Blog Inforeseau.com – Alexandre Blanc Cyber Security

They lock the door for privacy… but they keep a copy of the key, and couple of backdoors

What a week ! 2 Conferences in a row (Canadian Chamber of Commerce and MSS Great lakes), and as many opportunities to share awareness and make more people, hopefully decision makers, wondering about security by design.

Speaking at conferences is requiring a lot of focus, because we represent our employer, so we must be perfect, and we need to understand the audience, in order to share a message that can be understood. Basically translating the state of technology, digital transformation, the threat landscape evolution, the threats, the risks and the impacts.

Basically explaining that you, plugging your connected toaster, allowed to take down a nuclear power plant safety network….. kind of huge shortcut, but also true (IoT, DDoS, IIoT etc).

Conferences are also a great place, even virtual, to meet other experts. I have many contacts made from these events, and when we are placed together on a stage, despite what our linkedin message look like, we see if we are aligned or not. Most of the time, we are.

This week on 54 points on my blog as usual :

1 – The tool is the product of a growing industry whose work is usually kept from the public and utilized by police – SHADOWDRAGON: INSIDE THE SOCIAL MEDIA SURVEILLANCE SOFTWARE THAT CAN WATCH YOUR EVERY MOVE – You are watched way more than you think, by a lot of actors, as your digital footprint grows exponentially with time. The absolute zero privacy of the cloud doesn’t help protecting ourselves either.

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2 – Exactly the kind of BS that will make me boycott a brand like Canon – Canon sued for disabling scanner when printers run out of ink – But it’s good to see that consumers are tired of technology abuses, and actually go and sue big tech. Go people go, it’s time for tech to be the product again, not us !

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3 – Don’t think China is behind, it’s way ahead – China’s Hackers Crack Devices at Tianfu Cup for $1.5M in Prizes – This hacking challenge in China has proven they can hack any tech in a few hours, so much for our super secure stuff :P almost laughable…

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4 – Even for criminals, connected=hacked – REvil ransomware shuts down again after Tor sites were hijacked – this is kind of ironical isn’t it ?

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5 – You Know it’s coming, you know threat actors and APTs (advanced persistent threats) are on the rise, but you don’t adjust your posture accordingly – Sinclair TV stations crippled by weekend ransomware attack – The sad part is all these attacks can be prevented by security basics. Another sad part is that a majority of ransomware victims do pay the criminals and finance their growth and innovation, as time goes, they are ever stronger, we are ever weaker. Cyber Security is a journey, not a step.

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6 – Security cameras, when connected, are also our worst weakness – Credit card PINs can be guessed even when covering the ATM pad

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7 – WordPress plugin patch time ! Critical Vulnerabilities Discovered in Fastest Cache Plugin For WordPress – oh my penguin, I’m currently hosting this on wordpress….quick check on plugins and wordpress version, up to date, all good, ….. hot tamales !

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8 – Private data centers are on the rise – 400GbE data center switch ports shipments to exceed 10 million this year – As we’ve seen the cloud failed at #cybersecurity, because they do not achieve CIA, Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability… they only manage to get the Availability part…. mostly. So it’s not surprising to see serious business considering data protection to run on private datacenter, private cloud, or make sure they encrypt any data BEFORE it reaches the extremely dangerous cloud.

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9 – An isolated workspace for high-risk user activities which you can try for free – Hysolate Free for Isolating Endpoint Threats

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10 – MFA is absolutely mandatory these days, because the whole world try to guess your password, or already have it thanks to the leaky cloud, you can’t not have it – How to Use MFA to Achieve Regulatory Compliance

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11 – Don’t fall for these, the cloud is poisoned and delivers malwares – TikTok Serves Up Fresh Gamer Targets via Fake Among Us, Steam Offerings

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12 – Applying #cybersecurity best practice should be a continual effort to stand a chance against criminal groups – State-backed hackers breach telcos with custom malware

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13 – The infected cloud try to clean up – Twitter Suspends Accounts Used to Snare Security Researchers

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14 – Cyber battlefield, cloud + internet, a world of threats – Suspected Chinese hackers behind attacks on ten Israeli hospitals

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15 – Powershell should be disabled for your users as a general rule, it’s the first execution of choice by threat actors (check MITRE ATT&CK matrix) – Microsoft asks admins to patch PowerShell to fix WDAC bypass

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16 – Failry good points on here – How to Prevent Ransomware: 15 Ways to Prevent the Next Attack

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17 – Don’t fall for the scam, typo squatting, domain squatting and URL shortener are extremely efficient cyber weapons – FBI warns of fake govt sites used to steal financial, personal data

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18 – From gangbang to karma, isn’t that ironic ? New Karma ransomware group likely a Nemty rebrand

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19 – Meanwhile in the threat landscape TA505 Gang Is Back With Newly Polished FlawedGrace RAT – TA505 – cybercrime trailblazers with ever-evolving TTPs – have returned to mass-volume email attacks, flashing retooled malware and exotic scripting languages.

