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As threats escalate and enterprise cybersecurity teams struggle to build teams that can handle mounting volumes of work, the hue and cry over the cybersecurity skills shortage continues to grow more urgent by the year.

In fact, a study released earlier this year from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) shows that over the past four years, the percentage of IT leaders who complained about a problematic shortage of cybersecurity skills has more than doubled. Security skills, according to ESG, are the shortest in supply, ahead of IT architecture and planning, and server and virtualization administration, which were numbers two and three, respectively. 

If organizations are to survive this skills crunch, they’re going to need to get creative about how they build their teams. According to many longtime security experts, this means rethinking the basics. Fundamental to the process is for organizations to be both disciplined and open-minded as they recruit, retrain, and retain staffers.

Here’s what the experts say it will take to leverage these three R’s.

Recruit
Organizations often get so hung up with checking off a laundry list of resume prerequisites — either specific security certifications, technology proficiencies, exact numbers of years in the industry, or all of the above — that they eliminate excellent candidates from the pool before they’ve even started recruited. 

“It’s important to think outside the box and be open-minded when recruiting security talent. Throw stereotypes out the window and focus on understanding the types of people you are looking to hire,” says Jennifer Sunshine Steffens, CEO of IOActive. “They may not have degrees or certifications, they may not have years of experience in security, and they may not wear hoodies.” 

As Steffens and others explain, security is more of a way of life and a mode of thinking, so recruitment should be about filtering by personality types and mentalities more so than by checklists. Security recruiters who focus more on picking people who can round out a team rather than filling an exact role will see greater success down the line, says David Emerson, CISO for Cyxteram. This is particularly important considering that the pace of change is going to make those checklist items obsolete in a few years anyway. The more important thing is finding someone who can grow with the team.

“The person you need now is not necessarily the person you need one year from now, or three years from now, so make sure your hires have enduring characteristics, such as dedication and a penchant for collaborative problem solving, not merely point-in-time qualities or trendy resume points,” Emerson warns.

Organizations should be similarly creative about where and how they run recruitment drives, Steffens adds. 

“In cybersecurity, we’ve found some of the best talent by looking outside the industry ‘norms.’ Sure, recruitment at college fairs and offering internship programs will yield great candidates, but with 2 million jobs openings, the talent must come in nontraditional ways,” she says. “At IOActive, recruiting is part of our everyday lives. We travel around the world attending conferences, hosting events, and visiting hackerspaces to find the right talent.”

Finally, if you absolutely must fill a specific list of resume metrics, then you’ll need to ensure that what you offer a candidate is on track with market realities.

“[Organizations] will need to open their wallets and clearly define their cultural identity to win the affections of those who are already established as leaders in the field,” says Jared Coseglia, CEO of TRU Staffing Partners, a recruiter specializing in cybersecurity.

Retrain
Hiring based on potential is important, but to get the most out of all that latent ability you’ll need to actually give employees the opportunity to make good on it. Training is crucial to helping existing staff keep up with current trends and develop those promising new recruits. 

“Companies that don’t provide the space and the time for their security staff to keep their skills sharp are setting themselves up to fail,” says Ryan Barrett, vice president of security for Intermedia. “Companies with successful security teams give them the time to conduct internal evaluations and regularly send them to security conferences for fresh perspectives and hands-on training.”

Training can also be a huge tool for reducing cybersecurity recruitment spending when it is used to retrain or cross-train smart people who already work for the organization in different roles outside of security. According to Coseglia, this can be a very clever way to bridge gaps that can’t be filled by external recruitment. 

“Pull professionals who know your culture and know your data from tertiary departments and reinvest in them rather than rely exclusively on external hires,” he says. “For example, many corporations and consulting firms are transitioning tech savvy e-discovery or forensic investigation professionals into cyber-centric roles. These individuals often have the technical, business savvy, customer service, and/or project management skills needed to step in and provide leadership once trained on specific areas of cybersecurity.”

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is undervaluing the potential that existing IT employees could have to become excellent cybersecurity staffers, agrees Frank Downs, senior manager of Cyber Information Security Practices at ISACA. 

“Many of these people long to stay relevant within the organization but are not provided the funding or the mechanisms to cross-train,” Downs says. “Many IT professionals want to become cybersecurity relevant. For the cost of some additional education, organizations can have someone who is familiar with the corporate rules and culture [that are] directly applicable to the cybersecurity needs.”

Retain
Finally, organizations need to remember that simply filling a role is just the start to solid cybersecurity team-building. Even more important is ensuring that those roles remained filled for as long as possible.

This doesn’t happen magically. Security managers must develop a sound retention strategy if they want to remain fully staffed in such a competitive market.

