April, 2019

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How Not to Acknowledge a Data Breach

Krebs on Security

I’m not a huge fan of stories about stories, or those that explore the ins and outs of reporting a breach. But occasionally I feel obligated to publish such accounts when companies respond to a breach report in such a way that it’s crystal clear they wouldn’t know what to do with a data breach if it bit them in the nose, let alone festered unmolested in some dark corner of their operations.

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Excellent Analysis of the Boeing 737 MAX Software Problems

Schneier on Security

This is the best analysis of the software causes of the Boeing 737 MAX disasters that I have read. Technically this is safety and not security; there was no attacker. But the fields are closely related and there are a lot of lessons for IoT security -- and the security of complex socio-technical systems in general -- in here.

Software 275
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Malware Infected Medical Equipment Shows Fake Tumors

Adam Levin

Israeli cybersecurity researchers have created malware capable of showing fake cancerous growths on CT and MRI scans. The malware, called CT-GAN, served as a proof of concept to show the potential for hacking medical devices with fake medical news that was convincing enough to fool medical technicians. In a video demonstrating the exploit, researchers at Ben Gurion University described how such an attack might be deployed.

Malware 254
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NEW TECH: How Semperis came to close a huge gap in Active Directory disaster preparedness

The Last Watchdog

In today’s complex IT environments, a million things can go wrong, though only a few systems touch everything. Related: Why Active Directory is so heavily targeted For companies running Microsoft Windows, one such touch-all systems is Active Directory, or AD, the software that organizes and provides access to information across the breadth of Windows systems.

Backups 207
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Prevent Data Breaches With Zero-Trust Enterprise Password Management

Keeper Security is transforming cybersecurity for people and organizations around the world. Keeper’s affordable and easy-to-use solutions are built on a foundation of zero-trust and zero-knowledge security to protect every user on every device. Our next-generation privileged access management solution deploys in minutes and seamlessly integrates with any tech stack to prevent breaches, reduce help desk costs and ensure compliance.

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Weekly Update 136

Troy Hunt

Scott is still here with me on the Gold Coast lapping up the sunshine before NDC Security next week so I thought we'd do this week's video next to the palm trees and jet ski ?? But, of course, there's still a heap of stuff happening that's worthy of discussion, everything from the UK gov's NCSC doing good work to the Reply All podcast I was on this week to new data breaches to the ongoing shenanigans involving kids "smart" watches.

Passwords 194
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Books Worth Your Time (Q1 2019)

Adam Shostack

Cyber. Making Software “What Really Works, and Why We Believe It” by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson. This collection of essays is a fascinating view into the state of the art in empirical analysis software engineering. Agile Application Security by Laura Bell, Michael Brunton-Spall, Rich Smith and Jim Bird. A really good overview of the many moving pieces in an agile SDL.

Marketing 150

More Trending

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China Spying on Undersea Internet Cables

Schneier on Security

Supply chain security is an insurmountably hard problem. The recent focus is on Chinese 5G equipment, but the problem is much broader. This opinion piece looks at undersea communications cables: But now the Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies, the leading firm working to deliver 5G telephony networks globally, has gone to sea. Under its Huawei Marine Networks component, it is constructing or improving nearly 100 submarine cables around the world.

Internet 273
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EU To Build Massive Biometric Database

Adam Levin

The European Union’s parliament voted to create a biometric database of over 350 million people. The Common Identity Repository, or CIR, will consolidate the data from the EU’s border, migration, and law enforcement agencies into one system to be quickly accessible and searchable by any or all of them. Information will include names, birthdates, passport numbers as well as fingerprints and face scans.

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MY TAKE: How ‘CASBs’ are evolving to close the security gaps arising from digital transformation

The Last Watchdog

The Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) space is maturing to keep pace with digital transformation. Related: CASBs needed now, more than ever. Caz-bees first took shape as a cottage industry circa 2013 to 2014 in response to a cry for help from companies reeling from new Shadow IT exposures : the risk created by early-adopter employees, quite often the CEO, insisting on using the latest smartphone and Software-as-a-Services tools, without any shred of security vetting.

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Weekly Update 133

Troy Hunt

Wow, a weekly update back on the normal schedule! I also realised when watching this back how less tired I look compared to the last few weeks. Travel takes its toll so I touched on that a bit in this week's update, along with the usual raft of new data breaches to go into HIBP. Plus there's Facebook's incidents, both the one they're not directly responsible for and the one they are responsible for, but is also both a bit of a non-event and something that's reflective of broader issues in the in

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Optimizing The Modern Developer Experience with Coder

Many software teams have migrated their testing and production workloads to the cloud, yet development environments often remain tied to outdated local setups, limiting efficiency and growth. This is where Coder comes in. In our 101 Coder webinar, you’ll explore how cloud-based development environments can unlock new levels of productivity. Discover how to transition from local setups to a secure, cloud-powered ecosystem with ease.

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The White Box Essays (Book Review)

Adam Shostack

The White Box , and its accompanying book, “The White Box Essays” are a FANTASTIC resource, and I wish I’d had them available to me as I designed Elevation of Privilege and helped with Control-Alt-Hack. The book is for people who want to make games, and it does a lovely job of teaching you how, including things like the relationship between story and mechanics, the role of luck, how the physical elements teach the players, and the tradeoffs that you as a designer make as you de

Marketing 113
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Experts: Breach at IT Outsourcing Giant Wipro

Krebs on Security

Indian information technology (IT) outsourcing and consulting giant Wipro Ltd. [ NYSE:WIT ] is investigating reports that its own IT systems have been hacked and are being used to launch attacks against some of the company’s customers, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. Wipro has refused to respond to questions about the alleged incident.

Insurance 270
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G7 Comes Out in Favor of Encryption Backdoors

Schneier on Security

From a G7 meeting of interior ministers in Paris this month, an " outcome document ": Encourage Internet companies to establish lawful access solutions for their products and services, including data that is encrypted, for law enforcement and competent authorities to access digital evidence, when it is removed or hosted on IT servers located abroad or encrypted, without imposing any particular technology and while ensuring that assistance requested from internet companies is underpinned by the r

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Facebook Acknowledges “Unintentional” Harvesting of Email Contacts

Adam Levin

Facebook announced that it “unintentionally” harvested the email contacts of 1.5 million of its users without their consent. The social media company automatically uploaded the information from users who had registered with the site after 2016 and provided their email addresses and passwords. Upon submitting a form to “confirm” their accounts, registrants saw a screen showing that their email contact lists were harvested without any means of providing consent, opting out, or interrupting the pro

Passwords 205
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The Tumultuous IT Landscape Is Making Hiring More Difficult

After a year of sporadic hiring and uncertain investment areas, tech leaders are scrambling to figure out what’s next. This whitepaper reveals how tech leaders are hiring and investing for the future. Download today to learn more!

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NEW TECH: Alcide introduces a “microservices firewall” as a dynamic ‘IaaS’ market takes shape

The Last Watchdog

As a tech reporter at USA TODAY, I wrote stories about how Google fractured Microsoft’s Office monopoly , and then how Google clawed ahead of Apple to dominate the global smartphone market. Related: A path to fruition of ‘SecOps’ And now for Act 3, Google has thrown down the gauntlet at Amazon, challenging the dominant position of Amazon Web Services in the fast-emerging cloud infrastructure global market.

Marketing 193
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Weekly Update 135

Troy Hunt

It's another episode with Scott Helme this week as he's back in town for NDC Security on the Gold Coast (still a got a week to get those tickets, folks!) The timing actually works out pretty well as there was this week's announcement around Let's Encrypt transition of their root cert which is right up his alley. There's also the whole TicTokTrack kids watch situation which aligns very well with many of both our prior experience.

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‘No need’ to tell the public(?!?)

Adam Shostack

When Andrew and I wrote The New School, and talked about the need to learn from other professions, we didn’t mean for doctors to learn from ‘cybersecurity thought leaders’ about hiding their problems: …Only one organism grew back. C. auris. It was spreading, but word of it was not. The hospital, a specialty lung and heart center that draws wealthy patients from the Middle East and around Europe, alerted the British government and told infected patients, but made no public

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‘Land Lordz’ Service Powers Airbnb Scams

Krebs on Security

Scammers who make a living swindling Airbnb.com customers have a powerful new tool at their disposal: A software-as-a-service offering called “ Land Lordz ,” which helps automate the creation and management of fake Airbnb Web sites and the sending of messages to advertise the fraudulent listings. The ne’er-do-well who set up the account below has been paying $550 a month for a Land Lordz “basic plan” subscription at landlordz[.]site that helps him manage more than

Scams 249
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The Importance of User Roles and Permissions in Cybersecurity Software

How many people would you trust with your house keys? Chances are, you have a handful of trusted friends and family members who have an emergency copy, but you definitely wouldn’t hand those out too freely. You have stuff that’s worth protecting—and the more people that have access to your belongings, the higher the odds that something will go missing.

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New DNS Hijacking Attacks

Schneier on Security

DNS hijacking isn't new, but this seems to be an attack of uprecidented scale: Researchers at Cisco's Talos security division on Wednesday revealed that a hacker group it's calling Sea Turtle carried out a broad campaign of espionage via DNS hijacking, hitting 40 different organizations. In the process, they went so far as to compromise multiple country-code top-level domains -- the suffixes like.co.uk or.ru that end a foreign web address -- putting all the traffic of every domain in multiple co

DNS 267
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Report Shows Major Security Holes in Banking Apps

Adam Levin

A security analysis of 30 major banking and financial apps has shown major security holes and a lax approach to protecting user data. The analysis was conducted by the Aite Group, which looked at mobile apps in eight categories: retail banking, credit cards, mobile payment, healthcare savings, retail finance, health insurance, auto insurance and cryptocurrency.

Banking 187
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NEW TECH: Circadence deploys ‘gamification’ training to shrink cybersecurity skills gap

The Last Watchdog

It’s clear that closing the cybersecurity skills gap has to happen in order to make our internet-centric world as private and secure as it ought to be. Related: The need for diversity in cybersecurity personnel One of the top innovators in the training space is Circadence ®. The Boulder, CO-based company got its start in the mid-1990s as a pioneer of massive multi-player video games.

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Weekly Update 134

Troy Hunt

That's the second update in a row I've done on time! It's also another one with a bunch of other things in common with last week, namely commentary on yet more data breaches. It's not just the breaches in HIBP, but the ones I'm busily trying to disclose. This is really sucking a lot of time right now and frankly, well, I summed it up here earlier in the week: Currently going through the process with 4 breach disclosures. 3 of them I just can’t get a response from and the one I can really doesn’t

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IDC Analyst Report: The Open Source Blind Spot Putting Businesses at Risk

In a recent study, IDC found that 64% of organizations said they were already using open source in software development with a further 25% planning to in the next year. Most organizations are unaware of just how much open-source code is used and underestimate their dependency on it. As enterprises grow the use of open-source software, they face a new challenge: understanding the scope of open-source software that's being used throughout the organization and the corresponding exposure.

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Leave Those Numbers for April 1st

Adam Shostack

“90% of attacks start with phishing!*” “Cyber attacks will cost the world 6 trillion by 2020!” We’ve all seen these sorts of numbers from vendors, and in a sense they’re April Fools day numbers: you’d have to be a fool to believe them. But vendors quote insane because there’s no downside and much upside.

Phishing 113
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Android 7.0+ Phones Can Now Double as Google Security Keys

Krebs on Security

Google this week made it easier for Android users to enable strong 2-factor authentication (2FA) when logging into Google’s various services. The company announced that all phones running Android 7.0 and higher can now be used as Security Keys , an additional authentication layer that helps thwart phishing sites and password theft. As first disclosed by KrebsOnSecurity last summer , Google maintains it has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related acco

Mobile 242
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Vulnerabilities in the WPA3 Wi-Fi Security Protocol

Schneier on Security

Researchers have found several vulnerabilities in the WPA3 Wi-Fi security protocol: The design flaws we discovered can be divided in two categories. The first category consists of downgrade attacks against WPA3-capable devices, and the second category consists of weaknesses in the Dragonfly handshake of WPA3, which in the Wi-Fi standard is better known as the Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) handshake.

Passwords 266
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Possible Toyota Breach Affects Up to 3.1 Million Customers

Adam Levin

Multiple sales subsidiaries of Toyota Motor Corp. were breached in an apparent cyberattack that may have leaked the personal information of up to 3.1 million people in the Tokyo area. Toyota announced the possible breach as being the result of “unauthorized access” to a network server containing customer information in late March, but explained that they were unable to confirm if any data was actually lost.

Hacking 182
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Beware of Pixels & Trackers on U.S. Healthcare Websites

The healthcare industry has massively adopted web tracking tools, including pixels and trackers. Tracking tools on user-authenticated and unauthenticated web pages can access personal health information (PHI) such as IP addresses, medical record numbers, home and email addresses, appointment dates, or other info provided by users on pages and thus can violate HIPAA Rules that govern the Use of Online Tracking Technologies by HIPAA Covered Entities and Business Associates.

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MY TAKE: Most companies blissfully ignorant of rising attacks on most-used endpoint: mobile devices

The Last Watchdog

A dozen years after Apple launched the first iPhone, igniting the smartphone market, the Bring Your Own Device to work phenomenon is alive and well. Related: Stopping mobile device exploits. The security issues posed by BYOD are as complex and difficult to address as ever. Meanwhile, the pressure for companies to proactively address mobile security is mounting from two quarters.

Mobile 183
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Trump’s World Still Faces 16 Known Criminal Probes

WIRED Threat Level

Mueller is done and Rosenstein is on his way out the door, but federal and state authorities around the country are still investigating the president and those in his orbit.

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Over 23 million breached accounts were using ‘123456’ as password

Security Affairs

A cyber survey conducted by the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) revealed that ‘123456’ is still the most hacked password. Security experts at the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) analyzed the 100,000 most-commonly re-occurring breached passwords using data from Have I Been Pwned (HIBP). Have I Been Pwned allows users to search across multiple data breaches to see if their email address has been compromised.

Passwords 111
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Alleged Chief of Romanian ATM Skimming Gang Arrested in Mexico

Krebs on Security

An alleged top boss of a Romanian crime syndicate that U.S. authorities say is responsible for deploying card-skimming devices at Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) throughout North America was arrested in Mexico last week on firearms charges. The arrest comes months after the accused allegedly ordered the execution of a former bodyguard who was trying to help U.S. authorities bring down the group’s lucrative skimming operations.

Wireless 234
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Software Composition Analysis: The New Armor for Your Cybersecurity

Speaker: Blackberry, OSS Consultants, & Revenera

Software is complex, which makes threats to the software supply chain more real every day. 64% of organizations have been impacted by a software supply chain attack and 60% of data breaches are due to unpatched software vulnerabilities. In the U.S. alone, cyber losses totaled $10.3 billion in 2022. All of these stats beg the question, “Do you know what’s in your software?