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20 – No bla bla, fact, crime is growing like the dark star in the fifth element, each time some pays, it expands ! 2021 State of Ransomware Report Reveals 83% of Victims Paid to Get Data Restored

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21 – When was the last time you had a conversation with a CISO ? Ransomware attack disrupts production at Ferrara Candy, maker of Brach’s Candy Corn

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22 – Do it right, if you fail learn, because if you don’t learn, attackers will learn – Acer hacked twice in a week by the same threat actor

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23 – TPM mandatory they said – Microsoft issues advisory for Surface Pro 3 TPM bypass vulnerability

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24 – What ? the cloud hacked ? BS, the cloud is as strong as the Titanic ! Squirrel Engine Bug Could Let Attackers Hack Games and Cloud Services

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25 – Supply chain and third party risk management is a challenging task – Damages Escalate Rapidly in Multi-Party Data Breaches

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26 – Do not pay ransoms, do not finance crime ! Just stop doing that ! BlackByte ransomware decryptor released to recover files for free

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27 – While most SMBs have not yet an idea of what is CASB, meanwhile, threat actors build their market relax in plain sight – Zerodium wants zero-day exploits for Windows VPN clients

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28 – Cloud based VPN leak as cloud ! VPN Exposes Data for 1M Users, Leading to Researcher Questioning

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29 – Internet is a battlefield, and cyber incidents grow everywhere – DDoS attacks against Russian firms have almost tripled in 2021

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30 – if gummies take your cookies, your sessions are out – New Gummy Browsers attack lets hackers spoof tracking profiles

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31 – Do learn from this ! You can’t trust what tech shows or tell you – Deepfake Audio Scores $35M in Corporate Heist

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32 – As usual « Its activity starts with the execution of a PowerShell command that downloads a malicious payload from the specified URL, pointing to an available C2 server » Restrict the use of powershell only to users who need it (yes, you can do it with a GPO) – New PurpleFox botnet variant uses WebSockets for C2 communication

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33 – Still in public cloud ? lol – Researchers Break Intel SGX With New ‘SmashEx’ CPU Attack Technique

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34 – How to make different worlds in organizations, working together efficiently and keeping low risk – A practical framework for solving the infosec – infrastructure battle over enterprise storage security

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35 – If you don’t protect your internet browsing tools and sessions, they’ll be stolen – Youtubers accounts hijacked with cookie stealing malware

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36 – The cloud is putting transnational criminal on steroid supporting their activities without being able to identify criminals from legit users – Russian Cyber-Criminals Switch to Cloud (the current site you are reading is NOT in the cloud, and yet you can still read it…. ohhhhhhh)

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37 – Maybe it’s a good time to switch to 7zip – Bug in Popular WinRAR Software Could Let Attackers Hack Your Computer – Vulnerable because it’s a non free open source software, the issue is because of the end of trial notification

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38 – nteresting evolution from the leading XDR solution in the market – Product Overview: Cynet SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM)

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39 – Still blindly pulling anything from internet and the cloud into your code and playing Russian roulette with your deliverables ? Malicious NPM Packages Caught Running Cryptominer On Windows, Linux, macOS Devices

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40 – what authority has the US on Israel, the most advanced cyber place on this matter ? one can wonder – U.S. Government Bans Sale of Hacking Tools to Authoritarian Regimes

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41 – Smartphone are not allowing privacy – Smartphone counterespionage for travelers

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42 – Transnational criminal organizations now go through frontshop to hire ethical hackers for their « pentest » teams, while the engagements are fake and goal is get initial access to deploy ransomware – Hacking gang creates fake firm to hire pentesters for ransomware attacks

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43 – More focus on security for android (but not on privacy :p ) – Google Buckles Down on Android Enterprise Security

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44 – Youtube and the cloud used for cyber attacks, Modus operandi is that threat actor produce a video explaining how to fix a commonly researched issue, and advise to download a tool for the purpose, which tool is actually a virus – Massive campaign uses YouTube to push password-stealing malware

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45 – Threat actors move faster than regulations – Evil Corp demands $40 million in new Macaw ransomware attacks – Changing name and accounts quickly to avoid bans, yet still efficiently active