“As long as demand for experienced professionals remains high and supply low, a good retention strategy is crucial,” says Tom Gilheany, portfolio manager of security training and certifications for Cisco Services. “Retention isn’t necessarily driven by higher salaries alone. Research has shown that other factors play a surprisingly strong role when it comes to employee retention.”

This means offering employees career and skills development programs and providing a clear path for growth in their roles and responsibilities.

“You can’t hire and retain top cybersecurity professionals without presenting them with growth opportunities and a career path,” says Drew Nielsen, CISO of Druva. “Hiring managers also have to consider and improve on company culture to attract top talent.” 

Coseglia agrees that culture is the secret sauce for hanging on to the best and brightest. 

“Culture is key to the top echelon of cyber professionals,” he says. “Culture can mean different things to different organizations. Some cultures offer advanced challenges, and the nature of their work becomes an enticement, while others offer cultural lifestyle differentiations.” 

So whether it is giving staff the opportunity to hack into blockchain technology or the artificial intelligence of driverless cars, or it is giving them more flexibility to work from home to achieve a work/life balance, employers must up their game in making their companies a place where security pros want to set down roots.

Related Content:

• Demystifying Mental Health in the Infosec Community
• 6 Ways Greed Has a Negative Effect on Cybersecurity
• Bridging the Cybersecurity Talent Gap
• Growing Job Pressures Increase Risk of Burnout for Cybersecurity Professionals

Ericka Chickowski specializes in coverage of information technology and business innovation. She has focused on information security for the better part of a decade and regularly writes about the security industry as a contributor to Dark Reading.  View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/careers-and-people/the-3-rs-for-surviving-the-security-skills-shortage-/d/d-id/1332164?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Coin miner malware has replaced ransomware as security’s biggest threat, with samples spiking 629% in the first quarter of 2018, researchers at McAfee Labs report.

To put that number into context, consider this: Nearly 400,000 samples of coin miner malware were detected in Q4 2017, and 2.9 million known samples were found in Q1 2018. The drastic growth suggests adversaries are learning how they can maximize rewards with minimal effort.

Cryptomining’s growth pattern is hypersensitive to the fluctuating value of digital currency, explains Raj Samani, chief scientist at McAfee. If you look at the growth of Bitcoin, for example, a spike in Bitcoin malware will follow about a week after its value rises.

“As the price of coins goes up, we are compounded by the availability of cryptomining malware as just as prolific … it’s a huge jump,” Samani emphasizes. Attackers’ “infect and collect” strategy has driven the rise of cryptojacking, in which they hijack machines to mine cryptocurrency. It’s more straightforward and less risky than established crimes like ransomware and data theft.

Profits generated through coin mining are not limited to Bitcoin. GandCrab ransomware, which infected 50,000 machines in the first three weeks of Q1 and replaced Locky as this quarter’s ransomware leader, transacts ransom payments using dash currency instead of Bitcoin.

When people think cryptocurrency, they think of Bitcoin, and with good reason: It remains the first and most popular form of digital money. However, Bitcoin mining has become harder for attackers because it’s no longer as profitable to mine Bitcoin with the standard equipment in servers and desktops. Now you need graphic cards or ASIC chips to reap the same benefits.

As Cryptomining Goes Up, Other Threats Go Down
The rampant rise of cryptominers demands a follow-up question: Which types of cyberattacks are going down? Ransomware is on the decline as cryptojacking increases, Samani points out. McAfee researchers also saw attackers move away from PowerShell exploits, which fell 77%, and turn toward LNK malware, which rose 59% during Q1 2018.

“It’s probably quite a telling quarter because there have been a lot of changes,” Samani notes.

Adversaries no longer need to prompt victims for money; they can simply take it from them. Kaspersky Lab research further supports the fall of ransomware in favor of coin miners. A new report found the total number of people who encountered ransomware fell nearly 30%, from almost 2.6 million in 2016-2017 to 1.8 million in 2017-2018.

In comparison, the number of people who faced coin miners rose nearly 44.5%, from about 1.9 million in 2016-2017 to 2.7 million in 2017-2018. Of the overall threats detected, the share of miners grew from almost 3% in 2016-2017 to over 4% in 2017-2018.

New malware samples were down overall this quarter, McAfee researchers found. In Q1 2018, McAfee Labs recorded an average of five new malware samples per second – a decrease from eight new samples per second recorded in the previous quarter.

“I guess it’s good news … but I wouldn’t necessarily go out and buy the champagne just yet,” Samani explains.”We’re still talking about 44 million new [malware] samples, which was a 31% decrease from Q4, which was one of the highest amounts of malware samples we’ve ever had.”

Attackers Are Stepping Up Their Game. Are You?
McAfee’s Q1 2018 Quarterly Threat Report puts the spotlight on three major campaigns: the Gold Dragon implant targeting the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, Lazarus Group’s Bitcoin-stealing phishing campaign, and Operation GhostSecret, which deployed the Bankshot implant.

