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Cisco Warns of High-Severity Unpatched Flaw Affecting IP Phones Firmware

By Ravie Lakshmanan
Cisco has released a new security advisory warning of a high-severity flaw affecting IP Phone 7800 and 8800 Series firmware that could be potentially exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to cause remote code execution or a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. The networking equipment major said it's working on a patch to address the vulnerability, which is tracked as CVE-2022-20968 (CVSS score

Data Transparency and its Impact on Customer Trust

By Robert Waitman

How do organizations earn and build trust when it comes to the personal data that customers share with them? Customers certainly expect these organizations to comply with all privacy laws that are now in place in more than 130 countries. Customers also expect them not to sell personal data without consent and to try to avoid data breaches that could expose personal data. While these actions are necessary, organizations still need to do more when it comes to customer trust. According to our latest research, consumers’ top priority is, in fact, for organizations to be more transparent about how they use personal data.

The Cisco 2022 Consumer Privacy Survey, released today, explores what organizations can do to earn and build trust with customers, the actions individuals are taking to protect their data, the impact of privacy laws around the world, and some of the benefits and costs of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data localization requirements. The report, our fourth annual look at consumer privacy issues, draws on anonymous responses from 2600 adults in 12 countries.

Here are some highlights from the survey:

  1. Consumers chose ‘data transparency’ as the top thing organizations can do to build trust regarding how personal data is used and protected. At 39%, data transparency was selected almost twice as much as ‘refraining from selling personal information’ (21%) or ‘complying with all privacy laws’ (20%).
  2. More consumers are taking action to protect their personal data. Results showed that 37% have stopped using a company or provider over their data practices, with 24% having exercised their Data Subject Access Rights to inquire about the data companies have about them, and 14% having requested changes or deletions to that data.
  3. When it comes to applying and using AI, consumers are supportive, but very concerned with today’s practices. While 43% say AI can be useful in improving our lives and 54% are even willing to share their anonymized personal data to improve AI products, 60% are concerned about how businesses are using AI today. In fact, 65% say they have already lost trust in organizations due to their AI practices.
  4. Consumers continue to strongly support their nation’s privacy laws, as they want their government to take a leading role in protecting personal privacy. On average, 61% felt these laws are having a positive impact, whereas only 3% believe they are having a negative impact. Awareness of these laws continues to be a challenge as only 43% say they are aware of their country’s privacy laws.
  5. Consumers are evenly split on the value of data localization requirements that add cost to the products and services they buy, with 41% in favor and 41% against. Interestingly, in 9 of the 12 countries surveyed, more respondents were against data localization than in favor.

Check out the associated infographic that provides visual and easily consumable descriptions of the key data.

At Cisco, we believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. Privacy continues to be a high priority for consumers, and organizations need to do their part to protect personal data and build consumer confidence in how this data is being used. Some recommendations for organizations include:

  • Investing in transparency. Show your customers where they can find your company’s privacy policies and tell them in easy-to-understand ways exactly how you use their data (see, for example, Cisco’s in Privacy Data Sheets and Data Maps) as this is critical for earning and building their trust.
  • Helping to ensure your customers are aware of relevant privacy laws and their rights. Individuals who know about these protections are more likely to trust organizations with their personal data and have confidence that their data is protected.
  • Adopting measures to ensure responsible use of data. While misuse of personal data in AI can erode consumer trust, some positive steps to apply and use it responsibly include implementing an AI governance framework, providing transparency on how personal data is used in any AI application, and enabling customers to opt out of the specific application.
  • Evaluating the costs and legal alternatives, if any, to data localization requirements. These requirements may not be worth their cost to many consumers, and it is still unclear if they contribute to greater safety and privacy.

Privacy remains a critical element of trust. Consumers want more transparency and control of their personal data, especially as we continue to see innovations in technology. As we are now in the midst of Cybersecurity Awareness Month in the US and other countries around the world, it’s a great time to learn more and join in activities and discussions that advance cybersecurity.


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Duo Opens New Data Center in India

By Daisy Chittilapilly

Back in September last year, Ash Devata, VP and GM for Zero Trust and Duo at Cisco wrote about the expansion of our international footprint with the opening of data centers in Australia, Singapore, and Japan. Today, I am thrilled to add India to that list, exemplifying Duo’s commitment in a key market, which couldn’t have been better timed.

Local data centers help customers meet compliance and data localization requirements, which is becoming an increasingly important issue in India. As the National Law Review puts it ‘2021 was a blink-and-you-will-miss conveyor belt of activities’ regarding privacy and data protection law related legal developments, including the issuance of new data privacy standards that explores how organizations establish, implement, maintain and continually improve their data privacy management systems.