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46 – Potential massive supply chain attacks ahead ? Gigabyte Allegedly Hit by AvosLocker Ransomware

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47 – An ongoing malware distribution campaign targeting South Korea is disguising RATs (remote access trojans) as an adult game shared via webhards and torrents – RAT malware spreading in Korea through webhards and torrents

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48 – Oupsie, know bunch of military tools that will suffer from this, coming Oct 24th – GPS Daemon (GPSD) Rollover Bug

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49 – Prevention, detection and immediate response over cyber threat is critical.
In regards to data protection, governance and privacy, letting a successful ransomware attack succeed is NOT AN OPTION ! Italian celebs’ data exposed in ransomware attack on SIAE

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50 – NO CONFIDENTIALITY IN THE CLOUD – October 2021, Microsoft teams only start to consider end to end encryption and offer optional confidentiality, for a small subset of users, not enabled by default, ONLY on one to one calls – Microsoft Teams adds end-to-end encryption for one-to-one calls – Cybersecurity core is CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability), the cloud NEVER achieve confidentiality, so the cloud can’t be secured, cyber security can’t happen in the cloud.

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51 – Certificates are blindly signed by the cloud allowing threat actors to hijack any network traffic they want – Researchers Discover Microsoft-Signed FiveSys Rootkit in the Wild

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52 – The cloud is putting corporate infrastructure at risk – Threat Actors Abuse Discord to Push Malware

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53 – Powershell is the mainly used tool for successful malware attacks and lateral movements – Lyceum Hackers Stealing Credentials Windows By Deploy Keylogger Using PowerShell Scripts & .NET RAT

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54 – For threat modeling, to understand adversaries, and learn about compensation measures, MITRE ATT&CK is a gold mine of knowledge – Released: MITRE ATT&CK v10

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And that would be it, yes there are huge cloud issues, and no easy fix. Cloud stores so much of our PII and we can’t have it protected, so this is very very bad. Alternatives are not simple, and we know that convenience always wins, so, sharing this, my hope, is that people get more aware, don’t blindly trust the cloud and expect privacy. Meanwhile, we need to look as more privacy focused solution than the public cloud, as it’s not suitable for anything else than public data. Build your security posture, don’t be the next ransomware victim, because cloud or not cloud, you’ll be targeted.

Have a good weekend all !

Worst is yet to come, but they all warned you

CISA, FBI, Cyber Security specialists, they all warned you, I warned you, and I continue to do so.

Transnational criminal organizations, criminal hackers, are only getting better, and more organized. They have always been, but they are getting better and evolve faster.

This also means that YOU, and YOUR ORGANIZATIONS, must take this in consideration, and must adjust your posture according to this. Your risk register must be updated, and the likelihood of cyber events, at least should be raised or reviewed, especially on the ransomware side.

Doing so should put some level above the threshold you established, and some items that where falling under the « risk acceptance » option, will fall under the unacceptable, requiring compensation measures.

So you will update your security plan accordingly, while you adjust your risk posture.

A reminder on the risk management strategies :

• Risk Avoidance – Change organization practices to avoid the risk
• Risk Transference – Take an insurance, move the risk to a third party, BUT, keep in mind, there is no way you transfer 100% of the risk, which means, you need mitigation !
• Risk Mitigation – Take action design to reduce the likelihood or impact of a risk
• Risk Acceptance – After analysis, determining if cost makes the compensation irrelevant, then acceptance is the option
• Risk Deterrence – Dissuade a threat to happen, which can only be applied to risks that can be affected by controlled factors

So you’ll place security controls, which are procedures and mechanisms that an organization puts in place to manage security risks.

You’ll follow the defence in depth approach, multiple controls for one objective, overlapping security controls.

These security controls fall under 3 categories :

• Preventive, the goal being for the incident not to happen (you have a raid, so as when a disk dies, you don’t lose the data)
• Detective, goal is to identify a failing preventive security control, or an incident
• Corrective, restoring backups, because preventive controls failed, detective was missed, and you lost the data.

For each category above, you have many controls available (remember, people, process and technology somehow) :

• Technical controls (technology based, like a firewall)
• Operational controls (processes carried by humans)
• Management controls ( conducting risk assessments, security planning, change management etc).

When your risk register is complete, you have the assessment done (exposure factor, single loss expectancy, you got your Annual Loss Expectancy by multiply SLE x ARO as in anual risk occurence), and you get a quantitative and qualitative assessment.

Your goals are defined via RTO (recovery time objective), RPO (recovery point objective), MTD (maximum tolerable downtime), and you know your MTTR (mean time to repair).