“The underlying thing I’m seeing is they are getting better, they are adapting their techniques, and they are improving,” Samani says of the attacks’ commonalities.

He uses the Olympics attack as an example. The Gold Dragon implant is part of a fileless attack targeting organizations involved with the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. While many fileless malware threats use PowerShell to launch an attack in memory and create a backdoor, Gold Dragon was specifically built to target the Olympics and persist on infected systems. It was also crafted to check on antimalware processes and evade detection.

The actors behind the Olympics attack used a steganography tool to embed malicious code within seemingly benign content. While this is not a new technique, Samani points out the actors continued to edit the campaign as it was going on, demonstrating a high level of capability as they tested and rolled out new software to continue their attack.

Samani asked: How many security teams can adjust an application, perform QA, and have it launched and fully live in eight days? Adversaries are ahead of the game. They’re reading the threat data researchers generate, and they’re going to continue to adapt, target more systems, and evade defenses. He urges security pros to catch up with threat intel.

“As organizations, the best defense you can have is to be informed, get access to information, and use that information as proactively as you can,” he says.

Related Content:

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• 8 Security Tips for a Hassle-Free Summer Vacation

Why Cybercriminals Attack: A DARK READING VIRTUAL EVENT Wednesday, June 27. Industry experts will offer a range of information and insight on who the bad guys are – and why they might be targeting your enterprise. Go here for more information on this free event.

Kelly Sheridan is the Staff Editor at Dark Reading, where she focuses on cybersecurity news and analysis. She is a business technology journalist who previously reported for InformationWeek, where she covered Microsoft, and Insurance Technology, where she covered financial … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/coin-miner-malware-spikes-629--in-telling-q1/d/d-id/1332166?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

In the weeks since indictments were handed down from the ongoing investigation into Russia’s influence over the 2016 United States election, much has come to light. A picture has emerged of a massive global effort to create division and sow conflict — not necessarily to elect one person or another.

The primary point was fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), and the powerful consequences of those emotions on the human psyche. It was an effort to destroy confidence in the country’s democratic institutions, to break people’s trust in the election system, and, by extension, the legitimacy of our democracy.

The system of bots continues to exploit other hot-button issues, such as the gun debate, not to sway the issue one way or the other but to fuel tension and mistrust.

This struggle for the mind to exercise control has been going on since time immemorial, but today’s tools are different. The attackers have brought their world here — on a giant scale that can only be accomplished by a government.

The same techniques could be used to short a stock, spark a consumer boycott, or affect some as yet unforeseen challenge to a company’s survival. As such, this is an issue all security professionals need to be thinking — and doing something — about.

From Timelines to Algorithms
It’s known that Facebook was a primary vehicle for these efforts; much of the reason for that ties back to a shift in strategy the company made over the past few years, primarily for ad revenue.

Facebook’s feed formerly was organized as a chronological timeline of posts from users’ own connections. But as the platform grew, the company started to provide a more curated newsfeed to increase the stickiness of content. Facebook began allowing users to subscribe to feeds, and then suggested and highlighted certain content to individuals based on sentiment they expressed, as determined by algorithms.  

At first, this wasn’t problematic because trolls had trouble getting through. Fact-checking efforts disallowed much of the marginal content trolls produced — and actual human checkers were screening it. But after complaints from several groups whose content was being blocked, the company dialed down its fact-checking efforts and allowed content to be posted virtually unfiltered, creating a toxic environment that enabled unprecedented access and communication from one nation to another and directly to the populace.

We know now that the online influence efforts exploiting social media were not just online but also on the ground, with people organizing protests in the real world while trolls and bots posted, replied, and stoked sentiment on various social media platforms.

The US Government’s Outdated Paradigm
As this situation escalated, it didn’t entirely catch the US government off guard. The press has shown that the intelligence community (IC) knew fairly early. So why didn’t the IC do more? The roadblocks were part philosophical and part legal. To the US government, businesses are responsible for their own cyber defense. Protecting companies is not part of the government’s remit online, outside of critical infrastructure like power plants and water supplies.

Here we have an information resource that half the country is plugged into, but our laws are designed such that the government doesn’t protect that resource directly. Congress and our government’s infrastructure are set up to protect citizens from physical harm through the military and law enforcement.

But this a new horizon, and governments in the US and all over the world are struggling to respond. Many people are beginning to wonder if and how this needs to change. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted recently that he’s “not sure we shouldn’t be regulated.” Maybe social media is critical infrastructure after all.

New Technologies, New Responsibilities
What can companies and organizations do? There will be new technologies involved, and, as usual, the defenders are far behind in developing them. There are also some shifts in both philosophy and technique that can help companies adapt to this new world. 

