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The Travel Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) is taking a trip of its own, moving to a new home within the Retail Hospitality ISAC (RH-ISAC).

The integration is intended to strengthen collaboration and information-sharing about evolving incidents, threats, vulnerabilities, and remediation aimed at the travel and hospitality industry by bringing the community together in a single organization.

According to its website, “RH-ISAC serves all retail and hospitality companies, including retailers, restaurants, hotels, gaming casinos, food retailers, consumer products and other consumer-facing companies.” The Travel Hospitality ISAC was formed in 2018 by Hospitality Technology Next Generation.

The agreement went into effect Jan. 1.

Read more here.

Check out The Edge, Dark Reading’s new section for features, threat data, and in-depth perspectives. Today’s top story: “6 Unique InfoSec Metrics CISOs Should Track in 2020.”

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Everyone in security wants to know how criminals do their work – but everyone in security would rather watch cybercriminals’ handiwork while it plucks apart someone else’s computing infrastructure, not their own. Understanding your adversary is, after all, key to countering attacks, but most organizations are reluctant to enlist their production servers and networks for research.

So, instead, they turn to honeypots.

What Is a Honeypot?
A honeypot is a set of data or pieces of network infrastructure that appear to be vulnerable, legitimate production components but are, in fact isolated from the rest of the network. So attackers are attracted to them, but attacks can be studied without endangering the enterprise.

Honeypots have increased in importance as the cybersecurity battlefield has grown more dynamic. Rui Lopes, engineering and technical support manager at Panda Security, explains that honeypots are critical tools of “counter-espionage” in cybersecurity, delivering key intelligence on attackers.

Analysis of honeypot activity can, he says, bring early awareness of new forms of attacks. “In the age of malwareless and sophisticated cyberthreats, attack telemetry and its analysis becomes critical in customizing a protection model that fits the organization, its assets, and its strategy rather than a turnkey approach that will simply not work in the long run,” Lopes says.

Ideally, a honeypot is isolated, robust, easily monitored, and easily rebuilt when it has been successfully compromised by a criminal. For many, if not most, organizations, the combination of requirements is best met by virtual machines hosted on an isolated server.

But regardless of whether the honeypot is set up on a virtual machine or an isolated physical operating system instance, most will be set up with specific environmental variables, systems, or applications to attract particular criminals interested in specific targets.

Different Flavors of Honey
All honeypots are not created equal. It makes sense, since not all honeypots have the same purpose. While every honeypot is available on the Internet and vulnerable to one or more attack plans, the first major fork comes between honeypots serving the needs of production IT security teams and those serving the needs of security researchers.

Honeypots set up by enterprise IT teams tend to have a straightforward purpose: They gather information on the attacks being launched against the organization’s systems and applications. In most cases, that means a honeypot set up within the organization’s network address space, with some (or all) of the organization’s APIs and services exposed to the Internet.

The point of the enterprise honeypot is simple: It will allow the enterprise security team to see which ports and APIs are most frequently targeted, which username/password combinations are tried most often in credential-stuffing attempts, where the attacks are originating, and other basic but critical attack factors. Honeypots aren’t intended to be open-ended research devices, and in general they aren’t highly interactive. In particular, they aren’t intended to keep attackers engaged for long periods of time through highly interactive traps.

When security researchers set up a honeypot, they tend to have aims much different than those of enterprise security professionals. Research honeypots may be used to gather data on particular strains of malware or specific attack vectors, or they may provide data on more general trends in offensive cybersecurity.

At one extreme, research honeypots may have limited services, ports, or APIs open to the Internet so that they will be attractive to attackers searching for targets. At the other extreme, a research honeypot may duplicate a full enterprise server, complete with Web interface, enterprise applications, and faux database. These full-featured research honeypots may also be quite interactive, allowing attackers to go through several layers of the applications and services with appropriate responses from the honeypot.

These highly interactive honeypots are quite a bit more complex to set up and monitor than are the noninteractive or minimally interactive honeypots that gather data on more limited activities. Beyond the expense and complexity of setting up these highly interactive honeypots, there’s a risk as well. The longer attackers remain engaged with a honeypot, the more likely they will find a flaw that either reveals the honeypot to be a research project or allows them access to a production network.

Pulling Data From the Honeypot
Building a great honeypot is of no value if useful data isn’t returned to the security staff or researcher. The honeypot build process has to include processes and technology for safely gathering and reporting the captured data.

