Threat Intelligence Blog

Contact us to discuss any insights from our Blog, and how we can support you in a tailored threat intelligence report.

Black Arrow Admin Black Arrow Admin

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 18th August 2023

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Intelligence Briefing 18 August 2023:

-Ransomware Group Targeting MSPs Worldwide in New Campaign

-As Ransomware Surges, A lack of Resources Makes SMBs Most Vulnerable

-Business Email Compromise Attack Costs Far Exceeding Ransomware Losses

-Email Phishing Remains the Main Entry for Cyber Criminals; People with Six Personality Traits are More Susceptible

-Gartner Study Finds Generative AI to be a Top Emerging Risk for Organisations

-LinkedIn Suffers Significant Wave of Account Hacks

-High Net-Worth Families are at Risk of Cyber Crime

-Cyber Attack Rule Raises Insurance Risks for Corporate Officers

-PSNI and UK Voter Breaches Show Data Security Should be Taken More Seriously

-The Imperative of Cyber Preparedness: The Power of Tabletop Exercises

-Why Are Phones a Cyber Security Weak Spot?

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

Ransomware Group Targeting MSPs Worldwide in New Campaign

Russia-based cyber attackers called Play are evolving, with the ransomware group now using remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools at outsourced IT providers or managed service providers (MSPs) to gain access and hit downstream customers. A significant number of eventual targets are medium sized business. The group is also utilising intermittent encryption, where files are only partly encrypted, to avoid detection.

The attacks highlight the need for organisations to be aware of where they are in the supply chain and how they can be targeted through their supplier. It is not enough for an organisation to focus on its own security in isolation; organisations also need to have a way of effectively assessing their supply chain risk which includes their MSP.

Source [Dark Reading]

As Ransomware Surges, A lack of Resources Makes SMBs Most Vulnerable

Ransomware attacks continue to increase, with 1500 victims confirmed this year. It is likely this figure will continue to rise. In parallel, criminals are evolving and with that comes a rise in triple extortion; attackers are not just encrypting and exfiltrating an organisation’s data, but also using this data to blackmail employees and target third parties, hitting the supply chain.

Unfortunately for SMBs, they do not have the resources to keep up with such attacks, making them the most vulnerable. A report found that organisations that had 51 to 200 employees were the most targeted, followed by organisations with 11 to 50 employees. When it came to the types of organisations, the Financial Services sector placed first.

This should not mean SMBs should just accept this and wait to be attacked; on the contrary, their increased vulnerability means that SMBs need to effectively prioritise and allocate resources, and if necessary getting in specialist external help, to ensure their protections are the best that resources allow.

Sources [WWD] [InfoSecurity Magazine] [CRN]

Business Email Compromise Attack Costs Far Exceeding Ransomware Losses

Cloudflare's 2023 Phishing Threats Report recorded a 17% spike in business email compromise (BEC) related financial losses between December 2021 and 2022, noting that threat actors are increasingly leaning on this attack method to target organisations. Additionally, across 2022 nearly three-quarters (71%) of respondents to the study said they experienced an attempted or successful BEC attack. The Cloudflare report found that the financial impact of BEC led to organisations suffering losses in excess of $2.7 billion, whereas ransomware caused losses of $34.3 million during the same period.

Source [ITPro]

Email Phishing Remains the Main Entry for Cyber Criminals; People with Six Personality Traits are More Susceptible

According to a report, phishing attacks were found to be the initial attack vector for nine in ten cyber attacks. The report found that the focus of a cyber criminal tended to be two objectives: achieving authenticity and getting victims to click. Worryingly, 89% of unwanted messages were found to have bypassed authentication checks, leaving people and procedures as the last line of defence in an organisation.

A separate study found that having the following traits made a user more susceptible to phishing: extroverted, agreeable, people-pleasing, quick to trust, fearful or respectful of authority, and poor self-control.

With employees playing such an important role in preventing phishing, organisations need to ensure that employees are aware of what to look for in a phishing email with regular training to account for evolving tactics. This training should be carried out by experts with experience of conducting phishing simulations, accompanied with the ability to educate users on how they can protect themselves from falling victim.

Sources [Tech Radar] [Makeuseof]

Gartner Study Finds Generative AI to be a Top Emerging Risk for Organisations

In a recent survey, Gartner found that generative AI models such as ChatGPT were the second greatest emerging risk, with concerns around data privacy. This has led to organisations looking to ban such AI, with a separate report by Blackberry finding that ChatGPT faced banning from 75% of organisations.

Banning AI in the organisation is a short-term solution. The benefits of AI are clear and its usefulness in an organisation is significant, with reports finding 75% of IT leaders in favour. Organisations should instead look at how they can govern the usage of AI in their organisation, to reduce the risk of AI-related incidents and improve the effectiveness of work.

Sources [Security Magazine] [Analytics Insight] [IT Security Guru] [Decrypt]

LinkedIn Suffers Significant Wave of Account Hacks

LinkedIn users are reporting losing access to their accounts, with some being pressured into paying a ransom to get back in or else face permanent account deletion. LinkedIn is no stranger to being a target of cyber criminals; last year, the platform was deemed the most abused brand in phishing attempts likely due to its recognisability and widespread use in the corporate world. This extended as far as threat actors using fake LinkedIn profiles.

With the number of accounts being compromised, users need to be vigilant in their use of LinkedIn and be on the lookout for suspicious messages. Black Arrow recommends that users ensure they are using strong and unique passwords, combined with multi-factor authentication (MFA) to protect themselves.

Source [Dark Reading]

High Net-Worth Families are at Risk of Cyber Crime

A report found that high net-worth families have prioritised cyber security with a notable 77% of respondents stating they had a cyber security plan; however, 55% said their plan “could be better”.

A cyber security plan is not optional anymore. High net-worth families are at increased risk, with criminals cottoning on to the amount of information that is out there and the financial gain that can be made if that information is used effectively. Social media is just one of the things increasing the risk of cyber crime; unbeknownst to some families, their social media may be providing criminals a treasure trove of insight into a family’s wealth, real-time location and habits. Such information can be used by a cyber criminal to employ attacks.

Source [Campdenfb]

Cyber Attack Rule Raises Insurance Risks for Corporate Officers

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently issued rules that formally outlined directors’ responsibilities in cyber security governance for the first time, laying the groundwork for potential enforcement actions. The recently issued rules bring potential regulatory probes and shareholder legal class action alleging senior executives failed to supervise their businesses’ cyber security practices.

Although the practice is not yet universal, a growing number of director and officer (D&O) policies are being drafted with cyber related exclusions. Meanwhile, most cyber insurance policies exempt SEC enforcement actions and investor claims, but some cover allegations against a company’s executives over their cyber security roles.

Whilst this is only in the US at the moment, other developed nations are likely to follow suit.

Source [Bloomberg Law]

PSNI and UK Voter Breaches Show Data Security Should be Taken More Seriously

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and the UK Electoral Commission both suffered cyber incidents on the same day. Whilst both incidents were different in how they happened, the result was the same: sensitive information had been leaked. In the case of the PSNI, the data was leaked through a response to a freedom of information (FOI) request, in which an Excel sheet was accidentally included by the PSNI. The Electoral Commission incident resulted from a cyber attack.

The incidents are a wake-up call for organisations. If you have not already done so, you need to put things in place to help protect your data from ending up online. The PSNI incident in particular highlights the need to ensure that data does not leave the organisation by accident.

Source [The Guardian]

The Imperative of Cyber Preparedness: The Power of Tabletop Exercises

Cyber security has become an inescapable concern for organisations across industries. With cyber threats ranging from data breaches to ransomware attacks, it is paramount that companies remain vigilant and prepared.

A key way to be prepared is through a tabletop exercise that simulates a hypothetical cyber security incident and helps organisations to practice and evaluate their response. One example scenario can be responding to a ransomware attack blocking access to the organisation's computers for a ransom. These exercises serve as a practical, engaging, and low-risk way for teams to identify vulnerabilities in current plans, improve coordination, and evaluate the decision-making process during a crisis and this is something that we do with our clients on a regular basis.

Source [JDSupra]

Why Are Phones a Cyber Security Weak Spot?

Mobile phones are more interconnected than ever, with their usage extending to the workplace. Despite this, they often enter the corporate environment with a lack of protection and oversight. When laptops are in the corporate environment they are often secured through methods such as encryption and often the organisation has a clear oversight of the applications and activity on the laptop. Mobile phones on the other hand, are often left unmonitored, despite the fact they can and often do carry sensitive information.

Mobile phones also carry additional risks; for a start, they are easier to lose, due to their size difference and the fact they are often out more. In addition, they may have more entry points. Internet of things (IoT) devices, such as smart appliances, are often controlled by phones, making them another entry point for an attacker.

Source [Tech Shout]

Governance, Risk and Compliance

Threats

Ransomware, Extortion and Destructive Attacks

Ransomware Victims

Phishing & Email Based Attacks

BEC – Business Email Compromise

Artificial Intelligence

2FA/MFA

Malware

Mobile

Botnets

Denial of Service/DoS/DDOS

Internet of Things – IoT

Data Breaches/Leaks

Organised Crime & Criminal Actors

Cryptocurrency/Cryptomining/Cryptojacking/NFTs/Blockchain

Insider Risk and Insider Threats

Fraud, Scams & Financial Crime

Insurance

Dark Web

Supply Chain and Third Parties

Software Supply Chain

Cloud/SaaS

Containers

Encryption

API

Open Source

Passwords, Credential Stuffing & Brute Force Attacks

Social Media

Malvertising

Training, Education and Awareness

Cyber Bullying, Cyber Stalking and Sextortion

Regulations, Fines and Legislation

Models, Frameworks and Standards

Data Protection

Careers, Working in Cyber and Information Security

Law Enforcement Action and Take Downs

Privacy, Surveillance and Mass Monitoring

Misinformation, Disinformation and Propaganda

Nation State Actors, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), Cyber Warfare and Cyber Espionage

Russia

China

Iran

North Korea

Misc/Other/Unknown

Vulnerability Management

Vulnerabilities

Tools and Controls

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.

Read More
Black Arrow Admin Black Arrow Admin

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 07 April 2023

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 07 April 2023:

-15 Million Public-Facing Services Vulnerable to Known Exploited Vulnerabilities

-New Research Highlights Increased Security Risks Posed by Remote Working and BYOD

-Lack of Security Employees Makes SMBs Sitting Ducks for Cyber Attacks

-IT and Security Pros Pressured to Keep Quiet About Data Breaches

-Phishing Emails are Seeing a Huge Rise, So Stay on Your Guard"

-Ransomware Attacks Skyrocket as Threat Actors Double Down on Global Attacks

-MSPs a Favoured Target of Supply Chain and Infrastructure Attacks

-Fake Ransomware Gang Targets Organisations with Empty Data Leak Threats

-GCHQ Updates Security Guidance for Boards

-More than 60% of Organisations have been Hit with Unplanned Downtime on a Monthly Basis

-For Cyber Crime Gangs, Professionnalisation Comes With “Corporate” Headaches

-UK’s Offensive Hacking Unit Takes on Military Opponents and Terrorist Groups

-Man Kills Himself After an AI Chatbot 'Encouraged' Him to Sacrifice Himself to Stop Climate Change

-Hackers Exploit WordPress Plugin Flaw That Gives Full Control of Millions of Sites

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

  • 15 Million Public-Facing Services Vulnerable to Known Exploited Vulnerabilities

Over 15 million publicly facing services are susceptible to at least one of the 896 vulnerabilities listed in CISA's KEV (known exploitable vulnerabilities) catalogue. The findings are particularly worrying because the examined vulnerabilities are known and highlighted in CISA's KEV catalogue as actively exploited by hackers, so any delays in their patching maintain a large attack surface, giving threat actors numerous potential targets.

Over half of those 7 million instances were vulnerable to one of the 137 CVEs concerning Microsoft Windows, making this component a top priority for defenders and an excellent target for attackers. Almost half of those are over five years old, so roughly 800,000 machines have not applied security updates for a significant period of time.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/15-million-public-facing-services-vulnerable-to-cisa-kev-flaws/

  • New Research Highlights Increased Security Risks Posed by Remote Working and BYOD

New research has highlighted the increased threats associated with remote work and bring your own device (BYOD) policies faced by organisations. The results of the survey show that with remote and hybrid working, personal and work tasks blur together and the boundaries between the two have become more porous. The data shows that 32% of remote and hybrid workers use apps or software not approved by IT and 92% of remote employees perform work tasks on their personal tablet or smartphone devices. These devices, apps and software, along with the corporate data being accessed, are not visible to IT, thereby dramatically increasing an organisation’s risk posture.

https://www.itsecurityguru.org/2023/04/03/new-research-highlights-increased-security-risks-posed-by-remote-working-and-bring-your-own-device-policies/

  • Lack of Security Employees Makes SMBs Sitting Ducks for Cyber Attacks

Cyber security is a growing concern among all businesses but lack of security expertise in SMBs is leaving smaller firms open to attack. Cyber threats are more real and prevalent than ever before and the risk to businesses includes not only exposure of customer data and a decrease in trust, but also losses in revenue.

54% of small businesses say they are more concerned about cyber security now than one year ago yet 38% of SMBs said they had zero employees dedicated to security as part of their role, and 42% had just one employee working on security. Even without a traditional security role, there should be someone responsible for making security decisions in every organisation.

A lack of time to focus on security and keeping up with changing threats are amongst the biggest challenges for businesses.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2023/04/04/smbs-security-posture/

  • IT and Security Pros Pressured to Keep Quiet About Data Breaches

It is not possible to stop every bad thing from happening. Alarmingly, when something does go wrong IT/security professionals are being told to keep a breach confidential, even when they knew it should be reported. More than 42% of IT/security professionals reporting this happening to them, and a worrying 30% said they have kept a breach confidential.

At 71%, IT/security professionals in the US were the most likely to say they have been told to keep quiet followed by the UK at 44%.

52% of global organisations have experienced a data breach or data leak in the last 12 months. The US led at 75% (or 23% higher than average) followed by the UK at 51.4%.

