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Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 21 October 2022

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 21 October 2022:

-Gen Z, Millennials Really Doesn't Care About Workplace Cyber Security

-Supply Chain Attacks Increased Over 600% This Year and Companies Are Falling Behind

-Cyber-Enabled Crimes Are Biggest Police Concerns

-List of Common Passwords Accounts for Nearly All Cyber Attacks

-Shared Responsibility or Shared Fate? Decentralized IT Means We Are All Cyber Defenders

-Ukraine War Cuts Ransomware as Kremlin Co-Opts Hackers

-96% Of Companies Report Insufficient Security for Sensitive Cloud Data

-Your Microsoft Exchange Server Is a Security Liability

-Are Cyber Security Vendors Pushing Snake Oil?

-Ransomware Preparedness, What Are You Doing Wrong?

-NSA Cybersecurity Director's Six Takeaways from the War in Ukraine

-Microsoft Confirms Server Misconfiguration Led to 65,000+ Companies' Data Leak

Welcome to this week’s Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing – a weekly digest, collated and curated by our cyber experts to provide senior and middle management with an easy to digest round up of the most notable threats, vulnerabilities, and cyber related news from the last week.

Top Cyber Stories of the Last Week

  • Gen Z, Millennials Really Don’t Care About Workplace Cyber Security

When it comes to cyber security in the workplace, younger employees don’t really seem to care that much, which is putting their organisations in serious harm’s way, new research has claimed.

Surveying approximately 1,000 workers using devices issued by their employers, professional services firm EY found Gen Z enterprise employees were more apathetic about cyber security than their Boomer counterparts in adhering to their employer's safety policies.

This is despite the fact that four in five (83%) of all those surveyed claimed to understand their employer’s security protocol.

When it comes to implementing mandatory IT updates, for example, 58% of Gen Z’ers and 42% of millennials would disregard them for as long as possible. Less than a third (31%) of Gen X’ers, and just 15% of baby boomers said they do the same.

Apathy in the young extends to password reuse between private and business accounts. A third of Gen Z and millennial workers surveyed admitted to this, compared to less than a quarter of all Gen X’ers and baby boomers.

Some say the apathy of young people towards technology is down to their over-familiarity with technology, and never having been without it. Being too comfortable with tech undoubtedly makes an enterprise's younger employees a major target for cyber criminals looking to exploit any hole in security. 

If an organisation's cyber security practices aren't upheld strongly, threat actors can compromise huge networks with simple social engineering attacks.

https://www.techradar.com/news/younger-workers-dont-care-about-workplace-cybersecurity

  • Supply Chain Attacks Increased Over 600% This Year and Companies Are Falling Behind

The number of documented supply chain attacks involving malicious third-party components has increased 633% over the past year, now sitting at over 88,000 known instances, according to a new report from software supply chain management company Sonatype. Meanwhile, instances of transitive vulnerabilities that software components inherit from their own dependencies have also reached unprecedented levels and plague two-thirds of open-source libraries.

“The networked nature of dependencies highlights the importance of having visibility and awareness about these complex supply chains” Sonatype said in its newly released State of the Software Supply Chain report. “These dependencies impact our software, so having an understanding of their origins is critical to vulnerability response. Many organisations did not have the needed visibility and continued their incident response procedures for Log4Shell well beyond the summer of 2022 as a result.”

Log4Shell is a critical vulnerability discovered in November 2021 in Log4j, a widely popular open-source Java library used for logging and bundled in millions of enterprise applications and software products, often as an indirect dependency. According to Sonatype’s monitoring, as of August 2022, the adoption rate for fixed versions of Log4j sits at around 65%. Moreover, this doesn’t even account for the fact that the Log4Shell vulnerability originated in a Java class called JndiManager that is part of Log4j-core, but which has also been borrowed by 783 other projects and is now found in over 19,000 software components.

Log4Shell served as a watershed moment, highlighting the inherent risks that exist in the open-source software ecosystem – which sits at the core of modern software development – and the need to manage them properly. It also led to several initiatives to secure the software supply chain by private organisations, software repository managers, the Linux Foundation, and government bodies. Yet, most organisations are far from where they need to be in terms of open-source supply chain management.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3677228/supply-chain-attacks-increased-over-600-this-year-and-companies-are-falling-behind.html#tk.rss_news

  • Cyber-Enabled Crimes Are Biggest Police Concerns

Cyber-related crimes such as money laundering, ransomware and phishing pose the biggest threat to society, according to the first ever Interpol Global Crime Trend report.

The inaugural study was compiled from data received from the policing organisation’s 195 member countries, as well as information and analysis from external sources.

Money laundering was ranked the number one threat, with 67% of respondents claiming it to be a “high” or “very high” risk. Ransomware came second (66%) but was the crime type that most (72%) expected to increase in the next 3–5 years.

Of the nine top crime trends identified in the report, six are directly cyber-enabled, including money laundering, ransomware, phishing, financial fraud, computer intrusion and child sexual exploitation.

Interpol warned that the pandemic had fomented new underground offerings like “financial crime-as-a-service,” including digital money laundering tools which help to lower the barrier to entry for criminal gangs. It also claimed that demand for online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA) content surged during the pandemic. Some 62% of respondents expect it to increase or significantly increase in the coming years.

The findings represent something of a turnaround from pre-pandemic times, when drug trafficking regularly topped the list of police concerns. Thanks to a surge in corporate digitalisation, home working and online shopping, there are now rich pickings to be had from targeting consumers and business users with cyber-scams and attacks, Interpol claimed.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/cyberenabled-crimes-are-biggest/

  • List of Common Passwords Accounts for Nearly All Cyber Attacks

Half of a million passwords from the RockYou2021 list account for 99.997% of all credential attacks against a variety of honeypots, suggesting attackers are just taking the easy road.

Tens of millions of credential-based attacks targeting two common types of servers boiled down to a small fraction of the passwords that formed a list of leaked credentials, known as the RockYou2021 list.

Vulnerability management firm Rapid7, via its network of honeypots, recorded every attempt to compromise those servers over a 12-month period, finding that the attempted credential attacks resulted in 512,000 permutations. Almost all of those passwords (99.997%) are included in a common password list — the RockYou2021 file, which has 8.4 billion entries — suggesting that attackers, or the subset of threat actors attacking Rapid7's honeypots, are sticking to a common playbook.

The overlap in all the attacks also suggest attackers are taking the easy road, said Rapid7. "We know now, in a provable and demonstrable way, that nobody — 0% of attackers — is trying to be creative when it comes to unfocused, untargeted attacks across the Internet," they said. "Therefore, it's very easy to avoid this kind of opportunistic attack, and it takes very little effort to take this threat off the table entirely, with modern password managers and configuration controls."

Every year, security firms present research suggesting users are continuing to pick bad passwords. In 2019, an evaluation of passwords leaked to the Internet found that the top password was "123456," followed by "123456789" and "qwerty," and unfortunately things have not got much better since then.

https://www.darkreading.com/endpoint/a-common-password-list-accounts-for-nearly-all-cyberattacks

  • Shared Responsibility or Shared Fate? Decentralised IT Means We Are All Cyber Defenders

Does your organisation truly understand the shared responsibility model? Shared responsibility emerged from the early days of cloud computing as a way to delineate responsibilities between cloud providers and their customers, but often there's a gap between what shared responsibility means and how it is interpreted. With the decentralisation of IT, this gap is getting worse.

Applications, servers, and overall technology used to be under the purview and control of the IT department, yet with the shift to cloud, and specifically software-as-a-service (SaaS), this dynamic has changed. Whether it's the sales team bringing in a customer relationship management (CRM) system like Salesforce, or the HR department operating a human resources information system (HRIS) like Workday, there's a clear "expanding universe" of IT that no longer sits where it used to. Critical business workflows exist in separate business units far from IT and security and are managed as such. Our corporate IT footprints have become decentralised.

This is not some minor, temporary trend. With the ease and speed of adopting new SaaS applications and the desire to "lift and shift" code into cloud-based environments, this is the future. The future is decentralised.

The shift to business-owned and -operated applications puts security teams in a position where risk management is their responsibility; they are not even able to log into some of these critical systems. It's like asking your doctor to keep you healthy but not giving her access to your information or having regular check-ups. It doesn't work that way.

Beyond the challenging human skills gap, there's technical entropy and diversity everywhere, with different configuration settings, event logs, threat vectors, and data sensitivities. On the access side, there are different admins, users, integrations, and APIs. If you think managing security on Windows and Mac is a lot, try it across many huge applications.

With this reality, how can the security team be expected to combat a growing amount of decentralised business technology risk?

We must operate our technology with the understanding that shared responsibility is the vertical view between cloud provider and customer, but that enterprise-owned piece of shared responsibility is the burden of multiple teams horizontally across an organisation. Too often the mentality is us versus them, availability versus security, too busy to care about risk, too concerned with risk to understand "the business."

https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-threats/shared-responsibility-or-shared-fate-decentralized-it-means-we-are-all-cyber-defenders

  • Ukraine War Cuts Ransomware as Kremlin Co-Opts Hackers

The Ukraine war has helped reduce global ransomware attacks by 10pc in the last few months, a British cyber security company has said.

Criminal hacking gangs, usually engaged in corporate ransomware activities, are increasingly being co-opted by the Russian military to launch cyber attacks on Ukraine, according to Digital Shadows. “The war is likely to continue to motivate ransomware actors to target government and critical infrastructure entities,” according to the firm. Such attacks partly contributed to a 10pc drop in the number of ransomware threats launched during the three months to September, said the London-based company.

The drop in ransomware may also partly be caused by tit-for-tat digital attacks between rival hacking gangs. Researchers said the Lockbit gang, who recently targeted LSE-listed car retailer Pendragon with a $60m (£53.85m) ransom demand, were the target of attacks from their underworld rivals. The group is increasingly inviting resentment from competing threat groups and possibly former members.

Some cyber criminals’ servers went offline in September after what appeared to be an attack from competitors. In the world of cyber criminality, it is not uncommon for tensions to flare among rival groups.

Officials from GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre have said ransomware is one of the biggest cyber threats facing the UK. Figures published by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport this year revealed the average costs to businesses caused by ransomware attacks is around £19,000 per incident.

US-based cyber security company Palo Alto Networks, however, warned that the average ransom payment it saw in the early part of this year was $925,000 (£829,000).

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/10/23/ukraine-war-cuts-ransomware-kremlin-co-opts-hackers/

  • 96% Of Companies Report Insufficient Security for Sensitive Cloud Data

The vast majority of organisations lack confidence in securing their data in cloud, while many companies acknowledge they lack sufficient security even for their most sensitive data, according to a new report by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

The CSA report surveyed 1,663 IT and security professionals from organisations of various sizes and in various locations. "Only 4% report sufficient security for 100% of their data in the cloud. This means that 96% of organisations have insufficient security for at least some of their sensitive data," according to the report, which was sponsored by data intelligence firm BigID.

Apart from struggling with securing sensitive data, organisations are also having trouble tracking data in the cloud. Over a quarter of organisations polled aren’t tracking regulated data, nearly a third aren’t tracking confidential or internal data, and 45% aren’t tracking unclassified data, the report said.

“This suggests that organisations’ current methods of classifying data aren’t sufficient for their needs. However, if the tracking is this low, it could be a contributing factor to the issue of dark data. Organisations need to utilise data discovery and classification tools to properly understand the data they have and how to protect it,” the CSA study noted.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3677491/96-of-companies-report-insufficient-security-for-sensitive-cloud-data.html#tk.rss_news

  • Your Microsoft Exchange Server Is a Security Liability

With endless vulnerabilities, widespread hacking campaigns, slow and technically tough patching, it's time to say goodbye to on-premise Exchange.

Once, reasonable people who cared about security, privacy, and reliability ran their own email servers. Today, the vast majority host their personal email in the cloud, handing off that substantial burden to the capable security and engineering teams at companies like Google and Microsoft. Now, cyber security experts argue that a similar switch is due - or long overdue - for corporate and government networks. For enterprises that use on-premise Microsoft Exchange, still running their own email machine somewhere in a closet or data centre, the time has come to move to a cloud service, if only to avoid the years-long plague of bugs in Exchange servers that has made it nearly impossible to keep determined hackers out.

The latest reminder of that struggle arrived earlier this week, when Taiwanese security researcher Orange Tsai published a blog post laying out the details of a security vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange. Tsai warned Microsoft about this vulnerability as early as June of 2021, and while the company responded by releasing some partial fixes, it took Microsoft 14 months to fully resolve the underlying security problem. Tsai had earlier reported a related vulnerability in Exchange that was massively exploited by a group of Chinese state-sponsored hackers known as Hafnium, which last year penetrated more than 30,000 targets by some counts. Yet according to the timeline described in Tsai’s post this week, Microsoft repeatedly delayed fixing the newer variation of that same vulnerability, assuring Tsai no fewer than four times that it would patch the bug before pushing off a full patch for months longer. When Microsoft finally released a fix, Tsai wrote, it still required manual activation and lacked any documentation for four more months.

Meanwhile, another pair of actively exploited vulnerabilities in Exchange that were revealed last month still remain unpatched after researchers showed that Microsoft’s initial attempts to fix the flaws had failed. Those vulnerabilities were just the latest in a years-long pattern of security bugs in Exchange’s code. And even when Microsoft does release Exchange patches, they’re often not widely implemented, due to the time-consuming technical process of installing them.

The result of those compounding problems, for many who have watched the hacker-induced headaches of running an Exchange server pile up, is a clear message: An Exchange server is itself a security vulnerability, and the fix is to get rid of it.

“You need to move off of on-premise Exchange forever. That’s the bottom line,” says Dustin Childs, the head of threat awareness at security firm Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), which pays researchers for finding and reporting vulnerabilities in commonly used software and runs the Pwn2Own hacking competition. “You’re not getting the support, as far as security fixes, that you would expect from a really mission-critical component of your infrastructure.”

https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-exchange-server-vulnerabilities/

  • Are Cyber Security Vendors Pushing Snake Oil?

Survey: 96 percent of cyber security decision makers confused by vendor marketing.

The availability of new security products increases, the amount of budget spent on cyber security grows, and the number of security breaches seems to outpace both. This basic lack of correlation between increasing cyber security spend and any clear increase in cyber security effectiveness is the subject of a new analytical survey from Egress.

With 52 million data breaches in Q2 2022 alone (Statista), Egress questioned 800 cyber security and IT leaders on why vendor claims and reality aren’t aligned. The headline response in the survey is that 91% of decision makers have difficulty in selecting cyber security vendors due to unclear marketing about their specific offerings.

The financial investment cycle doesn’t help in this. For many investors, the strength of the management team is more important than the product. The argument is not whether this product is a cyber security silver bullet, but whether this management can take the company to a point where it can exit with serious profits.

If investment is achieved, much of it will go into marketing. That marketing must compete against existing, established vendors – so it tends to be louder, more aggressive, and replete with hyperbole. Marketing noise can lead to increased valuation, which can lead to a successful and profitable exit by the investors.

Of course, this is an oversimplification and doesn’t always happen. The point, however, is that it does happen and has no relevance to the real effectiveness of the product in question. Without any doubt, there are many products that have been over-hyped by marketing funds provided by profit-driven investors.

https://www.securityweek.com/are-cybersecurity-vendors-pushing-snake-oil

  • Ransomware Preparedness: What Are You Doing Wrong?

Axio released its 2022 State of Ransomware Preparedness research report, revealing that although notable improvements have been made since Axio’s 2021 report, organisational ransomware preparedness continues to be insufficient to keep pace with new attack vectors.

The report reveals that the lack of fundamental cyber security practices and controls, including critical vulnerability patching and employee cyber security training, continues to undermine organisational attempts to improve ransomware defences.

“Ransomware continues to wreak havoc on global organisations, regardless of size or industry,” remarked the report’s co-author David White, President of Axio. “As the number of attacks will most likely continue on an exponential trajectory, it’s more important than ever for companies to re-evaluate their cyber security practices and make the needed improvements to help combat these attacks.”

The report identifies several emerging patterns that yield insights into why organisations are increasingly susceptible to ransomware attacks. In 2021, seven key areas where organisations were deficient in implementing and sustaining basic cyber security practices were identified, and these patterns dominated the 2022 study results as well:

  • Managing privileged access

  • Improving basic cyber hygiene

  • Reducing exposure to supply chain and third-party risk

  • Monitoring and defending networks

  • Managing ransomware incidents

  • Identifying and addressing vulnerabilities in a timely manner

  • Improving cyber security training and awareness

Overall, most organisations surveyed are not adequately prepared to manage the risk associated with a ransomware attack. Key data findings include:

  • The number of organisations with a functional privileged access management solution in place increased by 10% but remains low at 33% overall.

  • Limitations on the use of service and local administrator accounts remain average overall, with nearly 50% of organisations reporting implementing these practices.

  • Approximately 40% of organisations monitor third-party network access, evaluate third-party cyber security posture, and limit the use of third-party software.

  • Less than 50% of respondents implement basic network segmentation and only 40% monitor for anomalous connections.

  • Critical vulnerability patching within 24 hours was reported by only 24% of organisations.

  • A ransomware-specific playbook for incident management is in place for only 30% of organisations.

  • Active phishing training has improved but is still not practiced by 40% of organisations.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/10/20/insufficient-ransomware-preparedness/

  • NSA Cybersecurity Director's Six Takeaways from the War in Ukraine

From the warning banner ‘Be afraid and expect the worst’ that was shown on several Ukrainian government websites on January 13, 2022, after a cyber-attack took them down, the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) cybersecurity director, Rob Joyce, knew that something was going to be different, and very aggressive, between Ukraine and Russia, and that it would be happening in the cyber space as well.

Ten months on, he was invited to speak at one of Mandiant Worldwide Information Security Exchange's (mWISE) opening keynotes on October 18, 2022. Joyce shared six takeaways from the Russia-Ukraine cyber-conflict in terms of what we learned from it and its impact on how nations should protect their organisations.

  1. Both espionage and destructive attacks will occur in conflict

  2. The cyber security industry has unique insight into these conflicts

  3. Sensitive intelligence can make a decisive difference

  4. You can develop resiliency skills

  5. Don’t try to go it alone

  6. You have not planned enough yet for the contingencies

Toward the end of the keynote, Joyce suggested the audience simulate a scenario based on what happened in Ukraine with the China-Taiwan conflict escalating and see what they should put in place to better prepare for such an event.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/nsa-6-takeaways-war-ukraine/

  • Microsoft Confirms Server Misconfiguration Led to 65,000+ Companies' Data Leak

Microsoft this week confirmed that it inadvertently exposed information related to thousands of customers following a security lapse that left an endpoint publicly accessible over the internet sans any authentication.

"This misconfiguration resulted in the potential for unauthenticated access to some business transaction data corresponding to interactions between Microsoft and prospective customers, such as the planning or potential implementation and provisioning of Microsoft services," Microsoft said in an alert.

Microsoft also emphasised that the B2B leak was "caused by an unintentional misconfiguration on an endpoint that is not in use across the Microsoft ecosystem and was not the result of a security vulnerability."

The misconfiguration of the Azure Blob Storage was spotted on September 24, 2022, by cyber security company SOCRadar, which termed the leak BlueBleed. Microsoft said it's in the process of directly notifying impacted customers.

The Windows maker did not reveal the scale of the data leak, but according to SOCRadar, it affects more than 65,000 entities in 111 countries. The exposure amounts to 2.4 terabytes of data that consists of invoices, product orders, signed customer documents, partner ecosystem details, among others.

https://thehackernews.com/2022/10/microsoft-confirms-server.html

Threats

Ransomware and Extortion

Phishing & Email Based Attacks

Other Social Engineering; Smishing, Vishing, etc

Malware

Mobile

Internet of Things – IoT

Data Breaches/Leaks

Organised Crime & Criminal Actors

Cryptocurrency/Cryptomining/Cryptojacking/NFTs/Blockchain

Fraud, Scams & Financial Crime

Deepfakes

Insurance

Supply Chain and Third Parties

Software Supply Chain

Denial of Service DoS/DDoS

Cloud/SaaS

Attack Surface Management

Identity and Access Management

Encryption

API

Open Source

Passwords, Credential Stuffing & Brute Force Attacks

Training, Education and Awareness

Privacy, Surveillance and Mass Monitoring

Regulations, Fines and Legislation

Law Enforcement Action and Take Downs

Spyware, Cyber Espionage & Cyber Warfare, including Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Vulnerabilities

Sector Specific

Industry specific threat intelligence reports are available.

Contact us to receive tailored reports specific to the industry/sector and geographies you operate in.

·       Automotive

·       Construction

·       Critical National Infrastructure (CNI)

·       Defence & Space

·       Education & Academia

·       Energy & Utilities

·       Estate Agencies

·       Financial Services

·       FinTech

·       Food & Agriculture

·       Gaming & Gambling

·       Government & Public Sector (including Law Enforcement)

·       Health/Medical/Pharma

·       Hotels & Hospitality

·       Insurance

·       Legal

·       Manufacturing

·       Maritime

·       Oil, Gas & Mining

·       OT, ICS, IIoT, SCADA & Cyber-Physical Systems

·       Retail & eCommerce

·       Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs)

·       Startups

·       Telecoms

·       Third Sector & Charities

·       Transport & Aviation

·       Web3

As usual, contact us to help assess where your risks lie and to ensure you are doing all you can do to keep you and your business secure.

Look out for our ‘Cyber Tip Tuesday’ video blog and on our YouTube channel.

You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Links to articles are for interest and awareness and linking to or reposting external content does not endorse any service or product, likewise we are not responsible for the security of external links.

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Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 15 April 2022

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 15 April 2022:

-Cyber Security Is Getting Harder: More Threats, More Complexity, Fewer People

-Terrible Cloud Security Is Leaving the Door Open for Hackers. Here's What You're Doing Wrong

-More Organisations Are Paying the Ransom. Why?

-Cyber Attack Puts City Firms on High Alert To Bolster Defences

-More Than 60% of Organisations Suffered a Breach in the Past 12 Months

-Account Takeover Poised to Surpass Malware as The No. 1 Security Concern

-Security Research Reveals 42% Rise In New Ransomware Programs In 2021

-Fraudsters Stole £58m with Remote Access Trojans (RATs) in 2021

-As State-Backed Cyber Threats Grow, Here's How the World Is Reacting

-Q1 Reported Data Compromises Up 14% Over 2021

-Europol Announces Operation to Hit Russian Sanctions-Evaders

Welcome to this week’s Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing – a weekly digest, collated and curated by our cyber experts to provide senior and middle management with an easy to digest round up of the most notable threats, vulnerabilities, and cyber related news from the last week.

Top Cyber Stories of the Last Week

  • Cyber Security Is Getting Harder: More Threats, More Complexity, Fewer People

Splunk and Enterprise Strategy Group released a global research report that examines the security issues facing the modern enterprise. More than 1,200 security leaders participated in the survey, revealing they’ve seen an increase in cyber attacks while their teams are facing widening talent gaps.

According to the report, 65% of respondents say they have seen an increase in attempted cyber attacks. In addition, many have been directly impacted by data breaches and costly ransomware attacks, which have left security teams exhausted:

·       49% of organisations say they have suffered a data breach over the past two years, an increase from 39% a year earlier.

·       79% of respondents say they’ve encountered ransomware attacks, and 35% admit that one or more of those attacks led them to lose access to data and systems.

·       59% of security teams say they had to devote significant time and resources to remediation, an increase from 42% a year ago.

·       54% of respondents report that their business-critical applications have suffered from unplanned outages related to cyber security incidents on at least a monthly basis, with a median of 12 outages per year. The median time to recover from unplanned downtime tied to cyber security incidents is 14 hours. Respondents estimated the cost of this downtime averaged about $200,000 per hour.

·       64% of security professionals have stated that it’s challenging to keep up with new security requirements, up from 49% a year ago.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/04/13/modern-enterprise-security-issues/

  • Terrible Cloud Security Is Leaving the Door Open for Hackers. Here's What You're Doing Wrong

A rise in hybrid work and a shift to cloud platforms has changed how businesses operate - but it's also leaving them vulnerable to cyber attacks.

Cloud applications and services are a prime target for hackers because poor cyber security management and misconfigured services are leaving them exposed to the internet and vulnerable to simple cyber attacks.

Analysis of identity and access management (IAM) polices taking into account hundreds of thousands of users in 18,000 cloud environments across 200 organisations by cyber security researchers at Palo Alto Networks found that cloud accounts and services are leaving open doors for cyber criminals to exploit – and putting businesses and users at risk.

The global pandemic pushed organisations and employees towards new ways of remote and hybrid working, with the aid of cloud services and applications. While beneficial to businesses and employees, it also created additional cyber security risks – and malicious hackers know this.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/terrible-cloud-security-is-leaving-the-door-open-for-hackers-heres-what-youre-doing-wrong/

  • More Organisations Are Paying the Ransom. Why?

Most organisations (71%) have been hit by ransomware in 2021, and most of those (63%) opted for paying the requested ransom, the 2022 Cyberthreat Defense Report (CDR) by the CyberEdge Group has shown.

The research company says that possible explanations for the steady yearly rise of the percentage of organisations that decided to pay the ransom may include: the threat of exposing exfiltrated data, increased confidence for data recovery, and the fact that many organisations find that paying a ransom is significantly less costly than system downtime, customer disruption, and potential lawsuits.

“72% of ransom-paying victims recovered their data [in 2021], up from 49% in 2017. This increased confidence for successful data recovery is often factored into the ransom-paying decision,” the company noted.

Similarly, BakerHostatler’s 2022 Data Security Incident Response Report says that in ransomware incidents the US-based law firm was called in to manage in 2021, ransomware groups provided decryptors and stuck to their promise to not publish stolen data 97% of the time.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/04/11/organizations-paying-ransom/

  • Cyber Attack Puts City Firms on High Alert to Bolster Defences

Experts warn a combination of 'ignorance and arrogance' makes City executives vulnerable to attacks.