Although the larger effect of this issue is to sway public sentiment in the physical realm, a big part of the problem still lies in social media bots in cyberspace — software processes automatically running on a network with the purpose of engaging and inputting on those networks to drive behaviors or perceptions determined by their programmers.

This, of course, is familiar territory for security orgs. Detecting a bot by posting speeds and other indicators is common in the industry. But what the organization decides to do after detection is up for debate. Right now, we just stop it, but it may be worthwhile for security pros to stymie the bots with error codes or other means to spend more time understanding what the bots are up to, where they come from, and who controls them.

Advances in technologies like artificial intelligence and natural language processing will bring the next level of defense against information warfare. Being able to detect whether the same person is behind dozens of personas or posts will require a level of data and correlation that today is available only to the world’s top intelligence agencies. But we know the industry is working on it. Clearly, Facebook has the most data to work with right now, but this would also be a natural extension to the security industry’s intelligence or reputation services.

Ultimately, these are human threats, and humans need to evolve along with them. Where security professionals have tended to gather intelligence about our own applications, our own networks, PCs, and logs, it’s imperative in this new world that they look beyond their own four walls to see what is happening elsewhere.

CISOs need to be cognizant of how events transpiring in the physical world could bring their organization under the crosshairs. Similarly, the role of government should evolve its idea of defense to extend more fully into the digital realm.

In this environment, users are more important than ever. It’s up to everyone to be critical about the information they encounter, no matter where it comes from. Look for corroboration. Find actual facts from trusted sources. Don’t believe everything you’re told.

In the age of weaponized FUD, it’s up to all of us to become security pros.  

Related Content:

• 7 Places Where Privacy and Security Collide
• 13 Russians Indicted for Massive Operation to Sway US Election
• How Guccifer 2.0 Got ‘Punk’d’ by a Security Researcher
• Trump Administration Slaps Sanctions on Russian Hackers, Operatives

Why Cybercriminals Attack: A DARK READING VIRTUAL EVENT Wednesday, June 27. Industry experts will offer a range of information and insight on who the bad guys are – and why they might be targeting your enterprise. Go here for more information on this free event.

Mike Convertino has nearly 30 years of experience in providing enterprise-level information security, cloud-grade information systems solutions, and advanced cyber capability development. His professional experience spans security leadership and product development at a wide … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/russia-facebook-and-cybersecurity-combating-weaponized-fud-in-the-social-media-age/a/d-id/1332135?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

You cannot defend against everything. Business demands and resource constraints force you to focus your security efforts on the threat actors most likely to target you, the assets they’re most likely to attack, and the exploits they’re most likely to use. Don’t know what those are? Then join us tomorrow, June 27, for “Why Cybercriminals Attack,” a Dark Reading Virtual Event, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern Time.

We start with a discussion of attacker motivations: who are the adversaries, who do they want to hurt, and why. Then we dig into their methods: How do the attacks vary from threat actor to threat actor.  

We’ll proceed to discussions about how to know when you’re under cyberattack. Experts will discuss the most effective and innovative tools and techniques for detecting exploits; even those that use sophisticated obfuscation techniques. They’ll also discuss how best to collect and analyze threat intelligence feeds, so that you have the insight you need when you need it most,  instead of too many feeds, and too little time. 

Finally, we’ll close with a discussion of what to do when your best efforts to prevent or detect have failed, and it’s time to simply contain the impact of a compromise. You’ll hear about the most essential elements of incident response including how to tell the extent of a compromise, how to determine whether your systems are still vulnerable, and when to contact law enforcement.

It all starts at 11 a.m. E.T. tomorrow, June 27. Register now.

Dark Reading’s Quick Hits delivers a brief synopsis and summary of the significance of breaking news events. For more information from the original source of the news item, please follow the link provided in this article. View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/today!--why-cybercriminals-attack-a-dark-reading-virtual-event-/a/d-id/1332153?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

The IEEE this week issued a position statement in support of strong encryption and in opposition to government efforts to require backdoors.

“IEEE supports the use of unfettered strong encryption to protect confidentiality and integrity of data and communications. We oppose efforts by governments to restrict the use of strong encryption and/or to mandate exceptional access mechanisms such as ‘backdoors’ or ‘key escrow schemes’ in order to facilitate government access to encrypted data,” the organization’s statement reads.

Backdoors and key escrow apporaches would open the door for vulnerabilities and other negative impacts on encryption, according to the IEEE. Law enforcement has other options besides backdoors, including legal action, forensic analysis, and requiring suspects to hand over keys and passwords, it said.

Read the full statement here. 

Dark Reading’s Quick Hits delivers a brief synopsis and summary of the significance of breaking news events. For more information from the original source of the news item, please follow the link provided in this article. View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/ieee-calls-for-strong-encryption/d/d-id/1332159?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple