Advanced Persistent Threats and Zero Day Exploits get a lot of press these days. I am reprinting content from the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Advanced Persistent Threats and Zero Day Exploits
An advanced persistent threat (APT) is a long-term cybersecurity attack that continuously attempts to find and exploit vulnerabilities in a target’s information systems to steal information or disrupt the target’s operations.1 Although individual APT attacks need not be technologically sophisticated, the persistent nature of the attack, as well as the attacker’s ability to change tactics to avoid detection, make APTs a formidable threat.
APTs are a serious threat to any information technology (IT) system, but especially those that are part of the health care field. Healthcare services ... Read More
Malvertising is the newest attack on your identity.
Yes, you read that right. Internet thieves have a new tool against unsuspecting victims: malvertising. Take the hostility of malware and the persuasiveness of advertising, put them together, and you get malvertising. Our friends at Respond Software created this short video for us:
Wikipedia reports this overview of malvertising.
Websites or web publishers unknowingly incorporate a corrupted or malicious advertisement into their page. Computers can become infected pre-click and post click. It is a misconception that infection only happens when visitors begin clicking on a malvertisement. "Examples of pre-click malware include being embedded in main scripts of the page or drive-by-downloads. Malware can also auto-run, as in the case of auto redirects, where the user is automatically taken to a ... Read More
Phishing attackers have found a new avenue: bogus job offers
A series of phishing campaigns are targeting companies in various industries with phony job offers using direct messages on LinkedIn, according to researchers at Proofpoint. The attacker initially makes contact by sending an invitation to the target on LinkedIn with a short message regarding job offers.
Within a week after the target accepts the invitation, the attacker will send a follow-up email with either a link or a PDF attachment that contains embedded URLs. These links take the target to a spoofed version of a real staffing service, which forces the download of either a Word document or a JScript loader. This document or loader will result in the installation of a JScript backdoor known as “More_eggs.”
More_eggs ... Read More
Phishing attacks leverage Boeing 737 Max warnings
Large airline crashes tend to uniquely focus almost everyone's attention. Lowlife Internet thieves exploit the fear surrounding Boeing 737 Max crashes. They leverage that fear in phishing attacks.
A new phishing attack campaign is underway that uses the recent Boeing 737 Max crashes as a way to infect workstations with both remote access and info-stealing Trojans. This new campaign was discovered by 360 Threat Intelligence Center, who posted about them on Twitter and include a VirusTotal link which shows the AV engines that catch it.
These emails pretend to be from a private intelligence analyst who found a leaked document on the dark web. This document pretends to contain information about other airline companies will be affected by similar crashes soon, ... Read More
Triton got into a petrochemical plant
In the summer of 2017, a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia experienced a worrisome security incident that cybersecurity experts consider to be the first-ever cyber attack carried out with “a blatant, flat-out intent to hurt people.” The attack involved a highly sophisticated new malware strain called Triton, which was capable of remotely disabling safety systems inside the plant with potentially catastrophic consequences. It all started when someone launched a spear phishing attack and someone else clicked a link they should not have clicked.
Luckily, a flaw in the Triton code triggered a safety system that responded by shutting down the plant. If it hadn’t been for that flaw, the hackers could have released toxic hydrogen sulfide gas or caused explosions. As ... Read More
Phishing and File Sharing
Internet thieves have long used file sharing sites and services to host their malicious files. When they do this, they typically use the underlying service to generate download links that anyone can click without logging in to the hosting service.
Over the past month we started noticing apparently legitimate Dropbox emails pushing links to files with names suspiciously similar to those routinely used by the bad guys. When we clicked the links to check, however, we were greeted with a demand to log in to the service. That's typically been a sign that the files involved were legit.
Still, something wasn't right here. Given the file names presented, we reckoned there was little chance those files were innocuous. So, we decided to log in to ... Read More
Ransomware knocked most systems offline
Officials in Jackson County, Georgia, paid $400,000 to cyber-criminals this week to get rid of a ransomware infection and regain access to their IT systems. The County hired cyber-security consultant to negotiate ransom fee with 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 difficult."
Jackson County officials notified the FBI and hired a cyber-security consultant. ... Read More
Office Depot $300 scam - yes, it really happened
I'm sure you've heard something about the Office Depot $300 fraud. For a thorough explanation, see https://cybersafetynet.net/office-depot-faked-malware-scans-to-sell-unneeded-300-tech-services/. Basically, Office Depot's malware scan reported malware on computers that did not have malware. Office Depot then sold an unnecessary $300 service. Today I am writing about how that would look in other industries.
We have a high level of trust in those who provide professional services. We go to them when we sense a problem and need their training, judgement and professionalism to turn the problem into a solution. Let's see how this would play out in another industry.
Electrical
Your kitchen has a refrigerator, microwave oven and coffee maker. You discover that you can run two at the same time, but ... Read More
Is this the best Facebook phishing scam ever?
Scams seeking to harvest online credentials have long tried to replicate known logon pages. But this newly found instance is just about perfect.
In every scam that uses social engineering, the key is to be believable. If it looks right, feels right, has the timing right, etc., the victim is more likely to fall for it. This latest scam seeks to take advantage of a user’s desire to leverage single sign-on (SSO) via well-known websites. In this case, Facebook. Rather than creating (and remembering) countless passwords for an equivalently large number of websites, users will take advantage of identifying themselves via Facebook.
Under normal circumstances, a Facebook API is called which prompts the user to authenticate. But researchers at security vendor Myki have ... Read More
A phishing attack will strike you. It is not a question of IF, but a question of WHEN
With the massive rise in phishing attacks, 2019 is the year for organizations to realize the concept of becoming a victim is an issue of when and no longer if.
According to Malwarebyte’s 2019 State of Malware report, there is pretty much no industry that is unaffected by malware. And phishing attacks remain an effective means of tricking users. In Healthcare alone, nearly one-half of orgs citing a 1-10% click rate when interacting with mock-phishing emails to test user response, and another one-quarter of organizations seeing click rates of 11-30%.
These numbers clearly indicate that organizations simply aren’t prepared for phishing attacks.
What you can do
What’s needed is an anti-phishing plan in place that helps to ... Read More