cloudconformity.com/

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

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Letter from the CEO: A time of kindness and compassion

By Trend Micro

Dear Customers,

Together, we are facing a truly unprecedented situation and we have all had to adapt to the new reality. The global coronavirus pandemic is affecting our families, our communities, our organizations – indeed, it affects our perspective and way of life. As you certainly have too, at Trend Micro we have been busy over the past few weeks ensuring our employees are safe while also delivering uninterrupted service and protection for our customers. We have made it a priority to help organizations around the globe strengthen their security and ensure business continuity while so many of their employees work remotely.

As a global company with headquarters in Japan, we have been exposed to COVID-19 from the very early days when it first erupted in Asia. We have seen the massive impact this novel coronavirus has had on all of us: from social distancing, to families being separated, illness and even death. Our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone who has been impacted by the virus, directly or indirectly.

The safety of our employees is our first priority and for the last few weeks the vast majority of our employees are all working from home – all 7,000 across 60 countries. It is heartwarming to see the different activities teams have launched to stay connected while being apart: virtual happy hours or morning coffee meetings, online sports classes to stay fit together, movie watching nights and even remote karaoke. I sometimes feel that we are more connected now than ever before.

In the midst of these difficult times, we have also seen the amazing power of positivity and kindness around the world. I am very touched and proud of how our employees, our Trenders, are stepping up even more than usual to engage in acts of generosity and community support. A few examples include:

  • Employee-initiated neighborhood help services such as shopping for the elderly
  • Tools developed to help our medical heroes, for example a 3D printed clip that allows medical staff to wear face masks more comfortably
  • New content for students and parents who are now working from home, developed by our Internet Safety for Kids & Families team
  • Over 60,000 masks donated to our communities
  • Give & Match activities supporting underserved neighborhoods in India and the Philippines, with the company matching each employee donation.

We have also seen Trenders donating some of their accrued paid vacation days to colleagues who might need additional time off to take care of family. There have been thousands of such acts of kindness – likely many more that I’m not even aware of. Knowing the passion of our employees, I know that there are new activities being organized and happening at this exact moment.

In this same spirit, it is very important to me – as well as the entire executive team – that we do the right thing for our employees and our customers during these difficult times, rather than focusing solely on what’s best for our bottom line. We intend to retain all of our employees, and are working to ensure that our teams that work on commission will continue to have a steady income, no matter how business goes. We know that not every company is as fortunate as we are, and many family members of our employees are out of jobs, so our executives have also committed to reducing their salaries if necessary, to ensure that every employee will receive company bonuses for the first half of 2020. If we protect our Trend Micro family, our Trend Micro family can protect and care for their communities.

I understand these times are difficult and while we are celebrating acts of kindness and positivity, many of our friends and families are struggling with health issues and other concerns. Our hearts go out to all those who are affected, to our healthcare workers and all essential employees who help keep our lives going. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Please stay safe – and stay at home!

Kind regards,

Eva Chen

 

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

By Trend Micro

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

We’re now done with familiarizing ourselves with the features of Trend Micro Home Network Security (HNS) It’s now time for you to get a bit more adept at regular monitoring and maintenance, to ensure you’re getting the best protection HNS can provide your connected home.

Keeping Tabs on Your Home Network

Once you’re tracking the various internet-capable devices in your home within HNS, as with any security-related device it’s essential to monitor the activities captured by it. In the same way that we need to periodically review the videos taken by our security cameras, to check for any unusual events in or around the home that need our attention; so too, do you need to keep abreast of the goings on in your home network, particularly those of an unusual or suspect nature, as revealed by HNS. This can easily be done in two ways: via Voice Control and Reports.

Voice Control. When you want just a quick overview of the status of your network, you can use HNS’s Voice Control. Voice Control is available as a skill for both Amazon Alexa and Google Home.