The first layer of data gathering can come from the logs of the firewall, intrusion-detection system, or other security components that sit between the honeypot and the Internet. Together, they will provide information on the application and network traffic that are part of the attacks.

Next, server system logs will bring system-level data to the proceedings. In addition, monitoring and analysis tools can be used to provide more detailed records of network traffic and packet contents. The total data set from the various sources, correlated and analyzed, will give the security team or researchers information required to do detailed forensic analysis of the attack and its effects on the system.

Safety First
When a honeypot is successful, an attacker will compromise its facilities, whether a single port or complete admin privileges. The complete plan for a honeypot must include steps to take when it is successful — how to regain control of the server, remove any artifacts left by the attacker, and (most important) prevent the attacker from using the honeypot as the first step in breaching the total enterprise network.

The first two can be accomplished with a “golden image” of the honeypot that can be reapplied to the physical server or server image on a virtual machine. The third is accomplished by a server that is on an entirely separate network, on a network segment logically separated from the production network, and with full network security between the honeypot and the rest of the enterprise.

One very real question, though, is whether, when the research is complete, the security team or researchers shut down access to the honeypot in a way that allows attackers know they’ve been duped. In most cases, the best solution is to keep attackers in the dark, shutting down the honeypot with a “maintenance required” or similar message that excuses the shutdown with a reason not having to do with security.

There are a wide variety of software packages, both free and commercial, for setting up a honeypot. Most of them are for honeypots intended for a specific goal, and none makes it easy for a novice to safely set up a honeypot on or related to a production network. Reading through the documentation, the discussion pages on GitHub, or community conversations should go a long way, though, toward helping anyone understand precisely how the honeypot works and why it’s such a valuable tool for cybersecurity pros.

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Curtis Franklin Jr. is Senior Editor at Dark Reading. In this role he focuses on product and technology coverage for the publication. In addition he works on audio and video programming for Dark Reading and contributes to activities at Interop ITX, Black Hat, INsecurity, and … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/edge/theedge/how-to-comprehend-the-buzz-about-honeypots/b/d-id/1336788?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

As email security providers strengthen their defenses, attackers develop new ways to work around them. A new report from Inky sheds light on how these techniques are evolving to become more complex and difficult to detect by unsuspecting targets.

“They’re clearly testing those systems, and then they’re exploring ways to get through,” says Inky co-founder Dave Baggett of email security defenses. Today’s adversaries are looking for ways to hide from legacy protection systems while avoiding suspicion from users, he adds.

One of the strategies Inky highlights is the use of hidden text and zero-font attacks to disguise malicious emails from security software. Someone may use an Office 365 logo to make a phish appear legitimate; the problem is, this would likely trigger defenses to see whether the email came from a Microsoft domain. Adding hidden text in the logo can confuse defensive tools.

“Attackers will put invisible [characters] in between the letters so the end user doesn’t see it,” Baggett says. Keyword stuffing is a similar tactic. With this technique, the attacker adds hidden text – white text on a white background – that contains keywords to make the email appear to be a conversation between two people rather than a transaction.

Malicious fake attachments are not a new technique, but with these attackers are also shifting their techniques to slip past defenses. Now they’re embedding local images into emails. If a victim sees an attachment that appears to be a PDF and clicks to open it, they may instead be redirected to a malicious website that asks for their credentials, Inky explains in the report.

A third tactic is the use of homograph attacks. Attackers may use Unicode lettering to trick people into thinking a fake domain name is real. Instead of spelling Microsoft with a normal “M” character, for example, they may use a visually similar letter from a different alphabet. The result is a domain name that appears real but bypasses detection from security software.

“Some of these things end up being a tell,” Baggett says. “Microsoft themselves would never spell their name with a funny Unicode M.” Still, he points out, chances are unsuspecting users wouldn’t notice.

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Check out The Edge, Dark Reading’s new section for features, threat data, and in-depth perspectives. Today’s top story: “6 Unique InfoSec Metrics CISOs Should Track in 2020.”

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/new-report-spotlights-changes-in-phishing-techniques/d/d-id/1336812?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Not that long ago, bold predictions were being made by some of the most noteworthy pundits in the technology community that the majority of Internet infrastructure would be fully moving to the cloud. When enterprises moved en masse to the public cloud, they’d only need modern cloud security protections, the story went – and older network security methods such as firewalls would flame out and become obsolete. 

But that day hasn’t come.

Why is that so? And what does that tell us about the state of today’s enterprise networks – and what is truly needed to manage them safely and efficiently?

