Allgemeine Informationen Archive - Seite 77 von 79

Unlike cyber criminals, who want to stay under the radar, Hacktivists like to make big splashy messages. The whole point of “cyber” activism is to use technology to get as many people as possible to notice your message, whatever it may be.

Prediction video link: https://youtu.be/EEbqr-2XFRk

Anonymous is a great example of this, with their well-known videos containing a man in a suit wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and speaking with a distorted voice over theatrical music. All of the Anonymous’ “operations” are designed to get noticed. Whether they’re trolling the Church of Scientology, DDoSing credit card providers, defacing websites, or doxing someone they disagree with, the goal is getting attention for their cause. What better way to get attention than to hijack a live TV signal or big event?

While hacktivists are known for their attention-grabbing videos, so far they’ve never taken over live TV or radio, and really gotten their message across to a wider audience. Movies and TV would have us expect “l33t h@x0rs” to take over the airwaves, but so far their strange hacktivist videos have been relegated to YouTube posts anyone can do. Hacking TV broadcasts may sound like sci-fi, but there is precedent. Back in the 80s, a weird, masked man (sound familiar?) took over a few Chicago TV stations for a few minutes at a time. While our TV broadcast have become more protected today, the breach to TV5Monde—a French broadcast network—shows that attackers still have the potential to take over the airwaves.

Next year, I expect cyber attackers to pull off some hack that gets broadcast to the world live. Perhaps they’ll take over a big stadium screen during the Super Bowl or World Cup; they might hijack all of the big TVs in Times Square; or perhaps they pull off the ultimate hacktivist’s dream, and hijack a major TV network’s live broadcast. Whatever it is, expect hacktivists to do something big that televises their revolution to the world live.

WatchGuard Security Vorhersage 2016 #9 – Spies Slip Into Wireless Alliances

3. Januar 2016 Bernd Och Comment

WatchGuard Security Prediction #9 – Spies Slip Into Wireless Alliances

To be honest, wireless security hasn’t changed too much in the last few years. That’s not to say it’s perfectly secure. There are still plenty of folks using legacy WEP encryption standards, and organizations that use WPA2-PSK with a horrible password. There are also many wireless networks that don’t segment clients, so attackers can sniff plenty of private connections by hanging out on public hotspots. Furthermore, many SMB organizations haven’t solved the problem of rogue hotspots or evil twin hotspots. That said, there hasn’t been a huge, industry-wide wireless standard vulnerability in quite awhile.

Prediction video link: https://youtu.be/A4m6D6fqmWA

While we don’t know exactly what it’ll be, we suspect the next big wireless vulnerability will have to do with an “ease-of-use” feature. The Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) standard was a great example of this possibility. WPS was designed to make it easier for new users to join a secure wireless network without having to remember a complex password. Unfortunately, it suffered from a flaw that made it easy for attackers to brute-force a WPS pin and gain access to the wireless network quickly. Unfortunately, usability features can sometimes clash with real security.

Recently, Windows included a new wireless feature called Sense. This feature is intended to allow you to automatically connect to secure wireless networks that your friends or acquaintances have used. While no one has found any issue with this feature yet, this is the type of feature that may introduce new wireless problems. In 2016, expect the next wireless security vulnerability to involve an ease of use feature like Sense.

WatchGuard Security Vorhersage 2016 #8 – Breaches Come to the IoT Frontier

3. Januar 2016 Bernd Och Comment

WatchGuard Security Prediction #8 – Breaches Come to the IoT Frontier

When a hacker hijacks a computer, gaining persistence (or making sure his malicious trojan stays on the computer) is easy. The attacker just has to load malware onto the computer’s hard drive and make sure it runs when the computer reboots. However, hijacking the Internet of Things (IoT) is a different story. Many IoT devices don’t have local storage, and are often small embedded systems with low resources. Gaining persistence on these devices is much more difficult and may actually involve modifying the software these devices use to boot, which we call firmware.

Prediction video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU63Bhmv6LU

Next year, we expect to see more researchers release proof-of-concept attacks that permanently modify and hijack the firmware of IoT devices. It’s not enough to just find a vulnerability in these devices, but you also have to figure out how to inject malicious code that can stick around. We expect to see vendors start to harden the security of their IoT devices by implementing secure boot mechanisms that makes it more difficult for attackers to modify firmware.

WatchGuard Security Vorhersage 2016 #7 – Starfleet Academy Targeted

3. Januar 2016 Bernd Och Comment

WatchGuard Security Prediction #7 – Starfleet Academy Targeted

Information security is all about protecting data, because at the end of the day, stolen data is what makes the cyber criminals rich. Criminals started with the basics. Monetizing stolen credit card (CC) information was easy. You just needed the basic CC information and a few personal details to make a purchase with a stolen card. We saw this in 2014—the year of the retail breach—as cyber criminals stole millions of CC records through point-of-sale systems.

Prediction video link: https://youtu.be/eATe_am6A6E

However, as fraud systems got better, making false CC purchases became harder and today stolen CC information is barely worth the effort to steal it. Meanwhile, the personally identifying information (PII) required to steal a full identity has become much more valuable. PII value in the underground directly increases in relation to how many individual pieces of data you have in a corresponding set. As you can imagine: a name, email, address, CC, date of birth, and social security number (SSN) is much more valuable than just a name and email address. That’s why CCs may only fetch 50 cents to a dollar on the underground, while a full set PII (which the underground calls a fullz) can bring in 10 to 20 dollars, especially since it includes a SSN. That’s also why healthcare records are so valuable—they’re rich in PII data and include SSNs. In 2015, we saw many attacks targeting healthcare data.

So what’s even better than a healthcare record? Apparently, student records! We are learning that the amount of data collected about our kids over their lifetime as a student is staggering. It even includes some of their health records to boot, which is already one of the richest PII datasets. This, combined with the more open network environment found in educational facilities is why we expect cyber criminals to target student data systems in 2016.

If you run IT for an educational facility, look out for hackers next year.

WatchGuard Security Vorhersage 2016 #6 – Jango Fett and the Clone Army are Coming

3. Januar 2016 Bernd Och Comment

WatchGuard Security Prediction #6 – Jango Fett and the Clone Army are Coming

Security experts have always realized that information security is a constant arms race. Attackers discover new methods to evade defenses, we update our defenses, and the cycle continues and repeats. In fact, much of our legacy defense is reactive. It relies on us having seen a particular attack, and creating a specific defense for that particular attack. The problem is, reactive defenses do little good for new attacks.

Prediction video link: https://youtu.be/PXG-nty1XR0

Today’s attackers have automated their attacks, ensuring they constantly evade our reactive defenses. Signature-based protection is no longer effective. While human analysts can identify new threats by monitoring for suspicious behaviors, cyber criminals release new threats in such volume that humans can’t keep up. The solution? Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning that can automatically recognize malicious behavior.

At a very high level, statisticians and mathematicians have begun to develop big data algorithms that can identify very complex behaviors and trends. The security industry is starting to see a new level of security controls that can proactively find new threats in real-time, without human interaction. We’ll always be one step behind the latest attack, so these more proactive security technologies are the only way we might stop the newest threat.

Expect 2016 to be the year of machine learning and behavioral detection security controls.

— Corey Nachreiner, CISSP (@SecAdept)03

WatchGuard Security Vorhersage 2016 #5 – Jar Jar Can’t Resist Ads from the Dark Side

3. Januar 2016 Bernd Och Comment

WatchGuard Security Prediction #5 – Jar Jar Can’t Resist Ads from the Dark Side

Malvertising, the combination of the words malware and advertising, is an attack where criminals booby-trap a legitimate, trusted website with a malicious code by sneaking it in through a third party advertising network. Unfortunately, legitimate web advertising services haven’t been very discerning with the ads they allow their “customers” to upload to their networks.

Prediction video link: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ps2ylLVGyCc

As a result, criminals have paid for advertising services in order to sneak malicious code onto all the legitimate web sites that use that service. Over the past two years, this has been a very successful technique for cyber criminals to redirect innocent users browsing the web to their malicious drive-by download sites.

The good news is a number of reputation services and security products have become better at detecting malicious advertisements, and preventing your users from getting redirected to these evil sites. However, the criminals are fighting back. They have started to implement a number of techniques to obfuscate their malicious web code, including encoding their malicious JavaScript or by burying their attack in a Shockwave video file. The most recent obfuscation technique is the simplest—they serve their malicious advertisement over HTTPS.

In 2016, expect malvertising attempts to triple and for it to succeed more regularly due to its use of HTTPS. Criminals know that security products and companies are keeping on the look out for malicious ads. They also know that many security controls cannot see into HTTPS traffic. By encrypting their malvertising campaigns, they hope to bypass most detections next year. If you don’t have security controls that can monitor HTTPS, you should update as soon as you can.

WatchGuard Security Vorhersage 2016 #4 – The iOS Menace

3. Januar 2016 Bernd Och Comment

WatchGuard Security Prediction #4 – The iOS Menace

Experts have been predicting the growth of mobile malware for years. We’ve covered how the increase in mobile device usage has led to an increase in criminal attention. We’ve predicted how the inclusion of mobile wallets, using NFV and RFID technology, would lead to attackers targeting the mobile payment vector. We’ve even talked about how Google’s open developer and consumer strategy translates to more threats against Android devices, since it’s an easier platform for criminals to infiltrate. However, through all these trends one thing has remained the same—Apple iOS has not seen that many threats. Next year, we expect this to begin to change, and for attackers to launch more attacks against iOS users.

Prediction video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjtvfU0Wx4M

Underneath the surface, iOS devices are not technically more secure than their Android brethren. They’re still just mini computers running software. Researchers and blackhats have found plenty of vulnerabilities in iOS software before, including the recent zero day that could easily root an iOS device via the Web. The difference being Apple has retained a much tighter control of their app community than Google, making it much harder for users to install non-sanctioned apps and thus making it harder for attackers to get malware on an iOS device.

However, last year smart cyber criminals found a way around this challenge: they infected the Apple development platform by releasing a maliciously hijacked version of Xcode called XcodeGhost. If Apple’s own development kit builds malicious code that seems legitimate, it makes it much harder for Apple to keep it off their official App store. Though Apple has since fixed the issue that led to XcodeGhost, and has tried to educate developers about it, we believe cyber criminals will continue to exploit this attack vector to sneak malware onto Apple’s official marketplaces. iOS users should prepare for more threats in 2016.

WatchGuard Security Vorhersage 2016 #3 – SMBs Can’t Let Basic Shields Down

3. Januar 2016 Bernd Och Comment

WatchGuard Security Prediction #3 – SMBs Can’t Let Basic Shields Down

Security experts often focus on the latest and greatest progressions of the threat landscape. They’re most interested in sharing how threat actors have become more sophisticated and how attack technology, malware, and techniques have evolved significantly. They warn that the latest attacks bypass or evade many of the industry’s original information security defenses.

Prediction video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwBQbx6jRKs

While none of that is false, the truth is a huge majority of successful attacks—especially ones against smaller targets—still rely on the basics. Many successful cyber-attacks last year exploited software flaws that had been fixed for months, took advantage of bad or default passwords or bad password practices, or just tricked users into doing something basic that they shouldn’t do. Despite the fact that some threat actors really are using very sophisticated techniques, we predict the majority of small to-medium businesses (SMBs) will experience security breaches next year that will succeed due to a basic security best practice failure, such as not keeping your software up to date or not using very basic security controls like Gateway Antivirus (GAV) or Intrusion Prevention Services (IPS).

There is a silver-lining to this prediction, though. If you concentrate on following basic security best practices, your organization can avoid a majority of the attacks that will launch in 2016.