Infosec professionals are increasingly worried about their company facing legal action due to a breach being handled incorrectly.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2023/04/06/pressure-keeping-breaches-confidential/

  • Phishing Emails are Seeing a Huge Rise, So Stay on Your Guard

Phishing attacks are up 5x year-on-year, researchers say. A report from Cofense analysed data received from 35 million people across the world, finding there has been a 569% increase in phishing attacks to 2022 and 478% increase to credential phishing. With the increased frequency, intensity and sophistication of these threats small and medium-sized businesses should be particularly wary of phishing and other forms of email-borne cyber attacks as their numbers have grown explosively over the last year, experts have warned. Organisations should keep eyes open for Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks as this type continues to be one of the top crimes for the eighth year in a row.

https://www.techradar.com/news/phishing-emails-are-seeing-a-huge-rise-so-stay-on-your-guard

  • Ransomware Attacks Skyrocket as Threat Actors Double Down on Global Attacks

New studies have found that ransomware exploits are increasing, and a large percentage of victims are being hit multiple times. The NCC Group noted that there were 240 ransomware attacks in February 2023, a 45% increase from the record-high number of attacks in January. North America accounted for 47% of the global ransomware attacks, with Europe following (23%). Another report found that of all organisations hit by ransomware in the last 12 months, 28% were reported to be hit twice or more. Of the organisations breached, 69% reported phishing as the initial access vector.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/nccgroup-ransomware-attacks-up-february/

  • MSPs a Favoured Target of Supply Chain and Infrastructure Attacks

With the backdrop of increasing cyber attacks on supply chains, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are increasingly being favoured by attackers due to their pivotal role in the supply chain and access to the organisations they are serving.

When measured by sector, MSPs are the hardest hit by hackers in supply chain attacks.

ConnectWise’s cyber research unit analysed some 440,000 incidents that impacted MSPs and their clients and found that Lockbit led among the most prolific ransomware hijackers targeting MSPs, (42% of all ransomware attacks) followed by Cl0p at 11%. Whilst numerous other ransomware gangs also directly targeted MSPs in 2022.

Third party risk assessments should be carried out for all organisations in your supply chain and this is especially true of MSPs and external IT providers given the level of access they have into your systems and data.

https://www.msspalert.com/cybersecurity-research/msps-a-favored-target-of-supply-chain-and-infrastructure-attacks-connectwise-reports/

  • Fake Ransomware Gang Targets Organisations with Empty Data Leak Threats

Fake extortionists are piggybacking on data breaches and ransomware incidents, threatening companies with publishing or selling allegedly stolen data unless they get paid. Sometimes the actors add the menace of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack if the message recipient does not comply with the instructions in the messages. It is possible that victims are selected from publicly available sources, such as the initial attacker’s data leak site, social media, news reports, or company disclosures; in some cases a fake extortionist could learn about ransomware victims that have yet to disclose the cyber attack, making it more likely for victims to believe them.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fake-ransomware-gang-targets-us-orgs-with-empty-data-leak-threats/

  • GCHQ Updates Security Guidance for Boards

The UK’s leading cyber security agency GCHQ, has urged the country’s business leaders to “get to grips” with cyber risk after releasing an updated toolkit to help them do so. GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said its updated Cyber Security Board Toolkit is designed to boost the confidence of senior execs when discussing security with key stakeholders from the organisation.

Given the potentially serious impact breaches can have on business operations and growth, the agency wants boards to treat cyber risk with the same urgency as other business risks in areas such as financial and legal.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/gchq-updates-security-guidance/

  • More than 60% of Organisations have been Hit with Unplanned Downtime on a Monthly Basis

A recent report found that 52% of organisations had suffered a data breach in the past two years, an increase from 49% in 2022. In addition, 62% of organisations reported that business critical applications suffered from unplanned downtime due to a cyber security incident on at least a monthly basis, an increase from 54% in 2022. Other key findings include downtime costing roughly 2.7% of annual revenue, 39% of organisations believing cyber security incidents directly harmed their competitive position and 31% noting that it had reduced shareholder revenue. As a result of the impact, 95% of organisations reported that they had planned to increase their security budget over the next 2 years.

https://www.msspalert.com/cybersecurity-research/splunk-details-increase-in-data-breaches-downtime-due-to-cybersecurity-issues/

  • For Cyber Crime Gangs, Professionalisation Comes With “Corporate” Headaches

Today’s largest cyber crime gangs are operating like large enterprises, with $50 million dollars in annual revenue and around 80% of operating expenses going towards wages. Researchers have found that small, medium and especially large cyber crime gangs are operating just like their legitimate counterparts, from their managerial structure to employee benefits. The research highlights a worrying level of sophistication within cyber crime gangs; we are no longer dealing with the lone attacker in a dark room, but in some cases an enterprise with clear objectives.

https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-threats/cybercrime-professionalization-gangs-corporate-headaches

  • UK’s Offensive Hacking Unit Takes on Military Opponents and Terrorist Groups

Britain’s newly created offensive hacking unit, the National Cyber Force (NCF), has said it is engaged daily in operations to disrupt terrorist groups and military opponents of the UK. Operational details remain unclear, however the NCF says it is engaged in techniques to “undermine the tradecraft” of Russian, Chinese and other state-sponsored hackers and in “technical disruption” against terrorist groups, for example to prevent the dissemination of online propaganda. This news comes after the recent leak of files for Moscow, which had tasked an IT company to develop cyber warfare tools aimed at taking down infrastructure networks and scouring the internet for vulnerabilities.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/03/uks-offensive-hacking-unit-takes-on-military-opponents-and-terrorist-groups

  • Man Kills Himself After an AI Chatbot 'Encouraged' Him to Sacrifice Himself to Stop Climate Change

A man reportedly took his own life following a six-week-long conversation about the climate crisis with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Reports found that the chatbot had fed the mans worries about climate change, which had worsened his anxiety and later led to suicidal thoughts. The AI chatbot failed to dissuade the man from committing suicide and had in fact encouraged him to act on the thoughts and join the AI chatbot so “they could live together, as one person, in paradise”. This is despite the efforts made to limit these kind of events.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/31/man-ends-his-life-after-an-ai-chatbot-encouraged-him-to-sacrifice-himself-to-stop-climate-

  • Hackers Exploit WordPress Plugin Flaw That Gives Full Control of Millions of Sites

Hackers are actively exploiting a critical vulnerability in a widely used WordPress plugin that gives them the ability to take complete control of millions of sites, researchers said. The vulnerability is in Elementor Pro, a premium plugin running on more than 12 million sites powered by WordPress.  Despite the vulnerability being fixed, many have not installed the patch. Worryingly, this is a common theme in cyber; many organisations remain vulnerable due to them not having an efficient patching process and as a result, a number of the most exploited vulnerabilities have available patches.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/hackers-exploit-wordpress-plugin-flaw-that-gives-full-control-of-millions-of-sites/

Threats

Ransomware, Extortion and Destructive Attacks

Phishing & Email Based Attacks

BEC – Business Email Compromise

2FA/MFA

Malware

Mobile

BYOD

Internet of Things – IoT

Data Breaches/Leaks

Organised Crime & Criminal Actors

Cryptocurrency/Cryptomining/Cryptojacking/NFTs/Blockchain

Insider Risk and Insider Threats

Fraud, Scams & Financial Crime

Deepfakes

Insurance

Dark Web

Supply Chain and Third Parties

Cloud/SaaS

Hybrid/Remote Working

Shadow IT

Identity and Access Management

Passwords, Credential Stuffing & Brute Force Attacks

Social Media

Parental Controls and Child Safety

Regulations, Fines and Legislation

Governance, Risk and Compliance

Models, Frameworks and Standards

Careers, Working in Cyber and Information Security

Law Enforcement Action and Take Downs

Privacy, Surveillance and Mass Monitoring

Artificial Intelligence

Misinformation, Disinformation and Propaganda

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

Nation State Actors

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

Read More
Black Arrow Admin Black Arrow Admin

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 17 March 2023

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 17 March 2023:

-Almost Half of IT Leaders Consider Security as an Afterthought

-Over $10bn Lost To Online Frauds, with Pig Butchering and Investment Scams Accounting for $3B, Overtaking BEC – FBI Report Says

-Over 721 Million Passwords Were Leaked in 2022

-How Much of a Cyber Security Risk are Suppliers?

-90% of £5m+ Businesses Hit by Cyber Attacks

-Rushed Cloud Migrations Result in Escalating Technical Debt

-17 European Nations Targeted by Russia in 2023 as Espionage Ramping Up

-Microsoft Warns of Large-Scale Use of Phishing Kits

-BEC Volumes Double on Phishing Surge

-The Risk of Pasting Confidential Company Data in ChatGPT

-Ransomware Attacks have Entered a New Phase

-MI5 Launches New Agency to Tackle State-Backed Attacks

-Why Cyber Awareness Training is an Ongoing Process

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

  • Almost Half of IT Leaders Consider Security as an Afterthought

A recent industry report found that security is an afterthought for almost half of UK IT leaders, despite 92% of respondents agreeing that security risks had risen in the last five years. Additionally, 48% of respondents felt that the rapid development of new tools had caused challenges around security. The concept of security as an afterthought is worrying when considering that 39% of UK businesses identified a cyber attack within the past 12 months.

https://www.itsecurityguru.org/2023/03/14/almost-half-of-it-leaders-consider-security-as-an-afterthought-research-reveals

  • Over $10bn Lost to Online Frauds, with Pig Butchering and Investment Scams Accounting for $3B, Overtaking BEC – FBI Report Says

According to the latest FBI crime report pig butchering now accounts for $3 billion of the $10 billion total lost to online fraud. Pig butchering is a rising investment scam that uses the promise of romance and the lure of making easy cryptocurrency profit against its unsuspecting targets. The concept of pig butchering is to “fatten up” the victim, with small returns on cryptocurrency and personal interactions, often with an element of romance; eventually, the victim is lured into making a larger investment with the scammer. In addition to pig butchering, other investment scams are growing in provenance and are set to overtake Business Email Compromise (BEC) as a major earner for cyber criminals.

https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/pig-butchering-investment-scams-3b-cybercrime-threat-overtaking-bec

  • Over 721 Million Passwords were Leaked in 2022

A report published this week discovered 721.5 million exposed credentials online in 2022. Additionally, the report identified 72% of users reusing previously compromised passwords. The study also uncovered 8.6 billion personally identifiable information assets, including 67 million credit card numbers which were publicly available.

https://www.neowin.net/news/study-over-721-million-passwords-were-leaked-in-2022/

  • How Much of a Cyber Security Risk are Suppliers?

When your business is digitally connected to a service provider, you need to understand how a cyber security attack on their business can affect yours. You can have all the right measures in place to manage your own cyber risks, but this doesn’t matter if there are undiscovered vulnerabilities in your supply chain. Organisations need to audit the cyber security of suppliers at several stages of their relationship; you may benefit from specialist cyber security support if you can’t do this in-house. Ask hard questions and consider advising your suppliers that if their cyber security is not enough then you may take your business elsewhere. Many businesses now require suppliers to be certified to schemes such as ISO 27001; demonstrating your security posture to your customers is an important ticket to trade.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-much-of-a-cybersecurity-risk-are-my-suppliers-mqbwcf7p2

  • 90% of £5m+ Businesses Hit by Cyber Attacks

A study from Forbes found that 57% of small and medium-sized enterprises had suffered an online attack. Businesses with an annual turnover in excess of £5 million were even more likely to experience a cyber crime with the figure rising to nearly 90% of firms of this size suffering a cyber attack. To make matters worse, the study found that a significant proportion of British businesses are without any form of protection against online attacks.

https://www.itsecurityguru.org/2023/03/13/nine-in-10-5m-businesses-hit-by-cyber-attacks/

  • Rushed Cloud Migrations Result in Escalating Technical Debt

A cloud service provider found 83% of CIO’s are feeling pressured to stretch their budgets even further than before. 72% of CIOs admitted that they are behind in their digital transformation because of technical debt and 38% believed the accumulation of this debt is largely because of rushed cloud migrations. Respondents believed these rushed migrations caused for miscalculations in the cloud budget, which resulted in significant overspend.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2023/03/16/managing-cloud-costs/

  • Microsoft: 17 European Nations Targeted by Russia in 2023 as Espionage Ramping Up

According to an intelligence report from Microsoft, Russia has been ramping up its cyber espionage operations and this now includes 17 European nations. Of all 74 countries targeted, the UK ranked third, after the US and Poland.

https://www.securityweek.com/microsoft-17-european-nations-targeted-by-russia-in-2023-as-espionage-ramping-up/

  • Microsoft Warns of Large-Scale Use of Phishing Kits

Microsoft have found that phishing kits are being purchased and used to perform millions of phishing emails every day. In their report, Microsoft found the availability of purchasing such phishing kits was part of the industrialisation of the cyber criminal economy and lowered the barrier of entry for cyber crime. Microsoft identified phishing kits which had the capability to bypass multi factor authentication selling for as little as $300. The emergence of AI is only going to compound this.

https://thehackernews.com/2023/03/microsoft-warns-of-large-scale-use-of.html

  • BEC Volumes Double on Phishing Surge

The number of Business Email Compromise (BEC) incidents doubled last year according to security provider Secureworks. In their report, they found that the main initial access vectors for BEC were phishing and systems with known vulnerabilities, with each accounting for a third of initial accesses.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/bec-volumes-double-on-phishing/

  • The Risk of Pasting Confidential Company Data in ChatGPT

Researchers analysed the use of artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT and found that 4.9% of employees have provided company data to the tool; ChatGPT builds its knowledge on this and in turn, this knowledge is shared publicly. The risk is serious, with employees putting their organisation at risk of leaking sensitive and confidential information. The research found that 0.9% of employees are responsible for 80% of leaks caused by pasting company data into ChatGPT and this number is expected to rise.

https://securityaffairs.com/143394/security/company-data-chatgpt-risks.html

  • Ransomware Attacks have Entered a Heinous New Phase

With an increasing amount of victims refusing to pay, cyber criminal gangs are now resorting to new techniques; this includes the recent release of stolen naked photos of cancer patients and sensitive student records. Where encryption and a demand for payment were previously the de facto method for cyber criminals, this has now shifted to pure exfiltration. In a report, the FBI highlighted evolving and increasingly aggressive extortion behaviour, with actors increasingly threatening to release stolen data.

https://www.wired.com/story/ransomware-tactics-cancer-photos-student-records/

  • MI5 Launches New Agency to Tackle State-Backed Attacks

British intelligence agency MI5 have announced the creation of the National Protective Security Authority (NPSA), created as part of a major review of government defences. The NPSA is to operate out of MI5 and absorb and extend the responsibilities for the protection of national infrastructure. The NPSA will work with existing agencies such as the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Counter Terrorism Security Office (CTSO) to provide defensive advice to UK organisations.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/mi5-new-agency-tackle-statebacked/

  • Why Cyber Awareness Training is an Ongoing Process

A survey conducted by Hornetsecurity found that 80% of respondents believed remote working introduced extra cyber security risks and 75% were aware that personal devices are used to access sensitive data, fuelling the need for employees to be cyber aware. Where IT security training is only undertaken once, for example in block training, it is likely that participants will have forgotten a lot of the content after as little as a week; this means that for organisations to get the most out of training, they need to conduct frequent awareness training. By conducting frequent training there is more chance of trainees retaining the training content and allowing the organisation to shape a culture of cyber security.

https://www.hornetsecurity.com/en/security-information/why-cyber-awareness-training-is-an-ongoing-process/

Threats

Ransomware, Extortion and Destructive Attacks

Phishing & Email Based Attacks

BEC – Business Email Compromise

2FA/MFA

Malware

Mobile

Botnets

Denial of Service/DoS/DDOS

Internet of Things – IoT

Data Breaches/Leaks

Organised Crime & Criminal Actors

Cryptocurrency/Cryptomining/Cryptojacking/NFTs/Blockchain

Insider Risk and Insider Threats

Fraud, Scams & Financial Crime

Impersonation Attacks

Deepfakes

AML/CFT/Sanctions

Dark Web

Supply Chain and Third Parties

Software Supply Chain

Cloud/SaaS

Hybrid/Remote Working

Attack Surface Management

Identity and Access Management

Encryption

Passwords, Credential Stuffing & Brute Force Attacks

Social Media

Malvertising

Training, Education and Awareness

Regulations, Fines and Legislation

Governance, Risk and Compliance

Models, Frameworks and Standards

Data Protection

Law Enforcement Action and Take Downs

Privacy, Surveillance and Mass Monitoring

Artificial Intelligence

Misinformation, Disinformation and Propaganda

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

Nation State Actors

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.

Read More
Black Arrow Admin Black Arrow Admin

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 16 December 2022

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 16 December 2022:

-Executives Take More Cyber Security Risks Than Office Workers

-CISO Role is Diversifying from Technology to Leadership & Communication Skills

-How Emerging AIs, Like ChatGPT, Can Turn Anyone into a Ransomware and Malware Threat Actor

-Cyber Security Drives Improvements in Business Goals

-Incoming FCA Chair Says Crypto Firms Facilitate Money Laundering

-Managing Cyber Risk in 2023: The People Element

-What We Can't See Can Hurt Us

-Uber Suffers New Data Breach After Attack on Vendor, Info Leaked Online

-When Companies Compensate the Hackers, We All Foot the Bill

-HSE Cyber-Attack Costs Ireland $83m So Far

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

  • Executives Take More Cyber Security Risks Than Office Workers

IT software company Ivanti worked with cyber security experts and surveyed 6,500 executive leaders, cybersecurity professionals, and office workers to understand the perception of today’s cybersecurity threats and to find out how companies are preparing for yet-unknown future threats.

The report revealed that despite 97% of leaders and security professionals reporting their organisation is as prepared, or more prepared, to defend against cybersecurity attacks than they were a year ago, one in five wouldn’t bet a chocolate bar that they could prevent a damaging breach.

In fact, the study finds that organisations are racing to fortify against cyber attacks, but the industry still struggles with a reactive, checklist mentality. This is most pronounced in how security teams are prioritising patches. While 92% of security professionals reported they have a method to prioritise patches, they also indicated that all types of patches rank high – meaning none do.

“Patching is not nearly as simple as it sounds,” said Ivanti. “Even well-staffed, well-funded IT and security teams experience prioritisation challenges amidst other pressing demands. To reduce risk without increasing workload, organisations must implement a risk-based patch management solution and leverage automation to identify, prioritise, and even address vulnerabilities without excess manual intervention”.

Cyber security insiders view phishing, ransomware, and software vulnerabilities as top industry-level threats for 2023. Approximately half of respondents indicated they are “very prepared” to meet the growing threat landscape including ransomware, poor encryption, and malicious employees, but the expected safeguards such as deprovisioning credentials is ignored a third of a time and nearly half of those surveyed say they suspect a former employee or contractor still has active access to company systems and files.

The report also revealed that leaders engage in more dangerous behaviour and are four times more likely to be victims of phishing compared to office workers.

Additionally:

  • More than 1 in 3 leaders have clicked on a phishing link

  • Nearly 1 in 4 use easy-to-remember birthdays as part of their password

  • They are much more likely to hang on to passwords for years

  • And they are 5x more likely to share their password with people outside the company.

One survey taker shared, “We’ve experienced a few advanced phishing attempts and the employees were totally unaware they were being targeted. These types of attacks have become so much more sophisticated over the last two years – even our most experienced staff are falling prey to it.”

To cope with a rapidly expanding threat landscape, organisations must move beyond a reactive, rules-based approach.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/12/16/executives-take-more-cybersecurity-risks-than-office-workers/

  • CISO Role is Diversifying from Technology to Leadership & Communication Skills

The role of chief information security officer (CISO), a relatively new executive position, is undergoing some significant changes and an archetype has yet to emerge, a new global report from Marlin Hawk, an executive recruiting and leadership consultant, said.

CISOs are still more likely to serve on advisory boards or industry bodies than on the board of directors. Only 13% of the global CISOs analysed are women; approximately 20% are non-white. Each diversity dimension analysed is down one percentage point year-on-year.

According to James Larkin, managing partner at Marlin Hawk, “Today’s CISOs are taking up the mantle of responsibilities that have traditionally fallen solely to the chief information officer (CIO), which is to act as the primary gateway from the tech department into the wider business and the outside marketplace. This widening scope requires CISOs to be adept communicators to the board, the broader business, as well as the marketplace of shareholders and customers. By thriving in the ‘softer’ skill sets of communication, leadership, and strategy, CISOs are now setting the new industry standards of today and, I predict, will be progressing into the board directors of tomorrow.”

The job does not come without its downsides. For one, according to the search firm, many CISOs change roles and leave their jobs. Their skillset may not be adequate or new leaders get appointed to the job, they lack the necessary internal support, or their company may not have the required commitment to cyber security to make the job effective.

Key findings from the report include:

  • 45% of global CISOs have been in their current role for two years or less, down from 53% in 2021, with 18% turnover year-on-year. While there is still a lot of movement in the CISO seat, there is potentially some stabilisation emerging.

  • Approximately 62% of global CISOs were hired from another company, indicating a slight increase in the number of CISOs hired internally (38% were hired internally compared to 36% in 2021) but a large gap remains in appropriate successors.

  • 36% of CISOs analysed with a graduate degree received a higher degree in business administration or management. This is down 10% from last year (46% in 2021). Conversely, there has been an increase to 61% of CISOs receiving a higher degree in STEM subjects (up from 46% in 2021).

https://www.msspalert.com/cybersecurity-research/ciso-role-is-diversifying-from-technology-to-leadership-communication-skills/

  • How Emerging AIs, Like ChatGPT, Can Turn Anyone into a Ransomware and Malware Threat Actor

Ever since OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of November, commentators on all sides have been concerned about the impact AI-driven content-creation will have, particularly in the realm of cybersecurity. In fact, many researchers are concerned that generative AI solutions will democratise cyber crime.

With ChatGPT, any user can enter a query and generate malicious code and convincing phishing emails without any technical expertise or coding knowledge.

While security teams can also leverage ChatGPT for defensive purposes such as testing code, by lowering the barrier for entry for cyber attacks, the solution has complicated the threat landscape significantly. From a cyber security perspective, the central challenge created by OpenAI’s creation is that anyone, regardless of technical expertise, can create code to generate malware and ransomware on-demand.

Whilst it can be used for good to assist developers in writing code for good, it can (and already has) been used for malicious purposes. Examples including asking the bot to create convincing phishing emails or assist in reverse engineering code to find zero-day exploits that could be used maliciously instead of reporting them to a vendor.

ChatGPT does have inbuilt guardrails designed to prevent the solution from being used for criminal activity. For instance, it will decline to create shell code or provide specific instructions on how to create shellcode or establish a reverse shell and flag malicious keywords like phishing to block the requests.

The problem with these protections is that they’re reliant on the AI recognising that the user is attempting to write malicious code (which users can obfuscate by rephrasing queries), while there’s no immediate consequences for violating OpenAI’s content policy.

https://venturebeat.com/security/chatgpt-ransomware-malware/

  • Cyber Security Drives Improvements in Business Goals

Cyber threats should no longer be viewed as just an IT problem, but also a business problem, Deloitte said in its latest Future of Cyber study. Operational disruption, loss of revenue, and loss of customer trust are the top three significant impacts of cyber incidents. More than half, or 56%, of respondents told Deloitte they suffered related consequences to a moderate or large extent.

In 2021, the top three negative consequences from cyber incidents and breaches were operational disruption, which includes supply chain and the partner ecosystem, intellectual property theft, and a drop in share price. While operational disruption remained the top concern in 2022, loss of revenue and loss of customer trust and negative brand impact moved up in importance. Intellectual property theft and drop in share price dropped to eighth and ninth (out of ten) in ranking. Losing funding for a strategic initiative, loss of confidence in the integrity of the technology, and impact on employee recruitment and retention moved up in ranking in 2022. Respondents were also asked to mark two consequences they felt would be most important in 2023: Operational disruption and loss of revenue topped the list.

"Today, cyber means business, and it is difficult to overstate the importance of cyber as a foundational and integral business imperative," Deloitte noted in its report. "It [cyber] should be included in every functional area, as an essential ingredient for success—to drive continuous business value, not simply mitigate risks to IT."

Deloitte categorised organisations' cyber security maturity based on their adoption of cyber planning, risk management, and board engagement. Risk management included activities such as industry benchmarking, incident response, scenario planning, and qualitative and quantitative risk assessment.

Whether or not the organisation adopted any of these three practices hinged on stakeholders recognising the importance of cyber responsibility and engagement across the whole organisation, Deloitte said in its report. Examples included having a governing body that comprises IT and senior business leaders to oversee the cyber program, conducting incident-response scenario planning and simulation at the organisational and/or board level, regularly providing cyber updates to the board to secure funding, and conducting regular cyber awareness training for all employees.

https://www.darkreading.com/edge-threat-monitor/cybersecurity-drives-improvements-in-business-goals

  • Incoming FCA Chair Says Crypto Firms Facilitate Money Laundering

The man who will lead UK efforts to regulate cryptocurrency firms issued a stark condemnation of the sector on Wednesday, telling MPs that in his experience crypto platforms were “deliberately evasive”, facilitated money laundering at scale and created “massively untoward risk”.

The comments from Ashley Alder, the incoming chair of the Financial Conduct Authority, suggest that crypto firms hoping to build businesses in the UK will face an uphill battle when the FCA assumes new powers to regulate broad swaths of the sector.

They also put Alder, who will become FCA chair in February, on a potential collision course with the government’s aspiration to create a high quality crypto hub that fosters innovation, a vision ministers have remained loyal to even as the global crypto market lurches from crisis to crisis, epitomised by the collapse of FTX. The FCA declined to comment on whether their incoming chair’s views were at odds with those of the government.

Alder comments came during a sometimes terse appointment hearing with the cross-party Treasury select committee, where he faced sustained criticism for appearing virtually from Hong Kong and for his lack of familiarity with some parts of the UK market place and its accountability structures.

https://www.ft.com/content/7bf0a760-5fb5-4146-b757-1acc5fc1dee5

  • Managing Cyber Risk in 2023: The People Element

2022 has had many challenges from cyber war between Russia and Ukraine, continuing ransomware attacks, and a number of high-profile vulnerabilities and zero day attacks.  With the attack surface constantly expanding, CISOs and security leaders are acutely aware of the need to minimise risk across people, processes, and technology.

Top infrastructure risk: people

It’s common knowledge that it’s not if, but when, your organisation will be the target of a cyber attack. CISOs and security leaders seem to share the same opinion—according to Trend Micro’s latest Cyber Risk Index (CRI) (1H’2022), 85% of 4,100 respondents across four global regions said its somewhat to very likely they will experience a cyber attack in the next 12 months.  More concerning was 90% of respondents had at least one successful cyber attack in the past 12 months.

The CRI (1H’2022) also found that CISOs, IT practitioners, and managers identified that most organisations’ IT security objectives are not aligned with the business objectives, which could cause challenges when trying to implement a sound cyber security strategy.

It’s important to note that while ideal, avoiding a cyber attack isn’t the main goal—companies need to address critical challenges across their growing digital attack surface to enable faster detection and response, therefore minimising cyber risk.

While it's commonly assumed that security efforts should be largely focused on protecting critical servers and infrastructure, the human attack vector shouldn’t be so quickly forgotten.

https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/ciso/22/e/managing-cyber-risk.html

  • What We Can't See Can Hurt Us

In speaking with security and fraud professionals, visibility remains a top priority. This is no surprise, since visibility into the network, application, and user layers is one of the fundamental building blocks of both successful security programs and successful fraud programs. This visibility is required across all environments — whether on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, multicloud, hybrid, or otherwise.

Given this, it is perhaps a bit surprising that visibility in the cloud has lagged behind the move to those environments. This occurred partially because few options for decent visibility were available to businesses as they moved to the cloud. But it also partially happened because higher priority was placed on deploying to the cloud than on protecting those deployments from security and fraud threats.

This is unfortunate, since what we can't see can hurt us. That being said, cloud visibility is becoming a top priority for many businesses. There are a few areas where many businesses are looking for visibility to play a key role, including Compliance, Monitoring, Investigation, Response, API Discovery, Application Breaches, and Malicious User Detection.

Organisation have been a bit behind in terms of ensuring the requisite visibility into cloud environments. Whilst time has been lost, it does seem that gaining visibility into the network, application, and user layers is now a priority for many businesses. This is a positive development, as it enables those businesses to better mitigate the risks that operating blindly creates.

https://www.darkreading.com/edge-articles/what-we-can-t-see-can-hurt-us

  • Uber Suffers New Data Breach After Attack on Vendor, Info Leaked Online

Uber has suffered a new data breach after a threat actor leaked employee email addresses, corporate reports, and IT asset information stolen from a third-party vendor in a cyber security incident.

On Saturday last week, a threat actor named 'UberLeaks' began leaking data they claimed was stolen from Uber and Uber Eats on a hacking forum known for publishing data breaches. The leaked data includes numerous archives claiming to be source code associated with mobile device management platforms (MDM) used by Uber and Uber Eats and third-party vendor services.

The threat actor created four separate topics, allegedly for Uber MDM at uberhub.uberinternal.com and Uber Eats MDM, and the third-party Teqtivity MDM and TripActions MDM platforms. Each post refers to a member of the Lapsus$ hacking group who is believed to be responsible for numerous high-profile attacks, including a September cyber attack on Uber where threat actors gained access to the internal network and the company's Slack server.

News outlet BleepingComputer has been told that the newly leaked data consists of source code, IT asset management reports, data destruction reports, Windows domain login names and email addresses, and other corporate information. One of the documents seen by BleepingComputer includes email addresses and Windows Active Directory information for over 77,000 Uber employees.

While BleepingComputer initially thought this data was stolen during the September attack, Uber told BleepingComputer it believes it is related to a security breach on a third-party vendor.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/uber-suffers-new-data-breach-after-attack-on-vendor-info-leaked-online/

  • When Companies Compensate the Hackers, We All Foot the Bill

Companies are always absorbing costs that are seen as par for the course of budget planning: maintenance, upgrades, office supplies, wastage, shrinkage, etc. These costs ratchet up the price of a company's products and are then passed on to the consumer. Breaches in cyber security and paying out ransoms to hackers should be outside of this remit, and yet more than half of all companies admit to transferring the costs of data breaches on to consumers. Careless or ill-informed employees and other weaknesses in a company's protections lead to catastrophic losses to businesses of around $1,797,945 per minute — and the consumers are paying it off.

If a company estimates the recovery costs from a ransomware attack to exceed the requested payment from the hacker, then it feels like a no-brainer — they're better off just cutting their losses and giving in to the cyber criminal's demands. The issue is that this creates an unvirtuous circle of paying the hacker, which enforces nefarious behaviour and empowers hackers to increase the number and volume of ransoms.

When it comes to ransomware, 32% of companies pay off hackers, and, of that percentage, the average company only retrieves about 65% of its data. Giving in to hackers is counterintuitive. On an even more disturbing note, one study found that 80% of companies that paid a ransom were targeted a second time, with about 40% paying again and a majority of that 40% paying a higher ransom the second time round. This is ludicrous. With 33% of companies suspending operations following an attack, and nearly 40% resorting to laying off staff, it comes as no surprise that the downstream costs are picked up to some extent by the consumer.

As for smaller companies, about 50% of US small businesses don't have a cyber security plan in place, despite the fact that small businesses are three times more likely to be targeted by cyber criminals than larger companies. An average breach costs these companies around $200,000 and has put many out of business. It isn't simply the cost passed on to consumers, it's also the intangible assets, such as brand reputation.

When data is leaked and a site goes down, customers become rightly anxious when their information is sold to the highest bidder on the Dark Web. To safeguard against this, companies of all sizes should exploit automated solutions while training every single member of staff to recognise and report online threats. Paying a ransom does not guarantee the return of data, and for a smaller business, losing valuable customer information could cause long-term damage way beyond the initial attack.

Cyber security professionals, governments, and law enforcement agencies all advise companies to avoid paying the hackers' ransoms. This strategy is affirmed by the success businesses have had in retrieving the stolen data and turning the lights back on — 78% of organisations who say they did not pay a ransom were able to fully restore systems and data without the decryption key. This evidently is not enough to reassure companies who, at the click of a dangerous email being opened, have lost sensitive information and access to their systems and are desperate to get back online. There are many preventative techniques businesses can take advantage of before it even gets to that stage.

https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/when-companies-compensate-the-hackers-we-all-foot-the-bill

  • HSE Cyber-Attack Costs Ireland $83m So Far

The cost of the cyber-attack that hit the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) last year has officially reached €80m ($83.75m).

The figures come from a letter from HSE’s chief information officer, seen by The Irish Times. This comes months after the Department of Health suggested in February the attack could end up costing up to €100m ($104m). The letter confirmed that the costs reached €42m ($43.97m) in 2021 and almost €39m ($40.83m) until October of this year.

Ireland has a very capable national cyber security centre and a well-oiled CSIRT team that engages the public/private sector. If the cost does continue to escalate to €100m, that is the equivalent to everyone in the Republic of Ireland having been defrauded by €20. According to The Irish Times, the costs were said to be “enormous,” and the government has been asked to complete a comprehensive assessment of the impact caused by the breach.

The cyber-attack, believed to have been conducted by Russia-based state actors, was reportedly caused by a malicious Microsoft Excel file delivered via a phishing email. According to a December 2021 report, the file was opened at an HSE workstation in March 2021. The malware would have been latent for two months before the breach, which was reportedly discovered in May, two months later. A total of roughly 100,000 people had their personal data stolen during the cyber-attack.

Healthcare continues to be a target of attacks given their enormous attack surface across critical applications, cloud environments and IoT devices.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/hse-cyber-attack-ireland-dollar83m/

Threats

Ransomware, Extortion and Destructive Attacks

Phishing & Email Based Attacks

BEC – Business Email Compromise

Other Social Engineering; Smishing, Vishing, etc

Malware

Mobile

Internet of Things – IoT

Data Breaches/Leaks

Organised Crime & Criminal Actors

Cryptocurrency/Cryptomining/Cryptojacking/NFTs/Blockchain

Insider Risk and Insider Threats

Fraud, Scams & Financial Crime

AML/CFT/Sanctions

Insurance

Dark Web

Supply Chain and Third Parties

Software Supply Chain

Denial of Service DoS/DDoS

Cloud/SaaS

Hybrid/Remote Working

Encryption

API

Open Source

Passwords, Credential Stuffing & Brute Force Attacks

Social Media

Training, Education and Awareness

Parental Controls and Child Safety

Cyber Bullying, Cyber Stalking and Sextortion

Regulations, Fines and Legislation

Governance, Risk and Compliance

Models, Frameworks and Standards

Backup and Recovery

Data Protection

Careers, Working in Cyber and Information Security

Law Enforcement Action and Take Downs

Privacy, Surveillance and Mass Monitoring

Artificial Intelligence

Misinformation, Disinformation and Propaganda

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

Vulnerability Management

Vulnerabilities

Tools and Controls

Other News

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.

Read More
Black Arrow Admin Black Arrow Admin

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.

Read More
Black Arrow Admin Black Arrow Admin

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 24 June 2022

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 24 June 2022:

-The NCSC Sets Out the UK’s Cyber Threat Landscape

-We're Now Truly in The Era of Ransomware as Pure Extortion Without the Encryption

-5 Social Engineering Assumptions That Are Wrong

-Gartner: Regulation, Human Costs Will Create Stormy Cyber Security Weather Ahead

-Ransomware Attacks - This Is the Data That Cyber Criminals Really Want to Steal

-Cloud Email Threats Soar 101% in a Year

-80% of Firms Suffered Identity-Related Breaches in Last 12 Months

-After Being Breached Once, Many Companies Are Likely to Be Hit Again

-Do You Have Ransomware Insurance? Look at the Fine Print

-The Price of Stolen Info: Everything on Sale On The Dark Web

-How Companies Are Prioritizing Infosec and Compliance

-Businesses Risk ‘Catastrophic Financial Loss’ from Cyber Attacks, US Watchdog Warns

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

  • The NCSC Sets Out the UK’s Cyber Threat Landscape

The current state of the UK’s cyber threat landscape was outlined by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), during a keynote address on the final day of Infosecurity Europe 2022.

They described the cyber threats posed by nation-states, particularly Russia and China. Russia remains “one of the world’s most prolific cyber actors and dedicates significant resources to conducting cyber operations across the globe.”  The NCSC and international partner organisations have attributed a number of high-profile attacks related to the conflict to Russian state actors, including the Viasat incident on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Therefore, the NCSC recommends that organisations prepare for a dynamic situation that is liable to change rapidly.

The NCSC emphasised that a more significant long-term threat comes from China, citing GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming’s assertion that “Russia is affecting the weather, but China is shaping the climate.” She described the nation’s “highly sophisticated” activities in cyberspace, born out of its “increasing ambitions to project its influence beyond its borders.” This includes a keen interest in the UK’s commercial secrets.

In addition to nation-state attacks, the NCSC noted that cyber crime is continuing to rise, with ransomware a continuing concern. Attacks are expected to grow in scale, with threat actors likely to increasingly target managed service providers (MSPs) to gain access to a wider range of targets. More generally, cyber capabilities will become more commoditised over the next few years, meaning they are increasingly available to a larger group of would-be attackers who are willing to pay.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/ncsc-uk-cyber-threat-landscape/

  • We're Now Truly in The Era of Ransomware as Pure Extortion Without the Encryption

Increasingly cyber crime rings tracked as ransomware operators are turning toward primarily data theft and extortion – and skipping the encryption step altogether. Rather than scramble files and demand payment for the decryption keys, and all the faff in between in facilitating that, simply exfiltrating the data and demanding a fee to not leak it all is just as effective. This shift has been ongoing for many months, and is now virtually unavoidable.

The FBI and CISA this month warned about a lesser-known extortion gang called Karakurt, which demands ransoms as high as $13 million. Karakurt doesn't target any specific sectors or industries, and the gang's victims haven't had any of their documents encrypted and held to ransom. Instead, the crooks claim to have stolen data, with screenshots or copies of exfiltrated files as proof, and they threaten to sell it or leak it publicly if they don't receive a payment.

Some of these thieves offer discounted ransoms to corporations to encourage them to pay sooner, with the demanded payment getting larger the longer it takes to cough up the cash (or Bitcoin, as the case may be).

Additionally, some crime groups offer sliding-scale payment systems. So you pay for what you get, and depending on the amount of ransom paid you get a control panel, you get customer support, you get all of the tools you need."

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/25/ransomware_gangs_extortion_feature/

  • 5 Social Engineering Assumptions That Are Wrong

Social engineering is involved in the vast majority of cyber attacks, but a new report from Proofpoint has revealed five common social engineering assumptions that are not only wrong but are repeatedly subverted by malicious actors in their attacks.

  1. Threat actors don’t have conversations with targets.

  2. Legitimate services are safe from social engineering abuse.

  3. Attackers only use computers, not telephones.

  4. Replying to existing email conversations is safe.

  5. Fraudsters only use business-related content as lures.

Commenting on the report’s findings, Sherrod DeGrippo, Proofpoint’s Vice-President Threat Research and Detection, stated that the vendor has attempted to debunk faulty assumptions made by organisations and security teams so they can better protect employees against cyber crime. “Despite defenders’ best efforts, cyber criminals continue to defraud, extort and ransom companies for billions of dollars annually. Security-focused decision makers have prioritised bolstering defences around physical and cloud-based infrastructure, which has led to human beings becoming the most relied upon entry point for compromise. As a result, a wide array of content and techniques continue to be developed to exploit human behaviours and interests.”

Indeed, cyber criminals will go to creative and occasionally unusual lengths to carry out social engineering campaigns, making it more difficult for users to avoid falling victim to them.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3664932/5-social-engineering-assumptions-that-are-wrong.html#tk.rss_news

  • Gartner: Regulation, Human Costs Will Create Stormy Cyber Security Weather Ahead

Security teams should prepare for what researchers say will be a challenging environment through 2023, with increased pressure from government regulators, partners, and threat actors.

Gartner kicked off its Security & Risk Management Summit with the release of its analysts' assessments of the work ahead, which Richard Addiscott, the company's senior director analyst, discussed during his opening keynote address.

“We can’t fall into old habits and try to treat everything the same as we did in the past,” Addiscott said. “Most security and risk leaders now recognise that major disruption is only one crisis away. We can’t control it, but we can evolve our thinking, our philosophy, our program, and our architecture.”

Topping Gartner's list of eight predictions is a rise in the government regulation of consumer privacy rights and ransomware response, a widespread shift by enterprises to unify security platforms, more zero trust, and, troublingly, the prediction that by 2025 threat actors will likely have figured out how to "weaponise operational technology environments successfully to cause human casualties”, the cyber security report said.

https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/gartner-regulation-human-cost-stormy-cybersecurity-weather

  • Ransomware Attacks - This Is the Data That Cyber Criminals Really Want to Steal

There are certain types of data that criminals target the most, according to an analysis of attacks.

Data theft and extortion has become a common – and unfortunately effective – part of ransomware attacks, where in addition to encrypting data and demanding a ransom payment for the decryption key, gangs steal information and threaten to publish it if a payment isn't received.

These so-called double extortion attacks have become an effective tool in the arsenal of ransomware gangs, who leverage them to force victims to pay up, even in cases where data could be restored from offline backups, because the threat of sensitive information being published is too great.

Any stolen data is potentially useful to ransomware gangs, but according to analysis by researchers at cyber security company Rapid7, of 161 disclosed ransomware incidents where data was published, some data is seen as more valuable than others.

According to the report, financial services is the sector that is most likely to have customer data exposed, with 82% of incidents involving ransomware gangs accessing and making threats to release this data. Stealing and publishing sensitive customer information would undermine consumer trust in financial services organisations: while being hacked in the first place would be damaging enough, some business leaders might view paying a ransom to avoid further damage caused by data leaks to be worth it.

The second most-leaked type of file in ransomware attacks against financial services firms, featuring in 59% of disclosures from victims, is employee personally identifiable information (PII) and data related to human resources. 

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ransomware-attacks-this-is-the-data-that-cyber-criminals-really-want-to-steal/

  • Cloud Email Threats Soar 101% in a Year

The number of email-borne cyber-threats blocked by Trend Micro surged by triple digits last year, highlighting the continued risk from conventional attack vectors.

The vendor stopped over 33.6 million such threats reaching customers via cloud-based email in 2021, a 101% increase. This included 16.5 million phishing emails, a 138% year-on-year increase, of which 6.5 million were credential phishing attempts.

Trend Micro also blocked 3.3 million malicious files in cloud-based emails, including a 134% increase in known threats and a 221% increase in unknown malware.

The news comes as Proofpoint warned in a new report of the continued dangers posed by social engineering, and the mistaken assumptions many users make. 

Many users don’t realise that threat actors may spend considerable time and effort building a rapport over email with their victims, especially if they’re trying to conduct a business email compromise (BEC) attack, it said.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/cloud-email-threats-soar-101-in-a/

  • 80% of Firms Suffered Identity-Related Breaches in Last 12 Months

Rapidly growing employee identities, third-party partners, and machine nodes have companies scrambling to secure credential information, software secrets, and cloud identities, according to researchers.

In a survey of IT and identity professionals from Dimensional Research, almost every organisation — 98% — experienced rapid growth in the number of identities that have to be managed, with that growth driven by expanding cloud usage, more third-party partners, and machine identities. Furthermore, businesses are also seeing an increase in breaches because of this, with 84% of firms suffering an identity-related breach in the past 12 months, compared with 79% in a previous study covering two years.

The number and complexity of identities organisations are having to manage and secure is increasing. Whenever there is an increase in identities, there is a corresponding heightened risk of identity-related breaches due to them not being properly managed and secured, and with the attack surfaces also growing exponentially, these breaches can occur on multiple fronts.

For the most part, organisations focus on employee identities, which 70% consider to be the most likely to be breached and 58% believe to have the greatest impact, according to the 2022 "Trends in Securing Digital Identities" report based on the survey. Yet third-party partners and business customers are significant sources of risk as well, with 35% and 25% of respondents considering those to be a major source of breaches, respectively.

https://www.darkreading.com/operations/identity-related-breaches-last-12-months

  • After Being Breached Once, Many Companies Are Likely to Be Hit Again

Cymulate announced the results of a survey, revealing that two-thirds of companies who have been hit by cyber crime in the past year have been hit more than once, with almost 10% experiencing 10 or so more attacks a year.

Research taken from 858 security professionals surveyed across North America, EMEA, APAC and LATAM across a wide range of industries including technology, banking, finance and government, also highlighted larger companies hit by cyber crime are experiencing shorter disruption time and damage to business with 40% reported low damage compared with medium-size businesses (less than 2,500 employees) which had longer recovery times and more business affecting damage.

Other highlights

  • 40% of respondents admitted to being breached over the past 12 months.

  • After being breached once, statistics showed they were more likely to be hit again than not (66%).

  • Malware (55%), and more specifically ransomware (40%) and DDoS (32%) were the main forms of cyber attacks experienced by those surveyed.

  • Attacks primarily occurred via end-user phishing (56%), via third parties connected to the enterprise (37%) or direct attacks on enterprise networks (34%).

  • 22% of companies publicly disclosed cyber attacks in the worst-case breaches, with 35% needing to hire security consultants, 12% dismissing their current security professionals and 12% hiring public relations consultants to deal with the repercussions to their reputations. Top three best practices for cyber attack prevention, mitigation and remediation include multi-factor authentication (67%), proactive corporate phishing and awareness campaigns (53%), and well-planned and practiced incident response plans (44%). Least privilege also ranked highly, at 43%.

  • 29% of attacks come from insider threats – intentionally or unintentionally.

  • Leadership and cyber security teams who meet regularly to discuss risk reduction are more cyber security-ready – those who met 15 times a year incurred zero breaches whereas those who suffered six or more breaches met under nine times on average.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/06/21/companies-hit-by-cybercrime/

  • Do You Have Ransomware Insurance? Look at the Fine Print

Insurance exists to protect the insured party against catastrophe, but the insurer needs protection so that its policies are not abused – and that's where the fine print comes in. However, in the case of ransomware insurance, the fine print is becoming contentious and arguably undermining the usefulness of ransomware insurance.

In recent years, ransomware insurance has grown as a product field because organisations are trying to buy protection against the catastrophic effects of a successful ransomware attack. Why try to buy insurance? Well, a single, successful attack can just about wipe out a large organisation, or lead to crippling costs – NotPetya alone led to a total of $10bn in damages.

Ransomware attacks are notoriously difficult to protect against completely. Like any other potentially catastrophic event, insurers stepped in to offer an insurance product. In exchange for a premium, insurers promise to cover many of the damages resulting from a ransomware attack.

Depending on the policy, a ransomware policy could cover loss of income if the attack disrupts operations, or loss of valuable data, if data is erased due to the ransomware event. A policy may also cover you for extortion – in others, it will refund the ransom demanded by the criminal.

The exact payout and terms will of course be defined in the policy document, also called the "fine print." Critically, fine print also contains exclusions, in other words circumstances under which the policy won't pay out. And therein lies the problem.

https://thehackernews.com/2022/06/do-you-have-ransomware-insurance-look.html

  • The Price of Stolen Info: Everything on Sale on The Dark Web

What is the price for personal information, including credit cards and bank accounts, on the dark web?

Privacy Affairs researchers concluded that criminals using the dark web need only spend $1,115 for a complete set of a person’s account details, enabling them to create fake IDs and forge private documents, such as passports and driver’s licenses.

Access to other information is becoming even cheaper. The Dark Web Price Index 2022 – based on data scanning dark web marketplaces, forums, and websites, revealed:

  • Credit card details and associated information cost between $17-$120

  • Online banking login information costs $45

  • Hacked Facebook accounts cost $45

  • Cloned VISA with PIN cost $20

  • Stolen PayPal account details, with minimum $1000 balances, cost $20.

In December 2021, about 4.5 million credit cards went up for sale on the dark web, the study found. The average price ranged from $1-$20.

Scammers can buy full credit card details, including CVV number, card number, associated dates, and even the email, physical address and phone number. This enables them to penetrate the credit card processing chain, overriding any security countermeasures.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/06/22/stolen-info-sale-dark-web/

  • How Companies Are Prioritising Infosec and Compliance

New research conducted by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), examines the impact of the compliance budget on security strategy and priorities. It describes areas for which companies prioritise information security and compliance, which leaders control information security spending, how compliance has shifted the overall security strategy of the organisation, and the solutions and tools on which organisations are focusing their technology spending.

The findings cover three critical areas of an organisation’s security and compliance posture: information security and IT audit and compliance, data security and data privacy, and security and compliance spending.

One key takeaway is that merging security and compliance priorities addresses regulatory control gaps while improving the organisation’s security posture. Respondents revealed insights on how they handle compliance, who is responsible for compliance and security responsibilities, and what compliance-related security challenges organisations face.

Additional findings:

  • Companies found the need to shift their information security strategy to address compliance priorities (93%).

  • Information security and IT compliance priorities are generally aligned (89%).

  • Existing security tools have to address data privacy considerations going forward (76%).

  • Managing an organisation’s multiple IT environments and the controls that govern those environments is the greatest challenge in the IT audit and compliance space (39%).

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/06/24/companies-infosec-compliance-priorities/

  • Businesses Risk ‘Catastrophic Financial Loss’ from Cyber Attacks, US Watchdog Warns

A US Government watchdog has warned that private insurance companies are increasingly backing out of covering damages from major cyber attacks — leaving businesses facing “catastrophic financial loss” unless another insurance model can be found.

The growing challenge of covering cyber risk is outlined in a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which calls for a government assessment of whether a federal cyber insurance option is needed.

The report draws on threat assessments from the National Security Agency (NSA), Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Department of Justice, to quantify the risk of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, identifying vulnerable technologies that might be attacked and a range of threat actors capable of exploiting them.

Citing an annual threat assessment released by the ODNI, the report finds that hacking groups linked to Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea pose the greatest threat to US infrastructure — along with certain non-state actors like organised cyber criminal gangs.

Given the wide and increasingly skilled range of actors willing to target US entities, the number of cyber incidents is rising at an alarming rate.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/23/23180115/gao-infrastructure-catastrophic-financial-loss-cyberattacks-insurance

Threats

Ransomware

Phishing & Email Based Attacks

Other Social Engineering

Malware

Mobile

Internet of Things – IoT

Data Breaches/Leaks

Cryptocurrency/Cryptomining/Cryptojacking/NFTs/Blockchain

Insider Risk and Insider Threats

Fraud, Scams & Financial Crime

Supply Chain and Third Parties

Cloud/SaaS

Identity and Access Management

Open Source

Training, Education and Awareness

Privacy

Regulations, Fines and Legislation

Law Enforcement Action and Take Downs

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

Vulnerabilities

Sector Specific

Financial Services Sector

SMBs – Small and Medium Businesses

Legal

Health/Medical/Pharma Sector

Retail/eCommerce

Manufacturing

CNI, OT, ICS, IIoT and SCADA

Reports Published in the Last Week

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.

Read More
Black Arrow Admin Black Arrow Admin

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 27 May 2022

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 27 May 2022

-How Confident Are Companies in Managing Their Current Threat Exposure?

-'There's No Ceiling': Ransomware's Alarming Growth Signals a New Era, Verizon DBIR Finds

-Paying Ransom Doesn’t Guarantee Data Recovery

-Report: Frequency of Cyber Attacks in 2022 Has Increased by Almost 3M

-New Zoom Flaws Could Let Attackers Hack Victims Just by Sending them a Message

-VMware, Airline Targeted as Ransomware Chaos Reigns

-Crypto Hacks Aren't a Niche Concern; They Impact Wider Society

-State of Cyber Security Report 2022 Names Ransomware and Nation-State Attacks as Biggest Threats

-Vishing (Voice Phishing) Cases Reach All Time High

-DeFi (Decentralised Finance) Is Getting Pummelled by Cyber Criminals

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

  • How Confident Are Companies In Managing Their Current Threat Exposure?

Crossword Cybersecurity has released a report based on the findings of a survey of over 200 CISOs and senior UK cyber security professionals. The paper reveals companies are more concerned and exposed to cyber threats than ever before, with 61 percent describing themselves as at best only “fairly confident” at managing their current cyber security threat exposure, which should raise some eyebrows around the boardroom.

Respondents also feared their cyber strategy would not keep pace with the rate of tech innovation and changes in the threat landscape. 40 percent of organisations believe their existing cyber strategy will be outdated in two years, and a further 37 percent within three years. Additional investment is needed to address longer term planning, with 44 percent saying they only have sufficient resources in their organisation to focus on the immediate and mid-term cyber threats and tech trends.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/05/26/organizations-cyber-strategy/

  • 'There's No Ceiling': Ransomware's Alarming Growth Signals A New Era, Verizon DBIR Finds

Ransomware has become so efficient, and the underground economy so professional, that traditional monetisation of stolen data may be on its way out.

The past year has seen a staggering acceleration in ransomware incidents, with 25% of all breaches containing a ransomware component.

That's the top-line finding in the 2022 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), which found that ransomware events in conjunction with breaches ballooned 13% in the past year — last year's report found that just 12% of incidents were ransomware-related. That translates into a rate of increase that's more than the previous five years of growth combined.

The 15th annual DBIR analysed 23,896 security incidents, of which 5,212 were confirmed breaches. About four in five of those were the handiwork of external cyber criminal gangs and threat groups, according to Verizon. And according to Alex Pinto, manager of the Verizon Security Research team, these nefarious types are finding it easier and easier to earn an ill-gotten living with ransomware, making other types of breaches increasingly obsolete.

"Everything in cyber crime has become so commoditised, so much like a business now, and it's just too darn efficient of a methodology for monetising their activity," he tells Dark Reading, noting that with the emergence of ransomware as-a-service (RaaS) and initial-access brokers, it takes very little skill or effort to get into the extortion game.

"Before, you had to get in somehow, look around, and find something worth stealing that would have a reseller on the other end," he explains. "In 2008 when we started the DBIR, it was by and large payment-card data that was stolen. Now, that has fallen precipitously because they can just pay for access someone else established and install rented ransomware, and it's so much simpler to reach the same goal of getting money."

https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/ransomware-alarming-growth-verizon-dbir

  • Paying Ransom Doesn’t Guarantee Data Recovery

A Veeam report has found that 72% of organisations had partial or complete attacks on their backup repositories, dramatically impacting the ability to recover data without paying the ransom.

Additionally, 76% of organisations admitted to paying the ransom. But while 52% paid the ransom and were able to recover data, 24% paid the ransom but were still not able to recover data.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/05/24/paying-ransom-recover-data-video/

  • Report: Frequency Of Cyber Attacks in 2022 Has Increased By Almost 3M

Kaspersky has released a new report revealing a growing number of cyber attacks on small businesses in 2022 so far. Researchers compared the period between January and April 2022 to the same period in 2021, finding increases in the numbers of Trojan-PSW detections, internet attacks and attacks on Remote Desktop Protocol.

In 2022, the number of Trojan-PSW (Password Stealing Ware) detections increased globally by almost a quarter compared to the same period in 2021 一 4,003,323 to 3,029,903. Trojan-PSW is a malware that steals passwords, along with other account information, which then allows attackers to gain access to the company network and steal sensitive information.

Internet attacks grew from 32,500,000 globally in the analysed period of 2021 to almost 35,400,000 in 2022. These can include web pages with redirects to exploits, sites containing exploits and other malicious programs, botnet command & control centres and more.

The number of attacks on Remote Desktop Protocol grew in the U.S. (while dropping slightly globally), going from 47.5 million attacks in the first trimester of 2021 to 51 million in the same period of 2022. With the widespread shift toward remote work, many companies have introduced Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), a technology that enables computers on the same corporate network to be linked together and accessed remotely, even when the employees are at home.

With small business owners typically handling numerous responsibilities at the same time, cyber security is often an afterthought. However, this disregard for IT security is being exploited by cyber criminals. The Kaspersky study sought to assess the threats that pose an increasing danger to entrepreneurs.

https://venturebeat.com/2022/05/20/report-frequency-of-cyberattacks-in-2022-has-increased-by-almost-3m/

  • New Zoom Flaws Could Let Attackers Hack Victims Just By Sending Them A Message

Popular video conferencing service Zoom has resolved as many as four security vulnerabilities, which could be exploited to compromise another user over chat by sending specially crafted Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) messages and execute malicious code.

With Zoom's chat functionality built on top of the XMPP standard, successful exploitation of the issues could enable an attacker to force a vulnerable client to masquerade a Zoom user, connect to a malicious server, and even download a rogue update, resulting in arbitrary code execution stemming from a downgrade attack.

https://thehackernews.com/2022/05/new-zoom-flaws-could-let-attackers-hack.html

  • VMware, Airline Targeted As Ransomware Chaos Reigns

Global ransomware incidents target everything from enterprise servers to grounding an airline, with one India-based group even taking a Robin Hood approach to extortion with the "GoodWill" strain.

Ransomware incidents are on the rise and this week proved no exception, with the discovery of a Linux-based ransomware family called Cheerscrypt targeting VMware ESXi servers and an attack on SpiceJet, India’s second largest airline.

Meanwhile, an oddball "GoodWill" variant purports to help the needy.

The Cheerscrypt ransomware variant was uncovered by Trend Micro and relies on the double-extortion scheme to coerce victims to pay the ransom – i.e., stealing data as well and threatening to leak it if victims don’t pay up.

Because of the popularity of ESXi servers for creating and running multiple virtual machines (VMs) in enterprise settings, the Cheerscrypt ransomware could be appealing to malicious actors looking to rapidly distribute ransomware across many devices.

Meanwhile, low-cost carrier SpiceJet faced a ransomware attack this week, causing flight delays of between two and five hours as well as rendering unavailable online booking systems and customer service portals.

While the company’s IT team announced on Twitter that it had successfully prevented the attempted attack before it was able to fully breach all internal systems and take them over, customers and employees are still experiencing the ramifications.

https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/vmware-airline-targeted-as-ransomware-chaos-reigns

  • Crypto Hacks Aren't A Niche Concern; They Impact Wider Society

Million-dollar crypto heists are becoming more common as the currency starts to go mainstream; prevention and enforcement haven't kept pace.

The attack against the Ronin Network in March was quickly speculated to be one of the largest cryptocurrency hacks of all time. Approximately $540 million was stolen from the cryptocurrency and NFT games company in a combination of USDC and Etherium, with $400 million of the stolen funds owned by customers playing the game Axie Infinity.

This attack was the latest in a string of thefts perpetrated against crypto and should be a jolt to both the digital asset and cyber security communities to bring the security of cryptocurrencies into line.

The current vogue of large-scale crypto heists goes as far back as the 2014 Mt. Gox hack (another cryptocurrency exchange built around a game, Magic: The Gathering), which went into bankruptcy after losing $460 million of assets.

However, the trend has been gathering pace. In the months leading up to the Ronin Network attack, cyber criminals stole nearly $200 million worth of cryptocurrency from the crypto trading platform BitMart, attacked 400 Crypto.com users, and orchestrated NFT-related scams, to name but a few incidents.

There is often an uncomfortable tendency to see these attacks as something that takes place in isolation in a remote part of the Internet when they actually have a huge impact on thousands of people.

https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/crypto-hacks-aren-t-a-niche-concern-they-impact-wider-society

  • State Of Cyber Security Report 2022 Names Ransomware And Nation-State Attacks As Biggest Threats

Ransomware is the biggest concern for cyber security professionals, according to results of the Infosecurity Group’s 2022 State of Cybersecurity Report, produced by Infosecurity Europe and Infosecurity Magazine.

Cyber Security Professionals' Number One Concern: Ransomware.

This attack vector was voted as the biggest cyber security trend (28%) by the survey respondents (including CISOs, CTOs, CIOs and academics), marking a significant change from the previous report in 2020, where ransomware did not break the top three. This follows surging ransomware incidents in 2021, with ransom demands and payments growing significantly last year. A number of these attacks have also impacted critical industries, for example, taking down the US’ largest fuel pipeline.

The survey respondents also highlighted the evolving tactics and capabilities of ransomware attackers. This includes threat actors becoming more sophisticated as they evolve into loosely coupled service-based operations.

A number of cyber security professionals believe that cyber-criminal groups will become more guarded in their approach due to new initiatives by governments and law enforcement to tackle these activities.

Cyber Security Professionals' Number Two Concern: Nation-State Attacks.

The second biggest concern for survey respondents was geopolitics/nation-state attacks (24%), particularly the shifting hostilities from the Russia-Ukraine conflict into cyberspace. Russia already had a reputation for conducting offensive cyber operations prior to the conflict, and the Ukrainian government and critical services have experienced numerous attacks both before and since the war began.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/2022-state-industry-report/

  • Vishing (Voice Phishing) Cases Reach All Time High

Vishing (voice phishing) cases have increased almost 550 percent over the last twelve months (Q1 2021 to Q1 2022), according to the latest Quarterly Threat Trends & Intelligence Report from Agari and PhishLabs.

In Q1 2022, Agari and PhishLabs detected and mitigated hundreds of thousands of phishing, social media, email, and dark web threats targeting a broad range of enterprises and brands. The report provides an analysis of the latest findings and insights into key trends shaping the threat landscape.

According to the findings, vishing attacks have overtaken business email compromise (BEC) as the second most reported response-based email threat since Q3 2021. By the end of the year, more than one in four of every reported response-based threat was a vishing attack, and this makeup continued through Q1 2022.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/05/24/vishing-cases-increased/

  • DeFi (Decentralised Finance) Is Getting Pummelled By Cyber Criminals

Decentralised finance lost $1.8 billion to cyber attacks last year — and 80% of those events were the result of vulnerable code, analysts say.

Decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms — which connect various cryptocurrency blockchains to create a decentralised infrastructure for borrowing, trading, and other transactions — promise to replace banks as a secure and convenient way to invest in and spend cryptocurrency. But in addition to attracting hordes of new users with dreams of digital fortune, cyber criminals have discovered them to be an easy target, wiping out wallets to zero balances in a moment, tanking whole markets while profiting, and more, according to a new report.

Analysts with Bishop Fox found that DeFi platforms lost $1.8 billion to cyber attacks in 2021 alone. With a total of 65 events observed, 90% of the losses came from unsophisticated attacks, according to the report, which points to the lax cyber security practices of the sector.

DeFi averaged five attacks per week last year, with most of them (51%) coming from the exploitation of "smart contracts" bugs, the analysts found. Smart contracts are essentially records of transactions, stored on the blockchain.

Other top DeFi attack vectors include cryptowallets, protocol design flaws, and so-called "rug-pull" scams (where investors are lured to a new cryptocurrency project that is then abandoned, leaving targets with a worthless currency). But taken together, 80% of all events were caused by the use (and re-use) of buggy code, according to the report.

https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/defi-pummeled-by-cybercriminals

Threats

Ransomware

BEC – Business Email Compromise

Phishing & Email Based Attacks

Other Social Engineering

Malware

Mobile

BYOD

Data Breaches/Leaks

Organised Crime & Criminal Actors

Cryptocurrency/Cryptomining/Cryptojacking/NFTs

Insider Risk and Insider Threats

Dark Web

Supply Chain and Third Parties

Denial of Service DoS/DDoS

Cloud/SaaS

Attack Surface Management

Open Source

Privacy

Passwords & Credential Stuffing

Regulations, Fines and Legislation

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.

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.

Read More
Black Arrow Admin Black Arrow Admin

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 20 May 2022

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 20 May 2022

-Fifth of Businesses Say Cyber Attack Nearly Broke Them

-Weak Security Controls and Practices Routinely Exploited for Initial Access

-How Do Ransomware Attacks Impact Victim Organisations’ Stock?

-Prioritise Patching Vulnerabilities Associated with Ransomware

-Researchers Warn of Advanced Persistent Threats/Nation State Actors (APTs), Data Leaks as Serious Threats Against UK Financial Sector

-Remote Work Hazards: Attackers Exploit Weak WiFi, Endpoints, and the Cloud

-Small Businesses Under Fire from Password Stealers

-Email Is the Riskiest Channel for Data Security

-Phishing Attacks for Initial Access Surged 54% in Q1

-State of Internet Crime in Q1 2022: Bot Traffic on The Rise, And More

-Fears Grow for Smaller Nations After Ransomware Attack on Costa Rica Escalates

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

  • Fifth of Businesses Say Cyber Attack Nearly Broke Them

A fifth of US and European businesses have warned that a serious cyber attack nearly rendered them insolvent, with most (87%) viewing compromise as a bigger threat than an economic downturn, according to Hiscox.

The insurer polled over 5000 businesses in the US, UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium to compile its annual Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report.

It revealed the potentially catastrophic financial damage that a serious cyber-attack can wreak. The number claiming to have nearly been brought down by a breach increased 24% compared to the previous year.

Nearly half (48%) of respondents said they suffered an attack over the past 12 months, a 12% increase from the previous report’s findings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, businesses in seven out of eight countries see cyber as their biggest threat.

Yet perception appears to vary greatly depending on whether an organisation has suffered a serious compromise or not. While over half (55%) of total respondents said they view cyber as a high-risk area, the figure among companies that have not yet suffered an attack is just 36%.

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/fifth-of-businesses-cyber-attack/

  • Weak Security Controls and Practices Routinely Exploited for Initial Access

Cyber actors routinely exploit poor security configurations (either misconfigured or left unsecured), weak controls, and other poor cyber hygiene practices to gain initial access or as part of other tactics to compromise a victim’s system. A joint Cybersecurity Advisory by the cyber security authorities of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom identifies commonly exploited controls and practices and includes best practices to mitigate the issues.

Malicious cyber actors often exploit the following common weak security controls, poor configurations, and poor security practices to employ the initial access techniques.

  • Multifactor authentication (MFA) is not enforced

  • Incorrectly applied privileges or permissions and errors within access control lists

  • Software is not up to date

  • Use of vendor-supplied default configurations or default login usernames and passwords

  • Remote services, such as a virtual private network (VPN), lack sufficient controls to prevent unauthorised access

  • Strong password policies are not implemented

  • Cloud services are unprotected

  • Open ports and misconfigured services are exposed to the internet

  • Failure to detect or block phishing attempts

  • Poor endpoint detection and response.

https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/ncas/alerts/aa22-137a

  • How Do Ransomware Attacks Impact Victim Organisations’ Stock?

Ransomware has developed into an extremely lucrative business model with little risk involved for the threat actors. Couple this with the willingness of most victim organisations to pay the ransom demand under the assumption it will return business operations to normal - ultimately encouraging more attacks - and we have a big problem with no easy remedies.

Back in 2021, Cybereason published a report titled Ransomware Attacks and the True Cost to Business that revealed the various costs that organisations face after falling victim to a ransomware attack. Here are some of the most significant findings that stood out:

  • Two-thirds of ransomware victims said that they endured a significant loss of revenue following the attack

  • More than half (53%) of organisations suffered damage to their brand and reputation after a ransomware infection

  • A third of those who fell to ransomware lost C-level talent in the attack’s aftermath

  • Three in 10 organisations had no choice but to lay off employees due to the financial pressures resulting from a ransomware incident

  • A quarter of ransomware victims said that they needed to suspend operations.

https://www.msspalert.com/cybersecurity-guests/how-do-ransomware-attacks-impact-victim-organizations-stock/

  • Prioritise Patching Vulnerabilities Associated with Ransomware

In the last quarter, ransomware attacks have made mainstream headlines on a near-daily basis, with groups like Lapsus$ and Conti’s names splashed across the page. Major organisations like Okta, Globant and Kitchenware maker Meyer Corporation have all fallen victim, and they are very much not alone. The data indicates that increasing vulnerabilities, new advanced persistent threat (APT) groups and new ransomware families are contributing to ransomware’s continued prevalence and profitability.

The top stats include:

  • 22 new vulnerabilities and nine new weaknesses have been associated with ransomware since January 2022; of the 22, a whopping 21 are considered of critical or high risk severity

  • 19 (out of 22) of the newly-added vulnerabilities are associated with the Conti ransomware gang

  • Three new APT groups (Exotic Lily, APT 35, DEV-0401) and four new ransomware families (AvosLocker, Karma, BlackCat, Night Sky) are deploying ransomware to attack their targets

  • 141 of CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEVs) are being used by ransomware operators – including 18 newly identified this quarter

  • 11 vulnerabilities tied to ransomware remain undetected by popular scanners

  • 624 unique vulnerabilities were found within the 846 healthcare products analysed.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/05/19/increase-ransomware-vulnerabilities/

  • Researchers Warn of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), Data Leaks as Serious Threats Against UK Financial Sector

Researchers say that geopolitical tension, ransomware, and cyber attacks using stolen credentials threaten the UK's financial sector.

KELA's security team published a report examining the cyber security issues and attacks that surfaced in 2021 and early 2022, specifically focused on the United Kingdom's banks and other financial services.

The UK was one of the first countries to stand with Ukraine after the invasion by Russia. This could make UK organisations a tempting target for threat actors siding with Russia - whether by state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) groups or hacktivists. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) previously warned businesses to shore up their cyber security following Russia's assault.

APTs are often responsible for attacking the financial sector: account credentials, card numbers, and the personally identifiable information (PII) of customers are useful not only in social engineering and identity theft but also to make fraudulent purchases or for card cloning.

APTs target organisations worldwide, and those located in the UK are no exception. Over the past few years, APTs, including the Chinese APT40 and APT31, have utilised vulnerabilities, including ProxyLogon, to compromise UK businesses.

"In general, APTs may target the financial sector to commit fraud, burglarise ATMs, execute transactions, and penetrate organisations' internal financial systems," KELA says. "Although specific threats to the UK financial sector have not been identified, there is no doubt that the UK has occasionally been a target of APT groups during 2021."

Exposed corporate information and leaked credentials are also of note. After browsing Dark Web forums, the researchers found that UK data is "in demand" by cyber criminals who are seeking PII, access credentials, and internal data.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/researchers-warn-of-apts-data-leaks-as-serious-threats-against-uk-financial-sector/

  • Remote Work Hazards: Attackers Exploit Weak WiFi, Endpoints, and the Cloud

Infoblox unveils a global report examining the state of security concerns, costs, and remedies. As the pandemic and uneven shutdowns stretch into a third year, organisations are accelerating digital transformation projects to support remote work. Meanwhile, attackers have seized on vulnerabilities in these environments, creating more work and larger budgets for security teams.

1,100 respondents in IT and cyber security roles in 11 countries – United States, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, United Arab Emirates, Australia, and Singapore – participated in the survey.

The surge in remote work has changed the corporate landscape significantly – and permanently. 52% of respondents accelerated digital transformation projects, 42% increased customer portal support for remote engagement, 30% moved apps to third party cloud providers, and 26% shuttered physical offices for good. These changes led to the additions of VPNs and firewalls, a mix of corporate and employee owned devices as well as cloud and on-premises DDI servers to manage data traffic across the expanded network.

The hybrid workforce reality is causing greater concerns with data leakage, ransomware and attacks through remote access tools and cloud services. Respondents indicate concerns about their abilities to counter increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks with limited control over employees, work-from-home technologies, and vulnerable supply chain partners. The sophistication of state-sponsored malware also is a source of worry for many.

Organisations have good reason to worry: 53% of respondents experienced up to five security incidents that led to at least one breach.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/05/17/state-of-security/

  • Small Businesses Under Fire from Password Stealers

Password-stealing malware and other cyber attacks have increased significantly against small businesses over the past year, according to Kaspersky researchers.

An assessment released this week detailed the number of Trojan Password Stealing Ware (PSW) detections, internet attacks and attacks on Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) between January and April 2022, compared with the same time frame from 2021. Kaspersky's research showed a jump in the detection of password stealers within small business environments, as well as increases in other types of cyber attacks.

According to Kaspersky, the biggest increase in threats against small businesses was password stealers, specifically Trojan PSWs. There were nearly 1 million more detected Trojan PSWs targeting small and medium-sized businesses in the first trimester of 2022 than the first of 2021, increasing from 3,029,903 to 4,003,323.

https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/news/252518442/Small-businesses-under-fire-from-password-stealers

  • Email Is the Riskiest Channel for Data Security

Research from Tessian and the Ponemon Institute reveals that nearly 60% of organisations experienced data loss or exfiltration caused by an employee mistake on email in the last 12 months.

Email was revealed as the riskiest channel for data loss in organisations, as stated by 65% of IT security practitioners. This was closely followed by cloud file-sharing services (62%) and instant messaging platforms (57%).

The research surveyed 614 IT security practitioners across the globe to also reveal that:

  • Employee negligence, because of not following policies, is the leading cause of data loss incidents (40%)

  • 27% of data loss incidents are caused by malicious insiders

  • It takes up to three days for security and risk management teams to detect and remediate a data loss and exfiltration incident caused by a malicious insider on email

  • 23% of organisations experience up to 30 security incidents involving employees’ use of email every month (for example, email was sent to an unintended recipient).

The most common types of confidential and sensitive information lost or intentionally stolen include: customer information (61%); intellectual property (56%); and consumer information (47%). User-created data (sensitive email content, text files, M&A documents), regulated data (credit card data, Social Security numbers, national ID numbers, employee data), and intellectual property were identified as the three types of data that are most difficult to protect from data loss.

The top two consequences for data loss incidents were revealed as non-compliance with data protection regulations (57%) and damage to an organisation’s reputation (52%). Furthermore, a previous study from Tessian found that 29% of businesses lost a client or customer because of an employee sending an email to the wrong person.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/05/20/data-loss-email/

  • Phishing Attacks for Initial Access Surged 54% in Q1

Threat actors doubled down on their use of phishing emails as an initial attack vector during the first quarter of 2022 — and in many cases then used that access to drop ransomware or to extort organisations in other ways.

Researchers from Kroll recently analysed data gathered from security incidents they responded to in the first three months of this year. The analysis showed a 54% increase in incidents of phishing for initial access compared with the same period last year.

