Free email services monetize your personal information. Use one of them and you are vulnerable. Free email and social media services are indexing and monetizing your mailbox data. They use that information for their gain, not yours.
Gmail monetizes your personal informationFor example, https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en says “When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited ... Read More
Remote Desktop is a big vulnerability
Maybe you use Microsoft’s Remote Desktop feature to connect to your workstation at work from…anywhere. Remote Desktop has been in Windows for 20 years at no extra cost. The network administrator at my target reviews the workstation’s logs through Windows’ Event Viewer. This screenshot is from my research honeypot.
Someone is trying to login to this virtual machine at a ferocious pace
The unlucky soul who has to read these logs finds login attempts are international. My perusal shows login attempts from five IP addresses:
211.72.1.31 in Taipei, Taiwan
24.142.48.215 in Dartmouth, Canada
87.147.195.55 in Olching, Germany
47.185.77.29 in Keller, Texas
91.234.125.163 is in Sosnicowice, Poland
Assuming it is one hacker who either employed a botnet (a series of computers simultaneously tasked with a large task) or is ... Read More
Let LastPass manage your passwords (you have other things to think about today).
We have too many passwords. Keeping track of them mentally or on Post-It notes does not work. Keeping them in a Microsoft Word document is also troublesome. If you change a password and fail to update the document, then the record becomes wrong. Next time you go to that website and use the password in your Microsoft Word document, it won’t work. You did not update the document. Let me introduce LastPass.
Several companies have solutions. I use LastPass, which lets you create a vault that holds all your passwords. You don’t have to remember what LastPass stores in the vault. You only have to remember the master password to access the vault. The ... Read More
2-factor Authentication helps protect your identity.
You should deploy 2-factor Authentication. This increases your security and reduces your chances of becoming an identity theft victim. Most services encourage 2-factor Authentication and let you deploy it at no additional cost.
Here's a quick question for you.
When attempting to access a website, the website can challenge you based on:
A) What you know (e.g. password).
B) Who you are (e.g. fingerprints).
C) What you have (e.g. phone).
D) All of the above.
Correct answer: D.
How it looks in real life.
Daisy runs a dental office in Folsom, CA. Keeping the practice up and running is her top priority. She runs most of her patient, insurance and vendor communications through her Gmail account. She deploys 2-factor Authentication with the steps at https://myaccount.google.com/signinoptions/two-step-verification/enroll-welcome. She keeps her smartphone nearby. ... Read More
Social media connection requests are not always real
Meet Lynne. She sent you a social media connection request. Here's some background on Lynne. Happily married to a professional athlete. Real estate agent in San Francisco. Runs three marathons a year. Promised her mom she would visit all seven continents before turning 50. Laughs and walks away when you try talking politics.
Would you accept a social media connection request from Lynne? She looks decent and honest, right?
Fake profile
Think twice. She is fake. I visited https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and chose three pictures for my book. I wrote the profiles from scratch. https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/ uses a generative adversarial network, defined at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network to create pictures. Wikipedia tells us “a GAN trained on photographs can generate new photographs that look at least superficially ... Read More
Did you know your multifunction printer has its own backdoor WIFI?
Allen called me one day and said his printer was printing nonstop garbage. He wasn’t printing anything, but somebody was printing through WIFI. This print job was consuming his toner and paper. How did this happen?
I told Allen that in addition to joining your multi function printer to your office or home WIFI, you’ll find the printer broadcasts its own WIFI signal. You, or anybody close enough to the printer, can hop on that printer through that WIFI. A hacker could then cause mischief, including changing the printer’s IP addresses or printing large print jobs that consume paper and toner. I am showing you how to identify your printer’s WIFI, and how to secure it.
Assumptions
... Read More
Insurance companies pay off ransomware
Fasten your seat belt. Ransomware may be poised to return as a top scourge for companies, as more and more of them pay up—actually their insurance companies pay up. They try to minimize the cost of recovery.
In this new RSA Conference 2019 Threatpost video, Josh Zelonis, senior analyst at Forrester Research, discusses the next great security threats to enterprises.
According to Zelonis, a new trend of victims paying off the ransoms could reverse the wane in ransomware attacks that has been seen in the last year or so. Here is a snippet from the interview:
Cheaper for insurance companies
Tara Seals: "Before we kick off our video interview here, you had mentioned that you’ve been seeing a trend of companies actually paying the ransomware when they ... Read More
Ransomware Authors Agreed to $400,000
Officials in Jackson County, Georgia, paid $400,000 to cybercriminals last month. That was the extortion fee to get an encryption key for a ransomware infection and regain access to their IT systems. The County hired a cyber-security consultant to negotiate a ransom fee with the hacker group. Jackson County officials have not yet confirmed how hackers breached their network.
The infection forced most of the local government's IT systems offline, with the exception of its website and 911 emergency system.
"Everything we have is down," Sheriff Janis Mangum told StateScoop in an interview. "We are doing our bookings the way we used to do it before computers. We're operating by paper in terms of reports and arrest bookings. We've continued to function. It's just more ... Read More
Extortionists demand money even though no agreement made
Anyone who depends upon good public opinion can be vulnerable to orchestrated bad word-of-mouth, especially in the form of online reviews.
Podcasters are being targeted by extortionists who threaten to swamp their shows with negative reviews, according to Mark Asquith at Rebel Base Media. Asquith cites one recent case in which a scammer reached out to a podcaster on social media and offered to promote their show.
When the podcaster expressed interest, the scammer didn’t respond for several days. After that, the scammer sent a message informing the target that they’d been promoting the target’s podcast for the past few days. The scammer then demanded hundreds of dollars in payment for this supposed service. “No agreement had even been discussed, ... Read More
New Cybersecurity best practices
In December 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published the “Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices (HICP): Managing Threats and Protecting Patients” publication. This new directive offers cybersecurity best practices that healthcare organizations of any size can implement. Originally posted by Fred Langston CISSP, CCSK at CI.Security.
I’ve been doing health industry cybersecurity for a long time, which has led to my involvement in helping to craft cybersecurity policy for the healthcare industry. One of my first experiences was back in 1996, when I was part of the working group that provided guidance on the proposed HIPAA Security Rule. That rule established certain standards for security moving forward. The resulting risk-based approach was meant to allow the vastly different types and sizes ... Read More