Successful cyber attacks attract additional cyber attackers
Recent cyber attacks against city governments have provided their attackers with revenue from scams, data breaches, and data held ransom. They also draw the attention of other cyber thieves. If you were a smart cyber thief, you’d be wanting to find victims that meet a few criteria:
Relatively vulnerable to attack
High-Profile (particularly in the case of Ransomware)
Have lots of valuable data to steal/hold for ransom
Deals in large monetary transactions
Cities are attractive targets
City governments across the U.S. have been the victim of countless attacks over the last number of years. It’s because they are one of the few organizations that meet all the needed criteria.
Vulnerable to Attack – Cities usually run as multiple departments with disparate technology and processes, ... Read More
Time for a PCI-DSS Assessment? Maybe?
If you accept charge cards, you are subject to the rules laid out by the PCI Security Standards Council. You could be in medical, retail or online. The field does not matter. What matters is you accept charge cards and/or debit cards. The PCI Security Standards Council mandates assessments and vulnerability scans. You perform assessments annually, or after significant changes. You perform vulnerability scans quarterly, or after a significant change.
Annual PCI-DSS Assessments
You should perform PCI-DSS assessments annually, or after significant changes. "What does that mean?" you may say.
Annually. https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/minisite/en/docs/Navigating_DSS_v2.pdf tells us on page 4 "At least annually and prior to the annual assessment,
the assessed entity should confirm the accuracy of their PCI DSS scope by identifying all locations and ... Read More
Cyber attack closes bank's doors
Reuters reported that the Bank of Valetta, which accounts for almost half of Malta’s banking transactions, had to shut down all of its operations last month after hackers broke into its systems and shifted funds overseas.
"Prime Minister Joseph Muscat told parliament the cyber attack involved the creation of false international payments totaling 13 million euros ($14.7 million) to banks in Britain, the United States, the Czech Republic and Hong Kong.
The funds have been traced and the Bank of Valletta is seeking to have the fraudulent transactions reversed.
Muscat said the attack was detected soon after the start of business on Wednesday when discrepancies were noticed during the reconciliation of international transactions.
Shortly after, the bank was informed by state security services that it had received ... Read More
Cyber thieves sending fake security alerts
Con artists are targeting thousands of people with tech support scams that pose as security alerts from Norton Security, researchers at Symantec have found. The phony alerts pop up in the browser and urge the victim to run a quick scan of their computer. If the user clicks “OK,” they’ll see a very realistic-looking fake Norton scan running, which tells them their computer is infected. They’ll then be prompted to download an “update” for their antivirus software, which is actually a potentially unwanted application (PUA).
The scammers use HTML and JavaScript to create a very convincing illusion that a Norton scan is taking place. The source code contains several invisible HTML div elements which are progressively made visible by JavaScript code. ... Read More
Real-estate phishing scam took $123,000 from a home buyer
A man in Portland, Oregon lost $123,000 after falling victim to a phishing real-estate scam, according to Michele Lerner at The Washington Post. In December, Aaron Cole and his family were about to buy a new house through WFG National Title Insurance Company.
Shortly before the deal was supposed to take place, Cole received an email that purported to come from WFG which told him to wire the $123,000 down payment to a different address. Cole complied, and the money was laundered through multiple banks and sent out of the country before anyone realized it had been sent to a scammer.
Never rely solely on email
Fortunately, WFG hired Cole as a spokesperson to raise awareness about cybercrime and scams, ... Read More
Malwarebytes releases State of Malware report
Growth in attacks designed to obfuscate access and purpose should put organizations on alert as cybercriminals gain control over endpoints to do just about anything they want.
The most dangerous cyberattack is the one you don’t know about.
That’s exactly what cybercriminals are focusing on, according to Malwarebytes’ 2019 State of Malware report. If an attack can either run completely in stealth, or simply hide their true intention, in many ways, they’ve already won.
According to the report, two very specific types of attacks are on the rise from 2017 to 2018:
Trojans saw a 132% increase
Backdoors saw a 173% increase
Trojans and backdoors
Malwarebytes defines each of these separately. Trojans are programs "that claim to perform one function but actually do another", with Backdoors defined as "a type ... Read More
Scammers using hijacked GoDaddy domains to launch large-scale spam campaigns
GoDaddy took steps in January, 2019 to address the authentication flaw exploited by the attackers, according to Brian Krebs. Krebs first reported on the authentication weakness on January 22nd, when he outlined two massive spam campaigns during 2018 that were very successful at getting into people’s inboxes. Their success was due to the fact that the emails were sent through trusted but dormant domains, many of which were registered and owned by Fortune 500 companies.
Anti-spam researcher Ron Guilmette discovered that nearly all of these domains had used GoDaddy’s DNS service at some point. The scammers had realized that they could add domains to their GoDaddy accounts without proving that they owned the domains. GoDaddy quickly addressed the ... Read More
Social engineering on Wikipedia
Social engineering scammers are selectively editing Wikipedia pages. These lend credibility to tech support scams, according to Rob VandenBrink at the SANS Internet Storm Center. The Wikipedia page for the SpyEye banking Trojan was changed in mid-December to include a typo-ridden paragraph which claims that only three tech companies can remove the malware, and that “Best buy, Geek squad, Office Depo will not be able to fix it at all.” <sic>
VandenBrink says that the scammer made these edits to convince victims that “only we can help you fix this (fake of course) infection you have on your computer.” The edit history of the Wikipedia user who made the changes shows that the account made similar edits to the “Macro virus” Wikipedia page, ... Read More
You can’t have privacy without security
California clearly agrees and may test the applicability of Larry Page's advice with new legislation signed by California Governor Brown in September, 2018.
Internet of Things legislation takes effect 1/1/2020
With the ink barely dry on the infamous California Consumer Privacy Act (the CCPA)—a first-of-its-kind data privacy bill in the United States—Brown signed a new Internet of Things cybersecurity bill into law, SB 327. Perhaps not so coincidentally, both laws will take effect on January 1, 2020, marking a substantial compliance deadline for technology companies big and small.
SB 327 will require that a manufacturer of a “connected device” equip the device with a defined minimum amount of security. “Connected device” is defined quite broadly and as written encompasses “any device, or other physical ... Read More
In-house phishing tests identify at-risk users
As compliance mandates and consumer privacy laws get tougher, businesses are taking matters into their own hands, launching internal phishing attacks to identify at-risk users.
Phishing remains a profitable tactic for cybercriminal organizations. The ability to gain access to internal systems, compromise credentials, or convince a user to wire money is well within the cybercriminals reach, accomplishing these attack results and more on a daily basis.
Organizations like UNC Health Care in Chapel Hill, NC receive over 91 million suspicious emails a every quarter, with a little more than 8 million still getting past security scanners. Even with 30,000 employees, that still represents an average of about 4 phishing emails a day per user.
University of North Carolina sends 3,000 phishing tests a ... Read More