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The threat landscape is very dynamic – Cyber news this week

This week again has been quite loaded, and the technology environment, which define the attack surface, is only growing. It takes a vulnerability, a threat attached to it, and we have a risk.

To know the likelihood of any threat to be targeting our organization, we go through a threat modelling exercise. Sometimes it’s formal, documented and referred in the risk register, sometimes it’s a guesstimate, a rough high level assessment. Overall, better than not considering the risk at all.

This week in 49 points, hosted on my blog, because I know I won’t have limitations etc, and for each of these, there is something to learn, a security control you may have forgotten :

1 – The financial system is fully backed by technology, and therefore, fully vulnerable – World Economic Forum (WEF) Warns of Cyberattack Leading to Systemic Collapse of the Global Financial System – Do you have some cash handy ? You are your own risk manager, what happen if you can’t use your payment card for a week ? Do you have enough food ? Gas ? Just a week, think about it.

2 – Building and learning takes time, but if you don’t, you are not the real owner – This Best-Selling TP-Link Router Ships With An Alarming Security Surprise – Do you know what runs on your network ? and what or who is watching your online activities ? (aside of the ISP who gladly sell all your activity, including your favourite recipes on youcorn, they know if you like crunchy corn, or white corn, old corn or even big or slim corn ! yes a VPN might come handy, but think twice who should know how you like to eat your corn ! )

3 – I’m proud having received the Cyber Sentinel Award 2021 in India for my work in #cybersecurity, and that’s a huge news :P – Cyber Sentinel Award 2021 – In the post you’ll find link to the panel I had a chance to participate as well, you’ll see that trends in India are very aligned with trends in US and Canada !

4 – I told you to drill that weak NFC circuit on your payment card ! Paypass is unsafe – New Vulnerability Allow Hackers to Bypass PIN Codes on Contactless Cards From Mastercard & Maestro – Wireless is weak, you know the song

5 – Let’s clear something, when authorities come with a warrant, organizations must comply – Important clarifications regarding arrest of climate activist – unlike the cloud, they did not betray confidentiality, as they are not technically supposed to be able to access your encrypted mailbox, they could just tell which IP use this mailbox. VPN maybe ? again, know which VPN you use, deciding to give all your traffic to a VPN provider is something you should look twice.

6 – Transnational criminal organization are efficient businesses – “FudCo” Spam Empire Tied to Pakistani Software Firm – Enjoy the reading, understand how it works, and be sure there are thousands like these.

7 – bypassing MFA and password reset, more on the SAML golden ticket attack, an attack close to pass the hash – Golden SAML Attack – APT Hackers Hijacking & Gaining Access To The Active Directory Server – Attacker don’t even need your credentials to be logged as you, be aware, MFA + attribute based authentication with continuous diagnosis and mitigation, yes I speak about better than ZeroTrust, I speak about CGM !

8 – Do you really know who you are working for, and what’s the purpose of your work ? TrickBot gang developer arrested when trying to leave Korea – In the not so recent past, I worked for an organization which turned to be terrorists, and this is one of the way I learned how privacy matters, how it’s heavily tight to freedom. So, always check who you work for, and make sure you are sure this is what it is. It doesn’t only happen to others. Due diligence is a good practice for your daily life too.

9 – WordPress plugin patch time ! Gutenberg Template Library Plugin Bugs Affected 1+ Million WordPress Sites – Oh myyyy penguiiiiiinnnn ! I’m currently typing on WordPress ! Oh no ! I’m doomed, nooooooo !…. oh wait, I just clicked on « update » and in 10 sec my blog was updated…. and actually there is a worst one that this one, so you full WordPress deserves an update if you did not apply it today.

10 – Netgear patch time ! Netgear fixes severe security bugs in over a dozen smart switches – Yes, patching is a non stop job, you should have someone coordinating this in your organization, because patching a switch, will turn the network off for a few seconds, even minutes. Coordination is key !

11 – IoT, or the internet of threats, is only growing (it’s supposed to mean the Internet of Things, but it’s not accurate) – IoT Attacks Skyrocket, Doubling in 6 Months – And this is only growing, the more you connect, the more you grow your attack surface, and the need for security controls, network segmentation and more, I know, at home it’s not easy !

12 – Speaking about IoT, Don’t connect all this crap ! Vulnerabilities In Victure Baby Monitor Allow Access To Camera Feeds – Really need to watch your baby with Russia and China doing so with you ? Because they will, do you know this site « Insecam » ? Enjoy.

13 – What do you do when all your stuff is in the cloud and Internet is taken down by DDoS ? New Zealand suffers a widespread Internet outage – You can look at stuff like Cloudflare solutions, issue is, you must give away all your traffic to the platform, and while they claim they never tap any connection, this is still a risk to consider. Sometimes it’s also a matter of national security, you would not want to give all your national internet traffic to another country either. Not simple.

14 – CASB LOL ! Criminal access service brokers to the cloud – Enterprising criminals are selling direct access to cloud accounts – Did you setup geo fencing in your cloud configuration ? On your firewall it’s easy, you just allow only national IPs as per need, in the cloud you’ll pay per rule or so.

15 – Micro segmentation is the very first step to protect your workload and bring governance, including the coverage of legacy systems – Micro-segmentation From Strategy to Execution

16 – A virus in the facebook application that steal your mobile data on Android – Discovered a virus in facebook app that steal data from user – You may consider using « slimsocial » on Android instead of the facebook apps, safer, better for privacy, it works well, and the key is that the app doesn’t send your private data to FB.

17 – I hope you use a password manager and multi factor everywhere – McDonald’s leaks password for Monopoly VIP database to winners – Whenever you give away your data, you must assume it will be compromised, as much as doable, provide fake data.

18 – Your private satellite network ? Review: Hands on with the Swarm Satellite Network Eval Kit

19 – Issue when you have tons of interconnected systems is that decommissioning can be a mess when not properly documented – Latest Atlassian Confluence Flaw Exploited to Breach Jenkins Project Server

20 – If ransomware gets in, you are done. Criminals will promise everything, but they are criminals, they will leak anyways – Ransomware gang threatens to leak data if victim contacts FBI, police – You should have proper security posture so as you never get to this point. At least, start with endpoint protection, such as Cynet XDR (yet we do provide managed offer for this product at work, customers are very happy with it, and the key point is, it works ! )

21 – There is porn, and Netflix and prime video and P2P, so most of internet is leisure and crime – 39% of all internet traffic is from bad bots – Quick hint, you are connected on this very same internet and your traffic is counted in this stat, oh oh….I know, we only watch youcorn ;)

22 – Scraping VS leaks ? Would you know the difference ? Dark Web Scraping

23 – Servers back online, seems they went dark for a while but came back – REvil ransomware’s servers mysteriously come back online – I bet the reason is summer vacations ! What is your take ? They made so much that they took a break ! :P

24 – Manual patch for O365 or get hacked – The cloud is funny – Microsoft shares temp fix for ongoing Office 365 zero-day attacks

25 – A Dash of cyber – In this episode Rod lewis, Brad Rhodes, Alexandre Blanc and Ron Craig will be talking about IoT, Great live we did, don’t miss the replay !

26 – The less apps you use, the less exposed you are. Reduce your attack surface ! Experts Uncover Mobile Spyware Attacks Targeting Kurdish Ethnic Group

27 – Popcorn time ahead, storm and pouring, data flooding as well ! Cloud computing market to reach $1,251.09 billion by 2028 – if we’d stop all cloud spending, we could pay the whole world debt immediately…. I’ll let you think about this.

28 – Backend of most cloud, HAProxy needs patching ! HAProxy Found Vulnerable to Critical HTTP Request Smuggling Attack – You should patch if you use it.

29 – Are you the next in line ? Have you prepared your organization by deploying proper security controls and limit incidents impacts ? Howard University shuts down network after ransomware attack

30 – When you need to provide remote access, but you need to restrict access to a limited amount of resources, and need efficient audit trails, Cyolo comes to mind – How to Provide Remote Users with Access to Restricted Services

31 – Zoho patch time ! Zoho patches actively exploited critical ADSelfService Plus bug – Pretty bad exploit given the nature of the product !

32 – Patching your Fortinet is critical, changing all passwords and enforcing MFA is even more needed ! Criminal Hackers leak passwords for 500,000 Fortinet VPN accounts

33 – Faking vaccine, a kamikaze approach – Spoofing Bug Highlights Cybersecurity for Digital Vaccine Passports

34 – Cloud oriented dev is quite different than traditional open source like CPAN etc – The Dark Side Of Package Repositories: Ownership Drama And Malware – an excellent reading.

35 – You think you can trust teams and that your boss trusts you ? LOL, don’t forget this is cloud based, so pure nastiness ! What Your Boss Can TRACK About YOU with Microsoft Teams

36 – Very happy to have had the opportunity to share during an interview, among amazing world wide known knowledgeable specialists – 2021 MIDDLE TN CYBER CONFERENCE », organized by The Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security and TCAT Shelbyville

37 – They went after the Russians…. There might be some retaliation coming here – New Mēris botnet breaks DDoS record with 21.8 million RPS attack

38 – We spoke about IoT and IIoT security issue during our Dash of cyber live, and here is a very relevant article on the topic – Fighting the Rogue Toaster Army: Why Secure Coding in Embedded Systems is Our Defensive Edge

39 – NPM patch time again ! GitHub finds 7 code execution vulnerabilities in ‘tar’ and npm CLI

40 – Multi factor authentication renders this useless – Ukrainian extradited for selling 2,000 stolen logins per week

41 – You’ll see the take of the article, BUT, I say it depends on the vertical and your compliance requirements ! 3 IT Restrictions that are hurting your business

42 – Public cloud continuous key problem : can’t isolate data between customers – ‘Azurescape’ Kubernetes Attack Allows Cross-Container Cloud Compromise

43 – CRAZY LOL ! Microsoft, the provider of cloud and teams and online collaboration tools (SharePoint and all) just publicly admits that their cloud doesn’t allow remote worker to do their job ! Study of Microsoft employees shows how remote work puts productivity and innovation at risk

44 – A world of deception, we can do better than this – Rep. Adam Schiff rips Amazon and Facebook for ‘directly profiting’ on COVID-19 misinformation

45 – Fixed but not really, history tends to repeat itself – Windows MSHTML zero-day defenses bypassed as new info emerges – Yes again and again !

46 – Things are moving ! Great !…. well somehow moving …. Rep. Jayapal: Biden administration supports Amazon-busting ‘Ending Platform Monopolies Act’

47 – It is very simple, no 2FA (second factor authentication) is a wide open door – Stolen Credentials Led to Data Theft at United Nations

48 – Threat actors are innovating continuously – SOVA: New Android Banking Trojan Emerges With Growing Capabilities – The less apps you install, the less risk you take !

49 – When you realise that OWASP Top 10 is the EXACT definition of the cloud state !!!! OWASP Top 10 2021 Published – Broken Access Control Jumps to the Top Spot

Some coming event in which I’ll be speaking (I know, bla bla bla bla :D ) :

• Will be speaking at the upcoming RED Summit on 9/24. Ransomware and Extortion Defense for Industry and Government
• Will be speaking at InfoGov World Expo & Conference 2021

Enjoy and have a good weekend all ! Thank you for reading !