City firms on high alert for cyber attacks were sent a clear warning recently, bolstering concerns of the potential for breaches from Russia.

Ince Group, the London-listed law firm, last month fell prey to hackers who infiltrated its computer systems and stole confidential data. The company's security systems detected the intrusion on March 13, prompting the IT team to shut down servers to try and prevent widespread damage.

But soon after, the hackers demanded a ransom for stolen data and threatened to publish it on the dark web if Ince Group, which has clients in the shipping, energy and healthcare sectors, didn't pay up.

The incident has intensified worries of possible breaches after warnings that City firms could be targeted by Russian hackers following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Julia O'Toole, chief executive of MyCena Security Solutions, says executives should be "very concerned" about any news of a cyber attack at a rival company.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/04/11/cyber-attack-puts-city-firms-high-alert-bolster-defences/

  • More Than 60% of Organisations Suffered a Breach in the Past 12 Months

Firms focus too narrowly on external attackers when it's insiders, third parties, and stolen assets that cause many breaches, new study shows.

The majority of companies — 63% — have suffered at least one breach in the past 12 months. The global average breach cost $2.4 million — a price tag that increases to $3.0 million for companies unprepared to respond to compromises.

The new data from Forrester Research, released on April 8 in a report titled "The 2021 State Of Enterprise Breaches," found that the number of breaches and the cost of breaches varied widely depending on the geographic location of the business and to what degree the organisation is prepared to respond to breaches. Companies in North America had the largest disparity between the haves and have-nots: While the average organisation required 38 days to find, eradicate, and recover from a breach, companies that failed to adequately prepare for security challenges took 62 days.

The difference in response resulted in a large difference in cost as well, with the average North American company paying $3.0 million to recover from a breach, a bill that rises to $4.0 million if the company suffered from a lack of incident-response preparation.

"The misalignment between the expectation and the reality of breaches has become very important," says Allie Mellen, an analyst with Forrester's Security and Risk group. "On a global scale, there is a big disparity of about $600,000 between those who are prepared to respond to a breach and those who are not."

https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/more-than-60-of-organizations-suffered-a-breach-in-the-past-12-months

  • Account Takeover Poised to Surpass Malware as The No. 1 Security Concern

As most researchers and financial executives can attest, virtually all types of fraud have dramatically risen over the past two years. However, attackers taking over legitimate financial accounts have become even more of a favourite with cyber criminals than most fraud schemes.

Many major recent research reports have pointed out that account takeover (ATO), a form of identity theft where bad actors access legitimate bank accounts, change the account information and passwords, and hijack a real customer’s account, has skyrocketed since last year. According to Javelin Research’s annual "Identity Fraud Study: The Virtual Battleground" report, account takeover increased by 90% to an estimated $11.4 billion in 2021 when compared with 2020 — representing roughly one-quarter of all identity fraud losses last year.

Like many types of financial fraud, cyber thieves are betting on the fact that if they attempt to seize a large number of legitimate accounts, eventually they will get a payoff.

Account takeovers are a numbers game, the more accounts that an organisation has, the bigger their risk that some of them will be compromised.

Account takeovers often piggyback off of previous attacks, making these crimes a way for hackers to make the most out of stolen information. Diskin pointed out that account takeovers most commonly happen when a password is “taken from another data leak and reused for different accounts. But there are a variety of risky scenarios that can lead to compromise.”

https://www.scmagazine.com/analysis/cybercrime/account-takeover-poised-to-surpass-malware-as-the-no-1-security-concern

  • Security Research Reveals 42% Rise in New Ransomware Programs In 2021

Critical infrastructure in the crosshairs: operational technology vulnerabilities jump 88% .

Threat intelligence analysts at Skybox Research Lab uncovered a 42% increase in new ransomware programs targeting known vulnerabilities in 2021. The Silicon Valley cyber security company released its annual 2022 Vulnerability and Threat Trends Report, revealing how quickly cyber criminals capitalise on new security weaknesses – shrinking the window that organisations have to remediate vulnerabilities ahead of an attack.

With 20,175 new vulnerabilities published in 2021, Skybox Research Lab witnessed the most vulnerabilities ever reported in a single year. And these new vulnerabilities are just the tip of the iceberg. The total number of vulnerabilities published over the last 10 years reached 166,938 in 2021 — a three-fold increase over a decade. These cumulative vulnerabilities, piling up year after year, represent an enormous aggregate risk, and they’ve left organisations struggling with a mountain of cyber security debt. As the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) highlights in its Top Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities list, threat actors are routinely exploiting publicly disclosed vulnerabilities from years past.