If you don’t know what adversary risks (aside of all the other existing risks) your organization face, have look to MITRE ATT&CK and check if anything is applicable to you, and therefore, if you have matching controls in place.

This week in the cyber news, helping you to have a real view of the threat landscape and what happens to others, so as you can actually review your posture, and adjust the above listed risk approach accordingly.

This week in 60 bullets :

1 – You are a target, you may just not be watching your logs – North American Orgs Hit With an Average of 497 Cyberattacks per Week

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2 – Do you have the proper security posture for today’s threat landscape ? Cox Media Group confirms ransomware attack that took down broadcasts

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3 – Phishing is still dominant, very cheap, with good success rates – Intuit warns QuickBooks customers of ongoing phishing attacks

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4 – There is something brewing in the #cybersecurity market. A change to come within 6 months to 1 year ( I make the prediction :) ) – Do you have an MSSP partner already ? Who are you going to call during the next incident ? (Nope, Ghostbusters are busy)

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5 – Security can be an illusion ! Reverse engineering and decrypting CyberArk vault credential files

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6 – it’s iOS patch time again ! Yes, the iPhone, iPad, iPod, iSuck and all their invasive stuff – Emergency Apple iOS 15.0.2 update fixes zero-day used in attacks (that was 3 days ago, hopefully you updated already)

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7 – it’s #libreoffice and #openoffice path time ! LibreOffice, OpenOffice bug allows hackers to spoof signed docs

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8 – Technology is the art of deception, and bugs left on purpose are often state sponsored, which can lead to frustration of researchers – Researcher Disclosed Telegram Vulnerability, Refused Bounty For Staying quiet

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9 – The cloud more and more targeted and hacked – Huawei Cloud targeted by updated cryptomining malware

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10 – spying, hacking, stealing IP, research and trade secrets is a reality. Don’t think you are not a target – Nuclear engineer’s espionage plans unraveled by undercover FBI agent

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11 – Cyber battlefield, you are all connected to it – Indian-Made Mobile Spyware Targeted Human Rights Activist in Togo

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12 – Don’t wait for an incident ! Your defenses must detect and respond against these quickly – Pacific City Bank discloses ransomware attack claimed by AvosLocker

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13 – Transnational crime scoreboard : REvil/Sodinokibi accounting for 73% of ransomware detections in Q2 2021

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14 – The threat landscape on ransomware is shifting, while we saw some focusing on encryption and giving up on stealing files, some groups now only focus on this approach – SnapMC hackers skip file encryption and just steal your files

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15 – The cloud is an expensive scalable mess – Microsoft revokes insecure SSH keys for Azure DevOps customers

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16 – The cloud attacked more and more, a growing target facing growing amount of challenges to keep up – Microsoft: Azure customer hit by record DDoS attack in August

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17 – The cloud is infected, so much for « play protect » ! Photo editor Android app STILL sitting on Google Play store is malware

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18 – Protecting your private keys is even more critical when you use wildcard certificates – NSA warns of wildcard certificate risks, provides mitigations

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19 – Ransomware threat actors are coming after the cloud, and cloud workload holding your data are at risk – AWS ransomware attacks: Not a question of if, but when (90% of the S3 buckets at risk ! )

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20 – Happy to see in my sponsored feed some more consideration on the cyber threat landscape handling, especially the ransomware side of things – Hysolate CTO and Co-Founder Tal Zamir presents at the recent IT Pro – Information Week Conference ‘Defending Against Ransomware

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21 – A quick take at what happened to Facebook, short and straight to the point – The Facebook outage and network configuration

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22 – Don’t worry, it’s just exploited since January – Microsoft Fixes Zero-Day Flaw in Win32 Driver

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23 – Interesting approach from dutch police speaking to criminals – Dutch police send warning letters to DDoS booter customers

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24 – The cloud is such and easy shiny target, corrupt one, corrupt them all – Office 365 Spy Campaign Targets US Military Defense

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25 – Supply chain poisoning by cloning (or forking), easy, cheap and efficient ! PyPI removes ‘mitmproxy2’ over code execution concerns

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26 – Connected = hacked – FreakOut botnet now attacks vulnerable video DVR devices

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27 – Would you be able to detect and respond to such attack ? AND, do you have enough cash to hold 1 or 2 weeks for when your bank falls offline ?! Cyberattack shuts down Ecuador’s largest bank, Banco Pichincha

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28 – Some good, and some bad – Australia to tackle ransomware data breaches by deleting stolen files

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29 – pros and cons as usual – EU legislation introduced to ban anonymous domain registration

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30 – Internet is a battlefield, a bias machine, and the cloud is a steroid for disinformation and leaks – A Close Look at Russia’s Ghostwriter Campaign

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31 – Your wallet has (had) a hole and it leaks your assets – Critical Flaw in OpenSea Could Have Let Hackers Steal Cryptocurrency From Wallets

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32 – Want it or not, the cloud leaks – Verizon digital carrier Visible customer accounts were hacked

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33 – The cloud is now widely recognized as a threat, and we see more and more solutions coming on the market for organizations that need to place data in the cloud, but don’t want their data stolen, abused, mined etc. – New Vaultree Encryption-as-a-Service Keeps Cloud Data Fully Encrypted

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34 – When technology and politics collide – Russia and China left out of global anti-ransomware meetings

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35 – jealous of Facebook maybe, all the big players must have their AS config fail, it’s like a prerequisite to join the table – OVH hosting provider goes down during planned maintenance

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36 – A 2 minutes video that allows you to get the ICS challenges of today, well done – « ROUNDS #1 – STRONG GUARD » about industrial control systems

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37 – When the marketplace competes with its sellers, the deck is stacked – the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets

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38 – Be aware that this is a reality in many places, assumed guilty and jailed. Given how technology is all fake and lies, you can only guess how easy it is for anyone to be sent in jail on fake proof – Belarus: Joining banned Telegram channels will land you in prison

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39 – What did you do to avoid this ? Are you sure you have the proper people, processes and technologies in place and it is well implemented ? Acer confirms breach of after-sales service systems in India

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40 – As predicted, the growth of ransomware is started, and that’s only the beginning. No fear mongering, FACTS ! New Yanluowang ransomware used in targeted enterprise attacks

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41 – The clowd as well. pile of lies – Washington Attorney General says Facebook knowingly lied in lawsuit testimony

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42 – Big tech and clowd style – Apple silently fixes zero-day Flaw without Crediting the finder

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43 – ou can’t even know what’s in your IoT, and you blindly trust the cloud ? Organizations losing business due to connected product security concerns

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44 – Interesting stats, based on what people gave to google via virus total (BTW, never upload confidential documents on this platform ! Nor in online translation tools, they are all using the data and selling it on the free accounts) – VirusTotal Shares Data on Ransomware Activity

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45 – So tempting to play big brother when you have access to all the data in the world – Microsoft will put government and police contracts through independent human rights review

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46 – Are you sure you are not providing computing resources to transnational criminal organization (or the cloud :p ) – MyKings botnet still active and making massive amounts of money

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47 – WordPress plugin patch time : Brizy Page Builder – Brizy WordPress Plugin Exploit Chains Allow Full Site Takeovers

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48 – MFA anyone ? hopefully you also use a password manager and a unique password for each and every services – Thingiverse Data Leaked — Check Your Passwords

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49 – Big tech abuses cleanup time, happy to see some action – FTC fires warning shot at 700 leading companies about fake reviews

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50 – At some point common sense should come back and we should stop connecting everything and anything, building dangerous data lakes etc – University of Sunderland announces outage following cyberattack

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51 – SIP can also lead to massive take over – Critical Remote Hacking Flaws Disclosed in Linphone and MicroSIP Softphones

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52 – A malware on top of a spyware ! Malicious Chrome ad blocker injects ads behind the scenes

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53 – Layered security and overlapping security controls are needed – 13 Vulnerabilities Discovered in a Widely Used Industrial Router

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54 – Interesting but, can this be done ? Governments worldwide to crack down on ransomware payment channels

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55 – Getting on the path to massive casualties – US government discloses more ransomware attacks on water plants

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56 – Good old email, if you don’t have independent advanced email filtering, you should talk to your MSSP, in most case it’s affordable and deployed in less than a day – Russian cybercrime gang targets finance firms with stealthy macros

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57 – Don’t worry, it’s only data after all – Twitch downplays this month’s hack, says it had minimal impact

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58 – As part of your incident response plan, you should have a communication plan, and ideally bring transparency – Accenture confirms data breach after August ransomware attack

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59 – Cyber crime supply chain is constantly enhancing. Is your posture adjusting too ? Attackers Behind Trickbot Expanding Malware Distribution Channels

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60 – Where do you stand with your patch management ? Server Patching Best Practices. Stop Patching, Start JetPatching

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And that’s all for this week ! Wishing you a good weekend ! That was pretty intense, despite a shorter week here in Canada :D …. what, he’s Canadian ? but he’s got such a French accent… .oh boy, yes, something like that ! :D Find me on linkedin here.