Inaccurate Forecasts of Doom
It helps to start by taking a look back at why traditional security methods, including firewalls, were considered to be a dying part of an enterprise’s security equation. It began with the advent of remote and mobile access. 

As theories and approaches around providing remote access to information and data started to solidify, there was a growing belief – pushed by security companies and organizations set to profit from these alternative approaches – that on-premises firewalls would become redundant. In practice, what actually happened was that firewalls evolved to incorporate the functionality of remote access (VPN) technologies. Fast-forward a few years, and firewalls are still with us; VPN products are not – they’ve been folded into the firewalls as a feature. 

This tendency repeated itself with the need for more advanced security filtering of traffic, which spawned the intrusion prevention system (IPS) market. IPS was thus perceived a threat to the firewall market until firewall vendors started offering built-in IPS capabilities. Similarly, other advanced security offerings such as security sandbox inspections and advanced malware identification and protection are becoming de-facto parts of the firewall, or offered as services by the firewall vendors.

The False Death of the Perimeter
As the Web application market grew – and users could visit Websites or receive emails with Web-enabled malicious content – suddenly Web apps and email became the most common vectors of cyberattacks. Traditional security technologies did not protect against these threats, and a new breed of security vendors rose once again to meet these new challenges. These security vendors continued the “leave the old methods behind” mantra because it helped them from a marketing perspective. 

Traditional security vendors, including the firewall vendors, kept growing as well, strengthening and expanding their offerings.

As attacks grew more creative and sophisticated, what enterprises realized is that they needed not one single type of security solution – but a multi-tiered approach that protected their organization’s critical data and applications from a wide variety of attacks. Weak machines can easily be compromised in a variety of methods, such as through browsers, various open servers, phishing campaigns, malware, etc. There are always bad actors looking to burrow their way into corporate networks. 

Indeed, as attacks evolved, so did the mindset of security professionals, to the point where it is commonly understood by organizations that they will be hacked and attacked, if they haven’t been already. This understanding led to the further evolution into a variety of security solutions, that attempt to slow down an attacker by blocking common threats and detect anomalies in real-time. On the network side, organizations started adopting micro-segmentation, which enables them to segment and contain an attack to a single location and deal with it there, instead of letting it spread and endanger the entire organization. 

A Complex Problem
Enterprise networks have grown in complexity to a point that no one was predicting. They’ve also evolved much slower than originally thought. Older technologies haven’t been severed off, mainly due to the fact that companies haven’t left on-premises systems behind. 

Now comes the existential threat of the cloud to the future of firewalls. The argument goes that if all critical data and applications will migrate to the public cloud – outside of the perimeter – then new and improved forms of security would be needed to keep their companies and their data safe, and thus the firewall would finally become obsolete.

Companies still have physical offices, data centers, factories, stores, and other physical properties – properties that need on-premises security solutions. There are government agencies that cannot allow critical and sensitive information to be shared via the Internet. There are industries – such as healthcare and financial services – where regulations ensure they maintain some key pieces of information on premises, outside of the cloud. There are also several nations around the world that demand that data on their operations and their citizens remain inside their country – and not be accessed by anyone else. All of these examples make the case that firewalls are a long way from becoming obsolete.

As Internet of Things technologies move from theory, to practice, and into mainstream adoption, they add yet another layer of complexity to our modern networks. Companies will need to deploy and support even more physical networks than ever before to support IoT. This means that technologies such as firewalls will remain in use as a way to protect these hyper-critical networks from catastrophe.

In fact, instead of a fresh start, as many were predicting, new security technologies have been added on top of the old. There’s been no clean break where security solutions such as firewalls have been jettisoned in favor of cloud-only security. Instead, today’s massive hybrid networks were created by mixing new and old – and making something so complex that no one technology or single security professional could manage it.

What the Future Holds
In the next five years, the split between on-premises and cloud data will be about 50/50 in large enterprises – and due to increased network activity and instances of segmentation – the use of traditional security tools such as firewalls will not drop off. 

What companies will face, however, will be a network that’s even more fragmented and hybrid than the ones we have today. The proliferation of on-premises networking via IoT and micro-segmentation, coupled with a slow migration of mission-critical applications to the cloud will make things much more difficult to manage than the technology pundits imagined in their “clean break” security scenarios.