Once the skill has been enabled, you can ask Alexa or Google Assistant to control your Home Network Security (HNS) using the following voice commands:

  • Start a Check Devices Scan – To check your network and devices, say: “Alexa (or Ok, Google), tell Trend Micro to scan my network.”
  • Get Your Security Status – To get a network security status update, say: “Alexa (Ok, Google), ask Trend Micro if my network is ok.”
  • Get An Online Activity Summary – To get a summary of a profile’s online activity, say: “Alexa (Ok, Google), ask Trend Micro what Tom (or any member of your household) did today.”
  • Pause the Internet for a Profile – To disconnect the devices assigned to a profile from the internet, say: “Alexa (Ok, Google), ask Trend Micro to pause the Internet for Tom (or any member of your household).”
  • Pause YouTube for a Profile – To prevent the devices assigned to a profile from accessing YouTube, say: “Alexa (Ok, Google), ask Trend Micro to turn off YouTube for Tom (or any member of your household).”
  • Use the Dashboard – Lastly, though not a voice command, checking out the Dashboard of the HNS app will give you a brief summary of the state of security of your home network, and will let you know if anything triggered any Parental Control rules that you’ve set.

Reports. On the other hand, if you have more time to spare, you can peruse the Reports for your devices, user profiles, and network usage.

  • Devices. On your HNS app, Tap Menu > Devices and select a device. Then, tap Report and choose the report you want to view in order to see more details.
  • User Profiles. From your HNS app, Tap Menu > Family and select a user profile. Then, tap Report and choose an event card from the list to see more details.
  • Network Usage. Besides knowing the status of your devices and users, it’s also necessary to know your network usage, especially when your home network relies on a metered connection. Having an idea which devices are hogs on the network will allow you to make proper adjustments, either to rules you implement for your youngsters and other members of your household; or to let you know that maybe you need to upgrade your internet plan to address the more intensive internet needs of your family. Network usage can be viewed by scrolling down to the bottom of the Dashboard and tapping the Network Usage graph; or you can just simply tap Menu > Network. Both will display more detailed network usage information.

Responding to Network Events

Now that you’re more acquainted with your home network through HNS, it’s vital that you know what to do when, for instance, you received a Smart Alert notification indicating an unusually high network activity detected on one of your connected devices.

A Range of Network Events. In brief, you’ll need to review the recent activities and perform the required actions to eliminate risks such as the following:

  • Check if there are any important security-related issues you need to resolve by checking if the ball at the top of the Dashboard says “Action Required”. Tap the ball to find out what you need to do to make sure your network and device security are optimal.
  • Check detected network activities.
  • Check if the device where the unusually high network activity was detected.
  • Select the device where the unusual activity was detected to view the Summary Report for the past 7 days.
  • You will see the unusual network traffic details, including the time range of the traffic and the amount of data used.
  • Check if the top 3 activity destinations were done by you or your family member.
  • If you are aware of the activities and not concerned about these events, tap Report > Not Unusual.
  • If these unusually high traffic activities were not caused by you or your family member, you need to double-check that the Network and Security settings are still enabled, to keep your connected devices protected. Moreover, you should fix any vulnerabilities on your devices, usually resolved by a software or firmware update.

For more specific information regarding these types of incidents, you may refer to this Technical Support article.

Monitoring the Health of Your Home Network Security Station

The Home Network Security Station takes care of your home and your family’s security and safety. In return, you should know how to check if it’s in good working condition.

Physical Status. Check whether the physical components (LED, Reset button, Power, and Ethernet ports) of your Station are intact.

Power. Ensure that the Station is powered on. To check if the Station has power supply, just follow these simple steps:

  • Connect the adapter to the outlet and the Station.
  • Make sure power on the outlet is turned on.
  • Change outlets to ensure power is on.

Offline Notifications. When the HNS Station is offline the user will receive a notification about it. In addition, the HNS app will indicate the Station is offline. This situation can be attributed to loss of either the internet or LAN connections.

Internet Connection. Make sure you have stable internet connection. Checking your internet connection is easy:

  • Disconnect your Home Network Security Station from the router.
  • Check if internet line is connected to the router’s WAN port.
  • If there is no internet connection, do the following:
  • Reboot your router
  • Check the network status from your Internet Service Provider
  • Check your router settings

If you are able to connect to the internet, just reconnect your Home Network Security Station to the router.

LAN Connection. Check the connection between the router and the HNS Station.

  • Ensure that the Ethernet cable provided is used to connect the HNS Station to any available LAN port of your router.
  • Check if the two LED lights of the LAN port are turned on.
  • The port on the right should be blinking green, while the other port should be a steady green or yellow.
  • If the LED lights don’t light up as mentioned, move the Ethernet cable to another router LAN port. Once the LED lights become normal, your HNS Station should be connected to the network.