Additionally, according to a survey by EY-Nasscom, one in every two Indian companies have accelerated their journey in cloud computing, which will inevitably increase the urgency for SaaS regulations in the region. A fact the Banking, Finance, Securities, and Insurance (BFSI) sector knows all too well, with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) issuing a SaaS Circular on ‘data localization requirements for financial sector organizations using cloud services’ just two years ago.

Unsurprisingly, this kind of regulatory change has resulted in a large increase in demand for control over where cloud services are hosted. And because we take security very seriously, and protecting our customers is always a top priority, our data centers are ISO27001 and SOC2 compliant and maintain a 99.999% service availability goal.

As with our other local data centers, all functionality from Duo’s zero trust platform including multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO), VPN-less remote access, device trust and adaptive risk-based policies is available through these new data centers. And in the near future, passwordless authentication and other new features will be available in all of our data center locations concurrently. We expect this will be particularly beneficial to our clients in India, where we have noticed one of the largest increases in MFA technology use, with authentication volumes rising by 80% (YoY) as outlined in our Trusted Access Report 2021.

We can’t wait to give this level of assurance and performance to our clients in such a strategically important region. Well done to everyone involved in making this happen.


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Microsoft Patch Tuesday, May 2022 Edition

By BrianKrebs

Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 74 separate security problems in its Windows operating systems and related software. This month’s patch batch includes fixes for seven “critical” flaws, as well as a zero-day vulnerability that affects all supported versions of Windows.

By all accounts, the most urgent bug Microsoft addressed this month is CVE-2022-26925, a weakness in a central component of Windows security (the “Local Security Authority” process within Windows). CVE-2022-26925 was publicly disclosed prior to today, and Microsoft says it is now actively being exploited in the wild. The flaw affects Windows 7 through 10 and Windows Server 2008 through 2022.

Greg Wiseman, product manager for Rapid7, said Microsoft has rated this vulnerability as important and assigned it a CVSS (danger) score of 8.1 (10 being the worst), although Microsoft notes that the CVSS score can be as high as 9.8 in certain situations.

“This allows attackers to perform a man-in-the-middle attack to force domain controllers to authenticate to the attacker using NTLM authentication,” Wiseman said. “This is very bad news when used in conjunction with an NTLM relay attack, potentially leading to remote code execution. This bug affects all supported versions of Windows, but Domain Controllers should be patched on a priority basis before updating other servers.”

Wiseman said the most recent time Microsoft patched a similar vulnerability — last August in CVE-2021-36942 — it was also being exploited in the wild under the name “PetitPotam.”

“CVE-2021-36942 was so bad it made CISA’s catalog of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities,” Wiseman said.

Seven of the flaws fixed today earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, which it assigns to vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malware or miscreants to remotely compromise a vulnerable Windows system without any help from the user.

Among those is CVE-2022-26937, which carries a CVSS score of 9.8, and affects services using the Windows Network File System (NFS). Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative notes that this bug could allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute code in the context of the Network File System (NFS) service on affected systems.

“NFS isn’t on by default, but it’s prevalent in environment where Windows systems are mixed with other OSes such as Linux or Unix,” ZDI’s Dustin Childs wrote. “If this describes your environment, you should definitely test and deploy this patch quickly.”

Once again, this month’s Patch Tuesday is sponsored by Windows Print Spooler, a core Windows service that keeps spooling out the security hits. May’s patches include four fixes for Print Spooler, including two information disclosure and two elevation of privilege flaws.

“All of the flaws are rated as important, and two of the three are considered more likely to be exploited,” said Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable. “Windows Print Spooler continues to remain a valuable target for attackers since PrintNightmare was disclosed nearly a year ago. Elevation of Privilege flaws in particular should be carefully prioritized, as we’ve seen ransomware groups like Conti favor them as part of its playbook.”

Other Windows components that received patches this month include .NET and Visual Studio, Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based), Microsoft Exchange Server, Office, Windows Hyper-V, Windows Authentication Methods, BitLocker, Remote Desktop Client, and Windows Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol.

Also today, Adobe issued five security bulletins to address at least 18 flaws in Adobe CloudFusion, Framemaker, InCopy, InDesign, and Adobe Character Animator. Adobe said it is not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the issues addressed in today’s updates.

For a more granular look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the skinny on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.

As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these patches, please drop a note about it here in the comments.

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