The sheer volume of accumulated risks — hundreds of thousands or even millions of vulnerability instances within organisations — means they can’t possibly patch all of them. To prevent cyber security incidents, it is critical to prioritise exposed vulnerabilities that could cause the most significant disruption, then, apply appropriate remediation options including configuration changes or network segmentation to eliminate risk, even before patches are applied or in cases where patches aren’t available.

https://informationsecuritybuzz.com/study-research/skybox-security-research-reveals-42-rise-in-new-ransomware-programs-in-2021/

  • Fraudsters Stole £58m with Remote Access Trojans (RATs) in 2021

2021 saw victims of Remote Access Tool (RAT) scams lose £58m in 2021, official UK police figures show.

RAT scams involve scammers taking control of a victim’s device, typically in order to access bank accounts.

Some 20,144 victims fell for this type of scam in 2021, averaging around £2800 stolen per incident.

Typically, RAT attacks begin with a victim being inundated with pop-ups claiming there is a problem with the computer. Users are often then asked to call a “hotline” number, when a scammer will persuade them to download a RAT.

RAT scams are often compared to the classic “tech support” scams. Modern RAT scams are typically more devious, however, with scammers often cold-calling their victims pretending to work for their bank and claiming that they need computer access to investigate a fraudulent transaction.

https://www.itsecurityguru.org/2022/04/11/fraudsters-stole-58m-with-rats-in-2021/

  • As State-Backed Cyber Threats Grow, Here's How the World Is Reacting

With the ongoing conflict in Eurasia, cyber warfare is inevitably making its presence felt. The fight is not only being fought on the fields. There is also a big battle happening in cyberspace. Several cyber-attacks have been reported over the past months.

Notably, cyber attacks backed by state actors are becoming prominent. There have been reports of a rise of ransomware and other malware attacks such as Cyclops Blink, HermeticWiper, and BlackCat. These target businesses as well as government institutions and nonprofit organisations. There have been cases of several attempts to shut down online communications and IT infrastructure.

The ongoing list of significant cyber incidents curated by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) shows that the number of major incidents in January 2022 is 100% higher compared to the same period in the previous year. With the recent activities in cyberspace impacted by the emergence of the geopolitical tumult in February, it is not going to be surprising to see an even more dramatic rise in the number of significant incidents.

https://thehackernews.com/2022/04/as-state-backed-cyber-threats-grow.html

  • Q1 Reported Data Compromises Up 14% Over 2021

The Identity Theft Resource Center published a First Quarter 2022 Data Breach Analysis which found that Q1 of 2022 began with the highest number of publicly reported data compromises in the past three years.

Publicly reported data compromises totalled 404 through March 31, 2022, a 14 percent increase compared to Q1 2021.

This is the third consecutive year when the number of total data compromises increased compared to Q1 of the previous year. It also represents the highest number of Q1 data compromises since 2020.

https://informationsecuritybuzz.com/expert-comments/q1-reported-data-compromises-up-14-over-2021/

  • Europol Announces Operation to Hit Russian Sanctions-Evaders

European police have announced a major new operation designed to crack down on Russian oligarchs and businesses looking to circumvent sanctions.

Operation Oscar will run for at least a year as an umbrella initiative that will feature many separate investigations, Europol explained.

The policing organisation’s European Financial and Economic Crime Centre will work to exchange information and intelligence with partners and provide operational support in financial crime investigations.

A key focus appears to be on illicit flows of money, which Russian individuals and entities will be trying to move around the region in order to bypass sanctions imposed since President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Europol will centralise and analyse all information contributed under this operation to identify international links, criminal groups and suspects, as well as new criminal trends and patterns,” Europol said.

“Europol will further provide tailor-made analytical support to investigations, as well as operational coordination, forensics and technical expertise, and financial support to the relevant national authorities.”

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/europol-hit-russian/

Threats

Ransomware

Other Social Engineering

Malware

Mobile

IoT

Data Breaches/Leaks

Organised Crime & Criminal Actors

Cryptocurrency/Cryptomining/Cryptojacking

Insider Risk and Insider Threats

Fraud, Scams & Financial Crime

Denial of Service DoS/DDoS

Cloud

Privacy

Spyware, Espionage & Cyber Warfare, including Russian Invasion of Ukraine

As usual, contact us to help assess where your risks lie and to ensure you are doing all you can do to keep you and your business secure.

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