As organizations build their future security strategy – a key step is to accept that almost all security technologies – new and old – are likely to have a role in protecting the modern and future enterprise network. In order to manage these complex hybrid networks safely and efficiently, security professionals will then need to embrace hybrid approaches to network security that will enable them to combine the latest technologies such as automation and machine learning with the ever-increasing amount of input and insights that will arrive from both new and old security methods.

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Ruvi Kitov is Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of Tufin, the Security Policy Company. Ruvi has led the company since Tufin’s founding in 2005, gaining more than 2,000 customers among the world’s largest enterprises. Tufin is recognized as a market leader with consistent revenue … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/risk/why-firewalls-arent-going-anywhere/a/d-id/1336749?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Google today announced updates to its Advanced Protection Program (APP), including the option for Apple iPhone users to use their smartphone as a security key instead of buying a separate physical key. It’s also bringing easier enrollment for the program to iPhone and Android devices.

APP aims to bring stronger security protections to politicians, journalists, activists, business executives, and other high-risk individuals likely to be targeted with cyberattacks. It’s difficult to define what makes these people vulnerable, as it depends on who they are and what they do. Politicians may be at higher risk during an election year; some activists may be targeted by their own governments. Journalists may be at higher risk if they’re in a war zone or certain countries.

Some are at risk because of their worth. Shuvo Chatterjee, product manager with Google’s APP, points to cryptocurrency investors as an example. “Time and time again we see people bragging on Twitter about how much they have, and they become a target,” he explains.

The APP was introduced to defend against phishing attacks and protect data by limiting access to information and adding extra account verification. Only Google apps and select third-party apps can access emails and Drive files, for example. Users must have a physical security key.

While participants like the program, Chatterjee says, many found the security key difficult from a usability standpoint. “It’s still this strange thing for most people,” he explains. “They don’t understand what it is; it’s still another thing you have to carry around.” The APP previously required the use of two physical security keys, which would turn people away when enrolling.

Last year, Google gave Android users the option to use their phone as a physical security key. Android devices running version 7.0 (Nougat) or later could double as keys to be used for two-factor authentication when logging into personal Google accounts and G Suite or Google Cloud.

Expanding the same option to iPhones presented more of a challenge. When Android devices became compatible as security keys, APP users with iPhones were still required a particular Bluetooth security key. “It’s one thing when you own the platform,” Chatterjee says, noting that Google could make changes to the Android OS so it could be used as a physical security key. Doing the same for iPhone meant a partnership with Apple and more time to offer the feature.

Now, Google is giving iPhone users running iOS 10 or later the option to turn their phone into a security key. “This opens the door for a lot more people who were maybe hesitant to enroll in advanced protection,” he adds. To activate a security key on iPhone, users need to first download and sign into the Google Smart Lock app. Android users can activate and enroll here.

High-Profile Users, Low-Level Security

Google has also shared findings from a new survey conducted with The Harris Poll. Researchers surveyed 500 high-risk users living in the US to learn more about their security practices.

The results indicate a need for stronger security hygiene among those at greater risk for targeted attacks. Most (78% of) respondents perceive themselves as being at higher risk of being hacked compared with the general population due to their job or online presence. Nearly two-thirds are more concerned about their online accounts being compromised today than they were one year ago; 86% are specifically concerned about work accounts being phished.

Nearly 70% of respondents report they have been the target of a phishing attack, and 39% have been compromised. Of those, 72% say the attack used personal information tailored to them.

Despite this, many high-risk users have risky security habits: 66% of them are using two-factor authentication, compared with 69% of the general population. More than three-quarters have used their personal email account to communicate with a work colleague or contact in the past year, and 71% reuse the same password for multiple accounts. Half don’t use a security key.

“Most of them knew they were under high risk of being attacked personally in their digital lives,” says Chatterjee. “But at the same time, most of them didn’t take basic steps to improve their security posture.”

Specifically, he is concerned about politicians’ security practices given they are more likely to be targeted during an election year. Ninety percent of politicians surveyed are worried about work-affiliated accounts being compromised; 83% are concerned for their personal accounts.

While the threat landscape is constantly shifting, Chatterjee anticipates phishing will continue to be a primary concern for the year ahead. “There will be different shifts in 2020 but I think there are some things that are low-hanging fruit to attackers. If you’re good enough at phishing and can trick enough people, eventually people will fall for it.”

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Check out The Edge, Dark Reading’s new section for features, threat data, and in-depth perspectives. Today’s top story: “How to Keep Security on Life Support After Software End-of-Life.”

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/operations/google-lets-iphone-users-turn-device-into-security-key/d/d-id/1336814?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple