July, 2019

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Attorney General William Barr on Encryption Policy

Schneier on Security

Yesterday, Attorney General William Barr gave a major speech on encryption policy -- what is commonly known as "going dark." Speaking at Fordham University in New York, he admitted that adding backdoors decreases security but that it is worth it. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it is technologically impossible to provide lawful access without weakening security against unlawful access.

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QuickBooks Cloud Hosting Firm iNSYNQ Hit in Ransomware Attack

Krebs on Security

Cloud hosting provider iNSYNQ says it is trying to recover from a ransomware attack that shut down its network and has left customers unable to access their accounting data for the past three days. Unfortunately for iNSYNQ, the company appears to be turning a deaf ear to the increasingly anxious cries from its users for more information about the incident.

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Welcoming the Austrian Government to Have I Been Pwned

Troy Hunt

Early last year, I announced that I was making HIBP data on government domains for the UK and Australia freely accessible to them via searches of their respective TLDs. The Spanish government followed a few months later with each getting unbridled access to search their own domains via an authenticated API. As I explained in that initial post, the rationale was to help the departments tasked with looking after the exposure of their digital assets by unifying search and monitoring capabilities so

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Prison Time for Former Equifax Executive

Adam Levin

The former CIO of Equifax has been sentenced to prison for selling his stock in the company before news of its 2017 data breach was publicly announced. Jun Ying, the former Chief Information Office of Equifax U.S. Information Solutions, sold his shares in the company for over $950,000 ten days before the company admitted that its data had been accessed by hackers.

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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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The Changing Face of Data Security in Federal Government

Thales Cloud Protection & Licensing

I recently had the pleasure of sharing some industry insights from our 2019 Data Threat Report-Federal Edition on Cyberwire’s Daily Podcast –specifically addressing the gap in security responsibility many federal agencies face today as they move tremendous amounts of sensitive data into multicloud environments. We also discussed a new digital landscape where perimeter defense is no longer effective.

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How to Protect Our Kids' Data and Privacy

WIRED Threat Level

Opinion: Kids today have an online presence starting at birth, which raises a host of legal and ethical concerns. We desperately need a new data protection framework.

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More Trending

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Party Like a Russian, Carder’s Edition

Krebs on Security

“It takes a certain kind of man with a certain reputation. To alleviate the cash from a whole entire nation…” KrebsOnSecurity has seen some creative yet truly bizarre ads for dodgy services in the cybercrime underground, but the following animated advertisement for a popular credit card fraud shop likely takes the cake. The name of this particular card shop won’t be mentioned here, and its various domain names featured in the video have been pixelated so as not to further

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Pwned Passwords, Version 5

Troy Hunt

Almost 2 years ago to the day, I wrote about Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era. This wasn't so much an original work on my behalf as it was a consolidation of advice from the likes of NIST, the NCSC and Microsoft about how we should be doing authentication today. I love that piece because so much of it flies in the face of traditional thinking about passwords, for example: Don't impose composition rules (upper case, lower case, numbers, etc) Don't mandate password rot

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Amazon Admits Alexa Voice Recordings Saved Indefinitely

Threatpost

Amazon's acknowledgment that it saves Alexa voice recordings - even sometimes after consumers manually delete their interaction history - has thrust voice assistant privacy policies into the spotlight once again.

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Protecting America’s Critical Infrastructure

Thales Cloud Protection & Licensing

From taking a shower, to brewing your coffee, and watching the news, your morning routine is fueled by the energy sector. If you’re like millions of other Americans, your TV is connected to the Internet and uses technology generated from the nation’s power grid. But the energy sector also underpins our emergency and response systems, our hospitals and healthcare, our schools, our businesses, and virtually everything we do as a society.

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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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A VxWorks Operating System Bug Exposes 200 Million Critical Devices

WIRED Threat Level

VxWorks is designed as a secure, "real-time" operating system for continuously functioning devices, like medical equipment, elevator controllers, or satellite modems.

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Applied Cryptography is Banned in Oregon Prisons

Schneier on Security

My Applied Cryptography is on a list of books banned in Oregon prisons. It's not me -- and it's not cryptography -- it's that the prisons ban books that teach people to code. The subtitle is "Algorithms, Protocols, and Source Code in C" -- and that's the reason. My more recent Cryptography Engineering is a much better book for prisoners, anyway.

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The War for Cyber Talent Will Be Won by Retention not Recruitment

Dark Reading

Six steps for creating a work environment that challenges, stimulates, rewards, and constantly engages employees fighting the good fight against cybercriminals.

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Android devices could be hacked by playing a video due to CVE-2019-2107 flaw

Security Affairs

Watch out! Playing a video on Android devices could be a dangerous operation due to a critical CVE-2019-2107 RCE flaw in Android OS between version 7.0 and 9.0. Playing a specially-crafted video on devices with the Android’s native video player application could allow attackers to compromise them due to a dangerous critical remote code execution flaw.

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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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Popular Samsung, LG Android Phones Open to ‘Spearphone’ Eavesdropping

Threatpost

A Spearphone attacker can use the accelerometer in LG and Samsung phones to remotely eavesdrop on any audio that's played on speakerphone, including calls, music and voice assistant responses.

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Four emerging digital payments standards you don’t want to catch you by surprise

Thales Cloud Protection & Licensing

Digital payments growth. According to 451 Research, digital payment channels are expected to grow from $2.8 trillion in 2018 to $5.8 trillion in 2022. That’s seven times the rate of in-store growth. Within digital payments, mobile payment transactions are expected to overtake e-commerce transactions in 2019 and represent 55% of transactions by 2022.

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Hackers Made an App That Kills to Prove a Point

WIRED Threat Level

Medtronic and the FDA left an insulin pump with a potentially deadly vulnerability on the market—until researchers who found the flaw showed how bad it could be.

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Zoom Vulnerability

Schneier on Security

The Zoom conferencing app has a vulnerability that allows someone to remotely take over the computer's camera. It's a bad vulnerability, made worse by the fact that it remains even if you uninstall the Zoom app: This vulnerability allows any website to forcibly join a user to a Zoom call, with their video camera activated, without the user's permission.

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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?

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DEF CON Invites Kids to Crack Campaign Finance Portals

Dark Reading

DEF CON's Voting Village and AI Village team up with r00tz Asylum to let kids explore simulated campaign financial disclosure portals and disinformation campaigns.

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Hackers compromised a Canonical GitHub account, Ubuntu source code was not impacted

Security Affairs

Yesterday, July 6, 2019, hackers breached the GitHub account of Canonical Ltd., the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. On July 6, 2019, hackers have breached the GitHub account of Canonical Ltd., the organization behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. The company immediately launched an investigation, the good news is that the source code of the popular Linux distro was not impacted. “We can confirm that on 2019-07-06 there was a Canonical owned account on GitHub whose credential

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VLC Media Player Plagued By Unpatched Critical RCE Flaw

Threatpost

A patch does not yet exist for a critical buffer overflow vulnerability in VLC Media Player that could enable remote code execution.

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What You Should Know About the Equifax Data Breach Settlement

Krebs on Security

Big-three credit bureau Equifax has reportedly agreed to pay at least $650 million to settle lawsuits stemming from a 2017 breach that let intruders steal personal and financial data on roughly 148 million Americans. Here’s a brief primer that attempts to break down what this settlement means for you, and what it says about the value of your identity.

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From Complexity to Clarity: Strategies for Effective Compliance and Security Measures

Speaker: Erika R. Bales, Esq.

When we talk about “compliance and security," most companies want to ensure that steps are being taken to protect what they value most – people, data, real or personal property, intellectual property, digital assets, or any other number of other things - and it’s more important than ever that safeguards are in place. Let’s step back and focus on the idea that no matter how complicated the compliance and security regime, it should be able to be distilled down to a checklist.

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Think FaceApp Is Scary? Wait Till You Hear About Facebook

WIRED Threat Level

The idea that FaceApp is somehow exceptionally dangerous threatens to obscure the real point: All apps deserve this level of scrutiny.

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Palantir's Surveillance Service for Law Enforcement

Schneier on Security

Motherboard got its hands on Palantir's Gotham user's manual, which is used by the police to get information on people: The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives. The capabilities are staggering, according to the guide: If police have a name that's associated with a license plate, they can use automatic license plate reader data to find out where they've been, and when

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TA505 Group Launches New Targeted Attacks

Dark Reading

Russian-speaking group has sent thousands of emails containing new malware to individuals working at financial institutions in the US, United Arab Emirates, and Singapore.

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0v1ru$ hackers breach FSB contractor SyTech and expose Russian intel projects

Security Affairs

SyTech , a contractor for the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) has been hacked, attackers stole data about interna l projects. Attackers have hacked SyTech, a contractor for the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), and exfiltrated data about interna l projects. According to the Russian media, SyTech has been working with FSB since 2009, in particular, they contributed to several projects for FSB unit 71330 and for fellow contractor Quantum.

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Successful Change Management with Enterprise Risk Management

Speaker: William Hord, Vice President of ERM Services

A well-defined change management process is critical to minimizing the impact that change has on your organization. Leveraging the data that your ERM program already contains is an effective way to help create and manage the overall change management process within your organization. Your ERM program generally assesses and maintains detailed information related to strategy, operations, and the remediation plans needed to mitigate the impact on the organization.

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Facebook Removes Accounts Used to Infect Thousands With Malware

Threatpost

A widespread malware campaign, ongoing since 2014, was using Facebook accounts and posts to spread malware through URL links.

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Who’s Behind the GandCrab Ransomware?

Krebs on Security

The crooks behind an affiliate program that paid cybercriminals to install the destructive and wildly successful GandCrab ransomware strain announced on May 31, 2019 they were terminating the program after allegedly having earned more than $2 billion in extortion payouts from victims. What follows is a deep dive into who may be responsible for recruiting new members to help spread the contagion.

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The Biggest Cybersecurity Crises of 2019 So Far

WIRED Threat Level

Ransomware attacks, supply chain hacks, escalating tensions with Iran—the first six months of 2019 have been anything but boring.

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Yubico Security Keys with a Crypto Flaw

Schneier on Security

Wow, is this an embarrassing bug : Yubico is recalling a line of security keys used by the U.S. government due to a firmware flaw. The company issued a security advisory today that warned of an issue in YubiKey FIPS Series devices with firmware versions 4.4.2 and 4.4.4 that reduced the randomness of the cryptographic keys it generates. The security keys are used by thousands of federal employees on a daily basis, letting them securely log-on to their devices by issuing one-time passwords.

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Cybersecurity Predictions for 2024

Within the past few years, ransomware attacks have turned to critical infrastructure, healthcare, and government entities. Attackers have taken advantage of the rapid shift to remote work and new technologies. Add to that hacktivism due to global conflicts and U.S. elections, and an increased focus on AI, and you have the perfect recipe for a knotty and turbulent 2024.