Updates. Make sure that you update the HNS App if you receive a notification that indicates, “Update Needed. Please click the button below to get the latest version.” This will guarantee that your HNS is up-to-date with app improvements.

Getting Help. Always remember, if you encounter any questions, issues or concerns that you’re unable to resolve, Help is just a click away.

Final Thoughts

Home networks are everywhere these days. However, the user knowledge required to secure and maintain our home networks spans from tech newbies to gurus and often seems to be a rather complicated or even confusing task.

To help you maintain and monitor your home network, Trend Micro offers a simple plug-and-protect home network device to protect your smart home and connected devices from being hacked, while keeping the internet safe for your kids on any device. But plug-and-protect doesn’t mean plug-and-forget. As with any security device, ongoing monitoring and maintenance is needed to provide the best protection your home network and family members need and deserve.

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

To read the rest of our series on HNS, go to

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

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

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

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5 reasons to move your endpoint security to the cloud now

By Chris Taylor

As the world has adopts work from home initiatives, we’ve seen many organizations accelerate their plans to move from on-premises endpoint security and Detection and Response (EDR/XDR) solutions to Software as a Service versions. And several customers who switched to the SaaS version last year, recently wrote us to tell how glad to have done so as they transitioned to working remote. Here are 5 reasons to consider moving to a cloud managed solution:

 

  1. No internal infrastructure management = less risk

If you haven’t found the time to update your endpoint security software and are one or two versions behind, you are putting your organization at risk of attack. Older versions do not have the same level of protection against ransomware and file-less attacks. Just as the threats are always evolving, the same is true for the technology built to protect against them.

With Apex One as a Service, you always have the latest version. There are no software patches to apply or Apex One servers to manage – we take care of it for you. If you are working remote, this is one less task to worry about and less servers in your environment which might need your attention.

  1. High availability, reliability

With redundant processes and continuous service monitoring, Apex One as a Services delivers the uptime you need with 99.9% availability. The operations team also proactively monitors for potential issues on your endpoints and with your prior approval, can fix minor issues with an endpoint agent before they need your attention.

  1. Faster Detection and Response (EDR/XDR)

By transferring endpoint telemetry to a cloud data lake, detection and response activities like investigations and sweeping can be processed much faster. For example, creating a root cause analysis diagram in cloud takes a fraction of the time since the data is readily available and can be quickly processed with the compute power of the cloud.

  1. Increased MITRE mapping

The unmatched power of cloud computing also enables analytics across a high volume of events and telemetry to identify a suspicious series of activities. This allows for innovative detection methods but also additional mapping of techniques and tactics to the MITRE framework.  Building the equivalent compute power in an on- premises architecture would be cost prohibitive.

  1. XDR – Combined Endpoint + Email Detection and Response

According to Verizon, 94% of malware incidents start with email.  When an endpoint incident occurs, chances are it came from an email message and you want to know what other users have messages with the same email or email attachment in their inbox? You can ask your email admin to run these searches for you which takes time and coordination. As Forrester recognized in the recently published report: The Forrester Wave™ Enterprise Detection and Response, Q1 2020:

“Trend Micro delivers XDR functionality that can be impactful today. Phishing may be the single most effective way for an adversary to deliver targeted payloads deep into an infrastructure. Trend Micro recognized this and made its first entrance into XDR by integrating Microsoft office 365 and Google G suite management capabilities into its EDR workflows.”

This XDR capability is available today by combining alerts, logs and activity data of Apex One as a Service and Trend Micro Cloud App Security. Endpoint data is linked with Office 365 or G Suite email information from Cloud App Security to quickly assess the email impact without having to use another tool or coordinate with other groups.

Moving endpoint protection and detection and response to the cloud, has enormous savings in customer time while increasing their protection and capabilities. If you are licensed with our Smart Protection Suites, you already have access to Apex One as a Service and our support team is ready to help you with your migration. If you are an older suite, talk to your Trend Micro sales rep about moving to a license which includes SaaS.

 

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Principles of a Cloud Migration – Security, The W5H

By Jason Dablow
cloud

Whosawhatsit?! –  WHO is responsible for this anyways?

For as long as cloud providers have been in business, we’ve been discussing the Shared Responsibility Model when it comes to customer operation teams. It defines the different aspects of control, and with that control, comes the need to secure, manage, and maintain.

While I often make an assumption that everyone is already familiar with this model, let’s highlight some of the requirements as well as go a bit deeper into your organization’s layout for responsibility.

During your cloud migration, you’ll no doubt come across a variety of cloud services that fits into each of these configurations. From running cloud instances (IaaS) to cloud storage (SaaS), there’s a need to apply operational oversight (including security) to each of these based on your level of control of the service.  For example, in a cloud instance, since you’re still responsible for the Operating System and Applications, you’ll still need a patch management process in place, whereas with file object storage in the cloud, only oversight of permissions and data management is required. I think Mark Nunnikhoven does a great job in going into greater detail of the model here: https://blog.trendmicro.com/the-shared-responsibility-model/.

shared responsibility model

I’d like to zero in on some of the other “WHO”s that should be involved in security of your cloud migration.

InfoSec – I think this is the obvious mention here. Responsible for all information security within an organization. Since your cloud migration is working with “information”, InfoSec needs to be involved with how they get access to monitoring the security and risk associated to an organization. 

Cloud Architect – Another no-brainer in my eyes but worth a mention; if you’re not building a secure framework with a look beyond a “lift-and-shift” initial migration, you’ll be doomed with archaic principles leftover from the old way of doing things. An agile platform built for automating every operation including security should be the focus to achieving success.

IT / Cloud Ops – This may be the same or different teams. As more and more resources move to the cloud, an IT team will have less responsibilities for the physical infrastructure since it’s now operated by a cloud provider. They will need to go through a “migration” themselves to learn new skills to operate and secure a hybrid environment. This adaptation of new skills needs to be lead by…

Leadership – Yes, leadership plays an important role in operations and security even if they aren’t part of the CIO / CISO / COO branch. While I’m going to cringe while I type it, business transformation is a necessary step as you move along your cloud migration journey. The acceleration that the cloud provides can not be stifled by legacy operation and security ideologies. Every piece of the business needs to be involved in accelerating the value you’re delivering your customer base by implementing the agile processes including automation into the operations and security of your cloud.

With all of your key players focused on a successful cloud migration, regardless of what stage you’re in, you’ll reach the ultimate stage: the reinvention of your business where operational and security automation drives the acceleration of value delivered to your customers.

This blog is part of a multi-part series dealing with the principles of a successful cloud migration.  For more information, start at the first post here: https://blog.trendmicro.com/principles-of-a-cloud-migration-from-step-one-to-done/

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

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

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

——

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

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

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

From these points, we learn the following lessons.

Software Doesn’t Wear Out

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

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

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

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

Computers Are Constrained

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

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

Computers Can Run Out of Resources

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

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

Add Capacity in Balance

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

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

Adding Staff Makes Things Worse

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

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

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

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

In Conclusion …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trend Micro Integrates with Amazon AppFlow

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

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

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

Audit automation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Developer Enablement

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

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

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

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

Security Remediation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Getting ATT&CKed By A Cozy Bear And Being Really Happy About It: What MITRE Evaluations Are, and How To Read Them

By Greg Young (Vice President for Cybersecurity)

Full disclosure: I am a security product testing nerd*.

 

I’ve been following the MITRE ATT&CK Framework for a while, and this week the results were released of the most recent evaluation using APT29 otherwise known as COZY BEAR.

First, here’s a snapshot of the Trend eval results as I understand them (rounded down):

91.79% on overall detection.  That’s in the top 2 of 21.

91.04% without config changes.  The test allows for config changes after the start – that wasn’t required to achieve the high overall results.

107 Telemetry.  That’s very high.  Capturing events is good.  Not capturing them is not-good.

28 Alerts.  That’s in the middle, where it should be.  Not too noisy, not too quiet.  Telemetry I feel is critical whereas alerting is configurable, but only on detections and telemetry.

 

So our Apex One product ran into a mean and ruthless bear and came away healthy.  But that summary is a simplification and doesn’t capture all the nuance to the testing.  Below are my takeaways for you of what the MITRE ATT&CK Framework is, and how to go about interpreting the results.

 

Takeaway #1 – ATT&CK is Scenario Based

The MITRE ATT&CK Framework is intriguing to me as it mixes real world attack methods by specific adversaries with a model for detection for use by SOCs and product makers.  The ATT&CK Framework Evaluations do this but in a lab environment to assess how security products would likely handle an attack by that adversary and their usual methods.  There had always been a clear divide between pen testing and lab testing and ATT&CK was kind of mixing both.  COZY BEAR is super interesting because those attacks were widely known for being quite sophisticated and being state-sponsored, and targeted the White House and US Democratic Party.  COZY BEAR and its family of derivatives use backdoors, droppers, obfuscation, and careful exfiltration.

 

Takeaway #2 – Look At All The Threat Group Evals For The Best Picture

I see the tradeoffs as ATT&CK evals are only looking at that one scenario, but that scenario is very reality based and with enough evals across enough scenarios a narrative is there to better understand a product.  Trend did great on the most recently released APT/29/COZY BEAR evaluation, but my point is that a product is only as good as all the evaluations. I always advised Magic Quadrant or NSS Value Map readers to look at older versions in order to paint a picture over time of what trajectory a product had.

 

Takeaway #3 – It’s Detection Focused (Only)

The APT29 test like most Att&ck evals is testing detection, not prevention nor other parts of products (e.g. support).  The downside is that a product’s ability to block the attacks isn’t evaluated, at least not yet.  In fact blocking functions have to be disabled for parts of the test to be done.  I get that – you can’t test the upstairs alarm with the attack dog roaming the downstairs.  Starting with poor detection never ends well, so the test methodology seems to be focused on ”if you can detect it you can block it”.  Some pen tests are criticized that a specific scenario isn’t realistic because A would stop it before B could ever occur.  IPS signature writers everywhere should nod in agreement on that one. I support MITRE on how they constructed the methodology because there has to be limitations and scope on every lab test, but readers too need to understand those limitations and scopes.  I believe that the next round of tests will include protection (blocking) as well, so that is cool.

 

Takeaway #4 – Choose Your Own Weather Forecast

Att&ck is no magazine style review.  There is no final grade or comparison of products.  To fully embrace Att&ck imagine being provided dozens of very sound yet complex meteorological measurements and being left to decide on what the weather will be. Or have vendors carpet bomb you with press releases of their interpretations.  I’ve been deep into the numbers of the latest eval scores and when looking at some of the blogs and press releases out there they almost had me convinced they did well even when I read the data at hand showing they didn’t.  I guess a less jaded view is that the results can be interpreted in many ways, some of them quite creative.  It brings to mind the great quote from the Lockpicking Lawyer review “the threat model does not include an attacker with a screwdriver”.

 

Josh Zelonis at Forrester provides a great example of the level of work required to parse the test outcomes, and he provides extended analysis on Github here that is easier on the eyes than the above.  Even that great work product requires the context of what the categories mean.  I understand that MITRE is taking the stance of “we do the tests, you interpret the data” in order to pick fewer fights and accommodate different use cases and SOC workflows, but that is a lot to put on buyers. I repeat: there’s a lot of nuance in the terms and test report categories.

 

If, in the absence of Josh’s work, if I have to pick one metric Detection Rate is likely the best one.  Note that Detection rate isn’t 100% for any product in the APT29 test, because of the meaning of that metric.  The best secondary metrics I like are Techniques and Telemetry.  Tactics sounds like a good thing, but in the framework it is lesser than Techniques, as Tactics are generalized bad things (“Something moving outside!”) and Techniques are more specific detections (“Healthy adult male Lion seen outside door”), so a higher score in Techniques combined with a low score in Tactics is a good thing.  Telemetry scoring is, to me, best right in the middle.  Not too many alerts (noisy/fatiguing) and not too few (“about that lion I saw 5 minutes ago”).

 

Here’s an example of the interpretations that are valuable to me.  Looking at the Trend Micro eval source page here I get info on detections in the steps, or how many of the 134 total steps in the test were detected.  I’ll start by excluding any human involvement and exclude the MSSP detections and look at unassisted only.  But the numbers are spread across all 20 test steps, so I’ll use Josh’s spreadsheet shows 115 of 134 steps visible, or 85.82%.  I do some averaging on the visibility scores across all the products evaluated and that is 66.63%, which is almost 30% less.  Besides the lesson that the data needs gathering and interpretation, it highlights that no product spotted 100% across all steps and the spread was wide. I’ll now look at the impact of human involvement add in the MSSP detections and the Trend number goes to 91%.  Much clinking of glasses heard from the endpoint dev team.  But if I’m not using an MSSP service that… you see my point about context/use-case/workflow.  There’s effectively some double counting (i.e. a penalty, so that when removing MSSP it inordinately drops the detection ) of the MSSP factor when removing it in the analyses, but I’ll leave that to a future post.  There’s no shortage of fodder for security testing nerds.

 

Takeaway #5 – Data Is Always Good

Security test nerdery aside, this eval is a great thing and the data from it is very valuable.  Having this kind of evaluation makes security products and the uses we put them to better.  So dig into ATT&CK and read it considering not just product evaluations but how your organization’s framework for detecting and processing attacks maps to the various threat campaigns. We’ll no doubt have more posts on APT29 and upcoming evals.

 

*I was a Common Criteria tester in a place that also ran a FIPS 140-2 lab.  Did you know that at Level 4 of FIPS a freezer is used as an exploit attempt? I even dipped my toe into the arcane area of Formal Methods using the GYPSY methodology and ran from it screaming “X just equals X!  We don’t need to prove that!”. The deepest testing rathole I can recall was doing a portability test of the Orange Book B1 rating for MVS RACF when using logical partitions. I’m never getting those months of my life back. I’ve been pretty active in interacting with most security testing labs like NSS and ICSA and their schemes (that’s not a pejorative, but testing nerds like to use British usages to sound more learned) for decades because I thought it was important to understand the scope and limits of testing before accepting it in any product buying decisions. If you want to make Common Criteria nerds laugh point out something bad that has happened and just say “that’s not bad, it was just mistakenly put in scope”, and that will then upset the FIPS testers because a crypto boundary is a very real thing and not something real testers joke about.  And yes, Common Criteria is the MySpace of tests.

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

By Jason Dablow
cloud

Teaching you to be a Natural Born Pillar!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This blog is part of a multi-part series dealing with the principles of a successful cloud migration.  For more information, start at the first post here: https://blog.trendmicro.com/principles-of-a-cloud-migration-from-step-one-to-done/

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Trend Micro’s Top Ten MITRE Evaluation Considerations

By Trend Micro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

4. Managed Service detections are not exclusive

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

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

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

6. We need to look through more than the Windows

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

7. The evaluation shows where our product is going

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

8. This evaluation is helping us make our product better

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

9. MITRE is more than the evaluation

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

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

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

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Principles of a Cloud Migration – Security W5H – The When

By Jason Dablow
cloud

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

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

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

NIST Planning Report 02-3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This Week in Security News: Shade Ransomware Shuts Down, Releases Decryption Keys and WebMonitor RAT Bundled with Zoom Installer

By Jon Clay (Global Threat Communications)
week in security

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, read about how the operators of the Shade (Troldesh) ransomware have shut down and released more than 750,000 decryption keys. Also, learn about an attack using Zoom installers to spread a WebMonitor RAT malware.

Read on:

The Industry 4.0 Lab Never Ignores Brownfields – What POLIMI and Trend Micro Aim to Prove

It takes time for new technologies to penetrate the market and even the most innovative technology must be used safely and with confidence. Industry 4.0 technology is no exception. Engineers and researchers, including those at Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI) and Trend Micro, are currently investigating how to map ICT technology principles onto OT environments, including factory environments.

Shade (Troldesh) Ransomware Shuts Down and Releases Decryption Keys

The operators of the Shade (Troldesh) ransomware have shut down and, as a sign of goodwill, have released more than 750,000 decryption keys that past victims can now use to recover their files. Security researchers from Kaspersky Lab have confirmed the validity of the leaked keys and are now working on creating a free decryption tool.

Trend Micro’s Top Ten MITRE Evaluation Considerations

The MITRE ATT&CK framework, and the evaluations, have gone a long way in helping advance the security industry, and the individual security products serving the market. The insight garnered from these evaluations is incredibly useful but can be hard to understand. In this blog, read Trend Micro’s top 10 key takeaways for its evaluation results.  

New Android Malware Steals Banking Passwords, Private Data and Keystrokes

A new type of mobile banking malware has been discovered abusing Android’s accessibility features to exfiltrate sensitive data from financial applications, read user SMS messages, and hijack SMS-based two-factor authentication codes. Dubbed “EventBot” by Cybereason researchers, the malware can target over 200 different financial apps, including banking, money transfer services, and crypto-currency wallets. 

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

Last week in Trend Micro’s cloud migration blog series, we explained the “WHO” of securing a cloud migration, detailing each of the roles involved with implementing a successful security practice during the migration. This week, Trend Micro touches on the “WHAT” of security: the key principles required before your first workload moves.  

Critical WordPress e-Learning Plugin Bugs Open Door to Cheating

Researchers have disclosed critical-severity flaws in three popular WordPress plugins used widely by colleges and universities: LearnPress, LearnDash and LifterLMS. The flaws, now patched, could allow students to steal personal information, change their grades, cheat on tests and more. 

WebMonitor RAT Bundled with Zoom Installer

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the usefulness of communication apps for work-from-home setups. However, as expected, cybercriminals look to exploit popular trends and user behavior. Trend Micro has witnessed threats against several messaging apps, including Zoom. In April, Trend Micro spotted an attack using Zoom installers to spread a cryptocurrency miner. Trend Micro recently encountered a similar attack that drops a different malware: RevCode WebMonitor RAT. 

Group Behind TrickBot Spreads Fileless BazarBackdoor

A new campaign is spreading a new malware named “BazarBackdoor,” a fileless backdoor created by the same threat actors behind TrickBot, according to BleepingComputer. The conclusion is drawn due to similarities in code, crypters, and infrastructure between the two malware variants. The social engineering attacks used to spread the backdoor use topics such as customer complaints, COVID-19-themed payroll reports, and employee termination lists for the emails they send out. 

Critical Adobe Illustrator, Bridge and Magento Flaws Patched

Adobe is warning of critical flaws in Adobe Bridge, Adobe Illustrator and the Magento e-commerce platform. If exploited, the most severe vulnerabilities could enable remote code execution on affected systems. Francis Provencher, Mat Powell, and an anonymous reporter were credited for discovering the flaws, all working with Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative.

Guidance on Kubernetes Threat Modeling

Kubernetes is one of the most used container orchestration systems in cloud environments. As such, like any widely used application, it is an attractive target for cybercriminals and other threat actors. In this blog, Trend Micro shares three general areas that cloud administrators need to secure their deployments against, as they can introduce threats or risks to their Kubernetes-driven containerization strategies.

Loki Info Stealer Propagates Through LZH Files

Trend Micro previously encountered a spam sample that propagates the info stealer Loki through Windows Cabinet (CAB) files. Recently, Trend Micro also acquired another sample that delivers the same malware, but through LZH compressed archive files. Trend Micro detects the attachment and the dropper as TrojanSpy.Win32.LOKI.TIOIBYTU.

Security 101: How Fileless Attacks Work and Persist in Systems

As security measures improve, modern adversaries continue to craft sophisticated techniques to evade detection. One of the most persistent evasion techniques involves fileless attacks, which don’t require malicious software to break into a system. Instead of relying on executables, these threats misuse tools that are already in the system to initiate attacks.

COVID-19 Lockdown Fuels Increase in RDP Attacks

The number of attacks abusing the remote desktop protocol (RDP) to compromise corporate environments has increased significantly over the past couple of months, according to Kaspersky. With employees worldwide forced to work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the volume of corporate traffic has increased significantly, just as the use of third-party services has increased to keep teams connected and efficient.

What measures are you taking to secure your migration to the cloud? Share your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter to continue the conversation: @JonLClay.

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Teaming up with INTERPOL to combat COVID-19 threats

By Trend Micro

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

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

The new normal

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

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

Getting the basics right

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

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

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

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

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Principles of a Cloud Migration – Security W5H – The WHERE

By Jason Dablow
cloud

“Wherever I go, there I am” -Security

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Securing Smart Manufacturing

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

“Alexa, turn on the TV.”

”Get it yourself.”

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

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

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

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

Figure 1: The cost of precision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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