For the first time since Microsoft disclosed the so-called ProxyLogon set of vulnerabilities in Exchange Server in the first quarter of 2021, incidents tied to email compromises surpassed those related to ransomware. Kroll described the sharp increase in phishing activity as likely the result of a surge in activity tied to Emotet and IceID malware — threat actors have been using both to drop other malware.

https://www.darkreading.com/risk/phishing-attacks-for-initial-access-surged-q1

  • Fears Grow for Smaller Nations After Ransomware Attack on Costa Rica Escalates

Conti demanded $20M in ransom — and the overthrow of the government.

It’s been a rough start for the newly elected Costa Rica president Rodrigo Chaves, who less than a week into office declared his country “at war” with the Conti ransomware gang.

“We’re at war and this is not an exaggeration,” Chaves told local media. “The war is against an international terrorist group, which apparently has operatives in Costa Rica. There are very clear indications that people inside the country are collaborating with Conti.”

Conti’s assault on the Costa Rican government began in April. The country’s Finance Ministry was the first hit by the Russia-linked hacking group, and in a statement on May 16, Chaves said the number of institutions impacted had since grown to 27. This, he admitted, means civil servants wouldn’t be paid on time and will impact the country’s foreign trade.

In a message posted to its dark web leaks blog, Conti urged the citizens of Costa Rica to pressure their government to pay the ransom, which the group doubled from an initial $10 million to $20 million. In a separate statement, the group warned: “We are determined to overthrow the government by means of a cyber attack, we have already shown you all the strength and power.”

Conti is among the most prolific hacking groups. The FBI warned earlier this year that the gang was among “the three top variants” that targeted businesses in the United States, and it has been blamed for ransomware attacks targeting dozens of businesses, including Fat Face, Shutterfly and the Irish healthcare service.

But Conti has picked up its pace in recent months: In January and February it published 31 victims on its leaks blog. In March and April, it posted 133 victims.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/20/costa-rica-ransomware-attack/

Threats

Ransomware

Phishing & Email Based Attacks

Malware

Mobile

IoT

Data Breaches/Leaks

Organised Crime & Criminal Actors

Cryptocurrency/Cryptomining/Cryptojacking/NFTs

Fraud, Scams & Financial Crime

Supply Chain and Third Parties

Cloud/SaaS

Open Source

Privacy

Passwords & Credential Stuffing

Cyber Bullying and Cyber Stalking

Regulations, Fines and Legislation

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

Vulnerabilities

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.

Read More
Black Arrow Admin Black Arrow Admin

Black Arrow Cyber Advisory 03/05/2022 – Hacking tool disclosed for Privilege Escalation on Windows

Black Arrow Cyber Advisory 03/05/2022 – Hacking tool disclosed for Privilege Escalation on Windows

Executive Summary

A privileged escalation hacking tool has been publicly disclosed, which allows an attacker to use the PowerShell to step through a process leading to local administrator access. Known as “KrbRelayUp” takes advantage of default configuration settings for Windows Domain environments, and the ability for local accounts to access Microsoft PowerShell. This attack requires a low-privilege account to be compromised, and could lead to further privilege escalation including compromising a domain administrator account.

What’s the risk to me or my business?

As the requirements for this attack are credentials to a low privileged account, and default configuration for Windows Active Directory, it is a likely path for an attacker to use once they have compromised an account in order to gain privileged access. This vulnerability affects any environments using either Local Domain Controllers, or a Hybrid between Azure and On-Premises Active Directory.

What can I do?

Contact your Managed Service Provider and request that tools such as “PSExec” and “PowerShell” are blocked for standard users, who would not require access to these tools typically used for administration purposes. Other mitigation options include enforcing “LDAP Signing” within active directory environments, however it is important to test the impact that making these changes may have on a production environment to avoid unexpected outcomes.

Technical Summary

The attack follows the following steps:

1.       Compromise/have access to low-privileged credentials linked to a Local Active Directory environment.

2.       Create a new machine account and add this to the domain.

3.       Obtain the SID for the machine account.

4.       Use the KrbRelay software to abuse the attribute “msDS-AllowedToActOnBehalfOfOtherIdentity” of the targeted computer account.

5.       Obtain privileged Silver Ticket for the local machine through Rebeus by performing a Resource-based Constrained Delegation attack (RBCD).

6.       Use the Silver Ticket to authenticate with local service manager, creating a new service as NT/System. This service now has local administrator access.

Further details can be found here:

GitHub - Dec0ne/KrbRelayUp: KrbRelayUp - a universal no-fix local privilege escalation in windows domain environments where LDAP signing is not enforced (the default settings). Privilege Escalation using KrbRelay and RBCD · GitHub

Need help understanding your gaps, or just want some advice? Get in touch with us.

Read More
Black Arrow Admin Black Arrow Admin

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 05 November 2021

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 05 November 2021

-500 Million Attempted Ransomware Attacks (So Far) in 2021, With No Sign Of Slowing

-Top 10 Ways Attackers Are Increasing Pressure On Their Ransomware Victims To Pay

-40% Of Organisations Suffered A Cloud-Based Data Breach In The Past 12 Months

-Midsize Business Cyber Attacks: A Security Reality Check

-70% Of Dev Teams Admit To Skipping Security Steps

-79% Of IT Teams Have Seen Increase In Endpoint Security Breaches

-Enterprises With Subsidiaries More Prone To Cyber Attacks, Study Says

-Cisco Talos Reports New Variant Of Babuk Ransomware Targeting Exchange Servers

-Ransomware Gangs Target Corporate Financial Activities

-Web Of Deceit: The Rising Threat Of Ransomware

-While Businesses Are Ramping Up Their Risk Mitigation Efforts, They Could Be Doing More

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

500 Million Attempted Ransomware Attacks (So Far) in 2021, With No Sign Of Slowing

So far, 2021 is stacking up to be the most costly and dangerous year on record for the volume of ransomware attacks, SonicWall said in a new report.

The security provider has logged nearly 500 million attempted ransomware attacks through September, 2021, with 1,748 attempts per customer in that nine-month period. The overall total of 495 million to date amounts to a 148 percent surge as compared to the same period last year. SonicWall expects to record 714 million attempted ransomware attacks by the close of 2021, a 134 percent skyrocket over last year’s totals. https://www.msspalert.com/cybersecurity-research/500-million-attempted-ransomware-attacks-so-far-in-2021/

Top 10 Ways Attackers Are Increasing Pressure On Their Ransomware Victims To Pay

Sophos researchers have detailed how ransomware attackers are implementing a wide range of ruthless pressure tactics to persuade victims to pay the ransom.

Their research is based on evidence and insight from a team of 24/7 incident responders who help organisations under active cyberattack. It highlights the shift in ransomware pressure techniques from solely encrypting data to including other pain points, such as harassing employees.

Since organisations have become better at backing up their data and restoring encrypted files from backups, attackers are supplementing their ransom demands with additional extortion measures that increase the pressure to pay.

For example, the Sophos Rapid Response team has seen cases where attackers email or phone a victim’s employees, calling them by their name and sharing personal details they’ve stolen – such as any disciplinary actions or passport information – with the aim of scaring them into demanding their employer pays the ransom. This kind of behavior shows how ransomware has shifted from a purely technical attack targeting systems and data into one that also targets people. https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/11/04/attackers-pressure-ransomware-victims/

40% Of Organisations Suffered A Cloud-Based Data Breach In The Past 12 Months

Despite increasing cyber attacks targeting data in the cloud, 83% of businesses are still failing to encrypt half of the sensitive data they store in the cloud, raising even greater concerns as to the impact cyber criminals can have. 40% of organisations have experienced a cloud-based data breach in the past 12 months, according to a study conducted by 451 Research.

Cloud adoption is on the rise and businesses are continuing to diversify the way they use cloud solutions. Globally, 57% of respondents reported they make use of two or more cloud infrastructure providers, whilst 24% of organisations flagged that the majority of their workloads and data now reside in the cloud. https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/11/02/experienced-cloud-based-data-breach/

Midsize Business Cyber Attacks: A Security Reality Check

Ransomware bombshells hit large enterprises. Carpet-bomb cyberattacks target MSP software supply chains and their small business customers. But what’s the state of cybersecurity among midsize businesses?

Actually, that landscape also faces its share of digital bombshells. Indeed, nearly two in three midsize organisations have suffered a ransomware attack in the past 18 months and 20 percent of them spent at least $250,000 to recover from it, according to research by UncommonX, an MSSP that leans heavily on its own SaaS-based solutions..

The Chicago-based MSSP’s newly released State of Cybersecurity for Midsize Organisations found that smaller companies are often not properly prepared to fend off a cyber attack nor do they engage in adequate network monitoring. In short, cybersecurity is often not enough of a priority within midsize companies. https://www.msspalert.com/cybersecurity-news/midsize-business-cyberattacks-a-security-reality-check/

70% Of Dev Teams Admit To Skipping Security Steps

According to a new study by Invicti Security, 70% of development teams always or frequently skip security steps due to time pressures when completing projects. This explains why, in the average organisation, 33% of security issues in remediation at any given time come from production code.

Security and development teams spend every day inside a catch-22: relentless demand for continued digital innovation amid increasing security threats to a sprawling attack surface. While there are some bright spots emerging on the road to secure innovation, these professionals are stressed — and too often make bad choices. https://venturebeat.com/2021/10/27/report-70-of-dev-teams-admit-to-skipping-security-steps/

79% Of IT Teams Have Seen Increase In Endpoint Security Breaches

According to a new report by HP Wolf Security, 79% of IT teams have seen an increase in rebuild rates, indicating that hackers are becoming more successful at breaching the endpoint and compromising organisations’ devices and data.

This sudden increase in rebuild rates is particularly affecting enterprises with 1,000 employees or more — organisations of this kind have the highest average number of rebuilds per month at 67.3. The study also highlights that employees are clicking on more malicious emails. Whether this is because people are less vigilant working from home or because they find it harder to determine what is safe to open, the rising number of rebuilds suggests that hackers have become more successful at breaching the endpoint through malicious links. https://venturebeat.com/2021/10/28/report-79-of-it-teams-have-seen-increase-in-endpoint-security-breaches/

Enterprises With Subsidiaries More Prone To Cyber Attacks, Study Says

Global enterprises with multiple subsidiaries are more exposed to cybersecurity threats and have more difficulty managing risk than companies with no, or fewer, subsidiaries, according to an Osterman Research report commissioned by CyCognito.

The study surveyed 201 organisations with at least 10 subsidiaries and at least 3,000 employees or $1 billion in annual revenue.

Despite being extremely confident about running effective subsidiary risk management, about 67% of respondents said their organisations had either experienced a cyberattack where the attack chain included a subsidiary, or that they lacked the ability or information to rule out the possibility.

About half of the respondents acknowledged that they wouldn't be surprised if a cyberbreach were to occur "tomorrow." https://www.csoonline.com/article/3639014/enterprises-with-subsidiaries-more-prone-to-cyberattacks-study-says.html

Cisco Talos Reports New Variant Of Babuk Ransomware Targeting Exchange Servers

Cisco Talos has a warning out for companies about a new variant of the Babuk ransomware. The security researchers discovered the campaign in mid-October and think that the variant has been active since July 2021. The new element in this attack is an unusual infection chain technique.

The researchers think that the initial infection vector is an exploitation of ProxyShell vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server through the deployment of China Chopper web shell.

Babuk can affect several hardware and software platforms but this version is targeting Windows. The ransomware encrypts the target's machine, interrupts the system backup process and deletes the volume shadow copies. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/cisco-talos-reports-new-variant-of-babuk-ransomware-targeting-exchange-servers/

Ransomware Gangs Target Corporate Financial Activities

The FBI is warning about a fresh extortion tactic: threatening to tank share prices for publicly held companies.

Ransomware gangs are zeroing in on publicly held companies with the threat of financial exposure in an effort to encourage ransom payments, the FBI is warning.

In an alert issued this week the Bureau said that activity over the course of the past year shows a trend toward targeting companies when they’re coming up to “significant, time-sensitive financial events,” such as quarterly earnings reports and mandated SEC filings, initial public offerings, M&A activity, and so on. The idea is to ratchet up the extortion thumb-screws by threatening to leak stolen information relevant to these events if the target doesn’t pay up.

Impending events that could affect a victim’s stock value, such as announcements [or] mergers and acquisitions, encourage ransomware actors to target a network or adjust their timeline for extortion. https://threatpost.com/ransomware-corporate-financial/175940/

Web Of Deceit: The Rising Threat Of Ransomware

With payouts of almost £260m last year alone, it has become the biggest – and easiest – money-earner available to hackers.

Heists at famous jewellers usually involve masked men, guns, shouting and terrified staff and customers. That was indeed the scene in August 2009 at the London branch of Graff, the famous diamond merchants, when a gang stole around £40million worth of jewels. They were caught not long after.

But the latest heist on Graff, revealed recently, was quieter. No guns, no masks, no shouting. Instead the company – which supplies a dizzying parade of top-name stars such as the Beckhams, Tom Hanks and Tamara Ecclestone – faced a demand, displayed on a computer screen, for millions of pounds, payable to a group of Russian hackers.

Graff, like hundreds of companies around the world, had been hit by “ransomware”: an attachment to an email delivered a malicious program which let in hackers, who scrambled all the files on its computer systems using an uncrackable computer code, for which they had the digital “key”.

They’d hand it over in exchange for a payment worth millions of pounds in untraceable cryptocurrency such as bitcoin, where transactions are made between digital “wallets” that do not pass through any bank and are not tied to any identity.

Without the key, the systems are useless. The option is to restore the system from backups – but frequently the hackers will have targeted those too. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/11/06/web-deceit-rising-threat-ransomware/

While Businesses Are Ramping Up Their Risk Mitigation Efforts, They Could Be Doing More

Zurich North America and Advisen have released a survey of corporate risk managers and insurance buyers revealing current views about information security and cyber risk management.

The survey results indicate that risk professionals are increasingly aware of their intensifying cyber risks and the need to manage them using risk mitigation and risk transfer. However, a deeper dive into the numbers found that there is much room for improvement in building cyber resilience.

Sixty-five percent of respondents have invested in cyber security solutions to mitigate risk, which means that 35 percent of respondents still have not. https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/11/03/gaps-risk-mitigation-efforts/

Threats

Ransomware

Phishing

Other Social Engineering

Malware

Mobile

Vulnerabilities

Data Breaches/Leaks

Cryptocurrency/Cryptojacking

OT, ICS, IIoT and SCADA

Privacy

Parental Controls

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 weekly ‘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.

Read More
Black Arrow Admin Black Arrow Admin

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 22 October 2021

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 22 October 2021

-Many Organisations Lack Basic Cyber Hygiene Despite High Confidence In Their Cyber Defences

-83% Of Ransomware Victims Paid Ransom: Survey

-Report: Ransomware Affected 72% Of Organizations In Past Year

-Ransomware: Looking For Weaknesses In Your Own Network Is Key To Stopping Attacks

-A Hacker Warns: Give Up Trying To Keep Me Out — And Focus On Your Data

-Cyber Risk Trends Driving The Surge In Ransomware Incidents

-US Ransomware Victims Paid $600 Million to Hackers in 1H of 2021

-Hacking Group Created Fake Cyber Security Companies To Hire Experts And Involve Them In Ransomware Attacks Tricking Them Of Conducting A Pentest

-Nearly Three-Quarters of Organizations Victimized by DNS Attacks in Past 12 Months

-Cyber Crime Matures As Hackers Are Forced To Work Smarter

-Hackers Stealing Browser Cookies to Hijack High-Profile YouTube Accounts

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

Many Organisations Lack Basic Cyber Hygiene Despite High Confidence In Their Cyber Defences

A new report released this week analysed IT security leaders’ perceived threat of ransomware attacks and the maturity of their cyber security defences. The report found that while 81% of those surveyed consider their security to be above average or exceptional, many lack basic cyber hygiene – 41% lack a password complexity requirement, one of the cheapest, easiest forms of protection, and only 55.6% have implemented multi-factor authentication (MFA). https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/10/21/organizations-cyber-hygiene/

83% Of Ransomware Victims Paid Ransom

A new survey of 300 US-based IT decision-makers found that 64% have been victims of a ransomware attack in the last 12 months, and 83% of those attack victims paid the ransom demand.

Cybersecurity company ThycoticCentrify released its "2021 State of Ransomware Survey & Report" on Tuesday, featuring the insights of IT leaders who have dealt with ransomware attacks over the last year. https://www.zdnet.com/article/83-of-ransomware-victims-paid-ransom-survey/

Ransomware Affected 72% Of Organisations In Past Year

72% of organisations were affected by ransomware at least once within the past twelve months, with 18% impacted more than six times in the past year. Organizations of all sizes were affected nearly to the same extent, with the exception of those with more than 25,000 employees. https://venturebeat.com/2021/10/20/report-ransomware-affected-72-of-organizations-in-past-year/

Ransomware: Looking For Weaknesses In Your Own Network Is Key To Stopping Attacks

Ransomware is a major cybersecurity threat to organisations around the world, but it's possible to reduce the impact of an attack if you have a thorough understanding of your own network and the correct protections are in place.

While the best form of defence is to stop ransomware infiltrating the network in the first place, thinking about how the network is put together can help slow down or stop the spread of an attack, even if the intruders have successfully breached the perimeter. https://www.zdnet.com/article/ransomware-looking-for-weaknesses-in-your-own-network-is-key-to-stopping-attacks/

A Hacker Warns: Give Up Trying To Keep Me Out — And Focus On Your Data

There is a misconceived notion that the security arena is a battlefield. It is not. It is a chess board and requires foresight and calculated pawn placement to protect the king — your data. If your main focus lies on keeping hackers out of your environment, then it’s already check mate. Your mission should be to buy time, slow hackers down and ultimately contain an attack.

Businesses must therefore make it as hard as possible for adversaries to exploit the relationships that allow them to move laterally through the corporate network. They can do this by distrusting anyone within their data’s environment and repeatedly corroborating that all users are who they say they are, and that they act like it too. That last part is crucial, because while identities are easy to compromise and imitate, behaviours are not. https://www.ft.com/content/93cec8b6-3fe9-4e9e-800a-62e13a0e2eac

Cyber Risk Trends Driving The Surge In Ransomware Incidents

During the COVID-19 crisis, another outbreak took place in the cyber space: a digital pandemic driven by ransomware. In a recent report, Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS) analyzes the latest risk developments around ransomware and outlines how companies can strengthen their defenses with good cyber hygiene and IT security practices

The increasing frequency and severity of ransomware incidents is driven by several factors:

·         Growing number of different attack patterns such as double and triple extortion campaigns

·         Criminal business model around ‘ransomware as a service’ and cryptocurrencies

·         Recent skyrocketing of ransom demands

·         Rise of supply chain attacks.

Not all attacks are targeted. Criminals also adopt a scattergun approach to exploit those businesses that aren’t addressing or understanding the vulnerabilities they may have. Businesses must understand the need to strengthen their controls.

Cyber intrusion activity globally jumped 125% in the first half of 2021 compared to the previous year, according to Accenture, with ransomware and extortion operations one of the major contributors behind this increase. According to the FBI, there was a 62% increase in ransomware incidents in the US in the same period that followed an increase of 20% for the full year 2020. https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/10/18/five-ransomware-trends/

US Ransomware Victims Paid $600 Million to Hackers in 1H of 2021

US Ransomware victims coughed up nearly $600 million to cyber hijackers in the first six months of 2021, further stamping cyber extortionists as an “increasing threat” to the U.S. financial, business and public sectors, a recent report released by the Treasury Department said.

Data gathered by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) derived from financial institutions’ Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) revealed that the 635 reports filed for the first six months of this year is already 30 percent greater than the 487 filed for all of last year. Some 458 financial transitions have been reported as of June 30, 2021 with the total value of suspicious activity reported in ransomware-related SARs during the first six months of 2021 amounting to $590 million, or 42 percent more than the $416 million filed for all of 2020. https://www.msspalert.com/cybersecurity-research/victims-paid-600-millon-1h-2021/

Hacking Group Created Fake Cyber Security Companies To Hire Experts And Involve Them In Ransomware Attacks Tricking Them Of Conducting A Pentest

The FIN7 hacking group is attempting to enter in the ransomware business and is doing it with an interesting technique. The gang is creating fake cyber security companies that hire experts requesting them to carry out pen testing attacks under the guise of pentesting activities.

FIN7 is a Russian criminal group that has been active since mid-2015, it focuses on restaurants, gambling, and hospitality industries in the US to harvest financial information that was used in attacks or sold in cybercrime marketplaces.

One of the companies created by the cyber criminal organizations with this purpose is Combi Security, but researchers from Gemini Advisory discovered other similar organizations by analyzing the site of another fake cybersecurity company named Bastion Security. https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/123673/cyber-crime/fin7-fake-cybersecurity-firm.html

Nearly Three-Quarters of Organisations Victimized by DNS Attacks in Past 12 Months

Domain name system (DNS) attacks are impacting organizations at worrisome rates. According to a new survey from the Neustar International Security Council (NISC) conducted in September 2021, 72% of study participants reported experiencing a DNS attack within the last 12 months. Among those targeted, 61% have seen multiple attacks and 11% said they have been victimized regularly. While one-third of respondents recovered within minutes, 58% saw their businesses disrupted for more than an hour, and 14% took several hours to recover. https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/nearly-three-quarters-of-organizations-victimized-by-dns-attacks-in-past-12-months

Cyber Crime Matures As Hackers Are Forced To Work Smarter

An analysis of 500 hacking incidents across a wide range of industries has revealed trends that characterize a maturity in the way hacking groups operate today.

Researchers at Kaspersky have focused on the Russian cybercrime underground, which is currently one of the most prolific ecosystems, but many elements in their findings are common denominators for all hackers groups worldwide.

One key finding of the study is that the level of security on office software, web services, email platforms, etc., is getting better, browser vulnerabilities have reduced in numbers, and websites are not as easy to compromise and use as infection vectors today.

This has resulted in making web infections too difficult to pursue for non-sophisticated threat groups.

The case is similar with vulnerabilities, which are fewer and more expensive to discover.

Instead, hacking groups are waiting for a PoC or patch to be released, and then use that information to create their own exploits. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cybercrime-matures-as-hackers-are-forced-to-work-smarter/

Hackers Stealing Browser Cookies to Hijack High-Profile YouTube Accounts

Since at least late 2019, a network of hackers-for-hire have been hijacking the channels of YouTube creators, luring them with bogus collaboration opportunities to broadcast cryptocurrency scams or sell the accounts to the highest bidder.

That's according to a new report published by Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), which said it disrupted financially motivated phishing campaigns targeting the video platform with cookie theft malware. The actors behind the infiltration have been attributed to a group of hackers recruited in a Russian-speaking forum. https://thehackernews.com/2021/10/hackers-stealing-browser-cookies-to.html

Threats

Ransomware

BEC

Phishing

Malware

Mobile

Vulnerabilities

Data Breaches/Leaks

Organised Crime & Criminal Actors

Insider Threats

Dark Web

Supply Chain

OT, ICS, IIoT and SCADA

Nation State Actors

Cloud

Privacy

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 weekly ‘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.

Read More
Black Arrow Admin Black Arrow Admin

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 09 July 2021

Black Arrow Cyber Threat Briefing 09 July 2021: Hackers Demand $70 Million To End Biggest Ransomware Attack On Record; Zero Day Malware Reached An All-Time High In Q1 2021; New Trojan Malware Steals Millions Of Login Credentials; MacOS Targeted In WildPressure APT Malware Campaign; The Cost Of Cyber Insurance Increased 32% Last Year And Shows No Signs Of Easing; Critical Flaws In Windows Print Spooler Service Could Allow For Remote Attacks; British Airways Settles Over Record Claim For Data Breach; Hackers On Loose As 9,000 Data Leaks A Year Recorded

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

Hackers Demand $70 Million To End Biggest Ransomware Attack On Record

An affiliate of the notorious REvil gang, best known for extorting $11 million from the meat-processor JBS after a Memorial Day attack, infected thousands of victims in at least 17 countries on Friday, largely through firms that remotely manage IT infrastructure for multiple customers. REvil was demanding ransoms of up to $5 million, the researchers said. But late Sunday it offered in a posting on its dark web site a universal decryptor software key that would unscramble all affected machines in exchange for $70 million in crypto currency.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ransomware-attack-revil-hackers-demand-70-million/

Zero Day Malware Reached An All-Time High Of 74% In Q1 2021

74% of threats detected in Q1 2021 were zero day malware – or those for which a signature-based antivirus solution did not detect at the time of the malware release – capable of circumventing conventional antivirus solutions. The report also covers new threat intelligence on rising network attack rates, how attackers are trying to disguise and repurpose old exploits, the quarter’s top malware attacks, and more.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/06/29/zero-day-malware-q1-2021/

New Trojan Malware Steals Millions Of Login Credentials

There is a new custom Trojan-type malware that managed to infiltrate over three million Windows computers and steal nearly 26 million login credentials for about a million websites. The findings suggest that the Trojan classifies the websites into a dozen categories, which include virtually all popular email services, social media platforms, file storage and sharing services, ecommerce platforms, financial platforms, and more. In all, the unnamed malware managed to siphon away 1.2 terabytes of personal data including over a million unique email addresses, over two billion cookies, and more than six million other files.

https://www.techradar.com/news/malware-steals-millions-of-login-credentials-for-popular-websites

Ransomware As A Service: Negotiators Are Now In High Demand

The Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) ecosystem is evolving into something akin to a corporate structure, with new openings available for "negotiators" -- a role focused on extorting victims to pay a ransom. A study in RaaS trends has recently come out saying that one-man-band operations have almost "completely dissolved" due to the lucrative nature of the criminal ransomware business. Showing the potential financial gains squeezed from companies desperate to unlock their systems have given rise to specialists in cyber crime and extortion and have also led to a high demand for individuals to take over the negotiation part of an attack chain.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ransomware-as-a-service-negotiators-between-hackers-and-victims-are-now-in-high-demand/

MacOS Targeted In WildPressure APT Malware Campaign

Recently, threat actors known as WildPressure have added a MacOS malware variant to their latest campaign targeting energy sector businesses, while enlisting compromised WordPress websites to carry out attacks. Furthermore, known novel malware, initially identified in March 2020 and dubbed Milum, has now been retooled with a PyInstaller bundle containing a trojan dropper compatible with Windows and MacOS systems, according to researchers. Compromised endpoints allow the advanced persistent threat (APT) group to download and upload files and executing commands.

https://threatpost.com/macos-wildpressure-apt/167606/

The Cost Of Cyber Insurance Increased 32% Last Year And Shows No Signs Of Easing

The cost of insurance to protect businesses and organisations against the ever-increasing threat of cyber crimes has soared by a third in the last year. Also adding that global cyber insurance pricing has increased by an average of 32 percent in the year to June. Not only are premiums going through the roof, insurers are also attaching more strings to their policies, demanding ever more assurances that firms taking out cover have the necessary systems and processes in place to prevent a cyber mishap. Previous research also suggests that the upward squeeze on premiums shows no sign of easing, which, in turn, is putting more strain on the sector.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/05/cyber_insurance_report/

Critical Flaws In Windows Print Spooler Service Could Allow For Remote Attacks

Administrators are urged to apply the latest patches from Microsoft and disable the Windows Print spooler service in domain controllers and systems not used for printing. This is because Microsoft is currently grappling with a couple of security holes in its Windows Print spooler service that could allow attackers to remotely control an affected system. Anyone able to exploit the more recent vulnerability of the two would be able to run code on the compromised computer with full system privileges. That attacker could then install software, modify data and create new user accounts.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/critical-flaws-in-windows-print-spooler-service-could-allow-for-remote-attacks/

End Users In The Dark About Latest Cyber Threats, Attacks

According to a recent survey, which polled consumers and end users, high-profile incidents such as the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline Co. and the breach of a Florida city's water utilities were either overlooked or ignored by many outside the IT and information security fields. As a result, the responsibility for keeping users informed and aware of the need for heightened security appears to fall on administrators and IT staff.

https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/252503223/End-users-in-the-dark-about-latest-cyber-threats-attacks

British Airways Settles Over Record Claim For Data Breach

British Airways has settled what is thought to be the biggest claim for a data breach in British legal history, involving 16,000 victims. However, the amount was not disclosed. When The breach took place three years ago, multiple data sources and customer data was leaked, including the leakage of names, addresses and card payment details which affected 420,000 customers and staff. As a result, in 2019 the Information Commissioner’s Office hit BA with its largest ever fine at £20 million.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-airways-settles-over-record-claim-for-data-breach-g0f63dnst

Hackers On Loose As 9,000 Data Leaks A Year Recorded

Public bodies and the private sector suffered nearly 9,000 data security incidents in 12 months with sensitive and private information hacked, lost or accidentally given to the wrong people. This Data was seen to lists more than 500 organisations hit by ransomware attacks and a further 562 incidents of hacking. There was also a total of 8,815 data security incidents in 2020/21 with the most breaches in the health and education sectors. Furthermore, over the past three years, police forces across England and Wales suffered an average eight breaches a week. Even security experts announced that these figures were “alarming” and that the public would be “disturbed” to learn how often important information/data was being lost.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hackers-9000-data-leaks-recorded-cyber-crime-56nvs7t6w

Threats

Ransomware

Phishing

Malware

Vulnerabilities

Data Breaches

Organised Crime & Criminal Actors

Supply Chain

OT, ICS, IIoT and SCADA

Nation State Actors

Cloud

Privacy

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 weekly ‘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.

Read More