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Cybersecurity professionals, and the employees and consumers they serve, all engage in risky security practices. Data shows password issues continue to plague users of all experience levels, two-factor authentication adoption is lagging, and mobile devices are introducing new challenges.

For the second “State of Password and Authentication Security Behaviors Report,” conducted by the Ponemon Institute and commissioned by Yubico, researchers polled 2,507 IT security practitioners and 563 individual users. In addition to learning the habits of cybersecurity pros, they wanted to see how professionals’ habits compared to those of employees and customers.

“We expect people who are in IT and IT security to be more security-smart,” says Larry Ponemon, co-founder and CEO of the Ponemon Institute. “For the most part, both groups are more similar than they are different.”

There are, however, some discrepancies between the two groups. When asked about the increase in security and privacy concerns, security pros pointed to their higher concern for government surveillance (61%), as well as more use of mobile devices (53%) and connected devices (41%). Consumers said they are most worried about their personal data, particularly medical records, shared with third parties (57%), followed by mobile device (46%) and connected device (43%) use.

Behavioral numbers are closer. Sixty percent of professionals said they don’t use 2FA to protect personal accounts, compared with 64% of consumers who don’t. Half of professionals reuse passwords across workplace accounts, compared with 39% of consumers. Roughly half of both groups – 51% of consumers and 49% of professionals – sometimes or often share passwords with colleagues.

After an account takeover attack, 76% of consumers said they changed how they managed their passwords or protected their accounts. Only 65% of IT pros did the same, researchers found. Individuals are most likely to use stronger passwords (61%), make more frequent password changes (52%), use unique passwords across multiple accounts (36%), or start using 2FA (35%) after a cyberattack.

The trend of tech professionals reusing passwords and adopting poor security habits “seems counterintuitive” but points to broader business problems, says Jerrod Chong, chief solutions officer at Yubico. IT security pros serve several teams across an organization. They can fight for stronger security tools, but if a long-held policy mandates stronger, more complex passwords, it becomes “a losing battle” for them to change the mindset of business leaders and stakeholders.

“It’s not just a tech mindset,” Chong explains. “It goes back to the systems and processes of a large organization that makes it harder to make a technology [switch] by putting specific mandates on security practices.” Businesses often adhere to policies created decades ago, he continues, and those who don’t follow the policy are out of compliance. IT security pros often go along because they don’t want to be out of compliance and there is no support for change.

“[Change] needs to come all the way from the top and all the way from the bottom,” Chong adds. “These numbers are giving a spotlight into the problem, which is both a technology and people problem.”

Passwords: A Hard Habit to Break
The ways that organizations manage and protect their passwords is putting them at risk, researchers found. Despite concerns from both groups around protecting workplace accounts, 59% of both professionals and consumers said they use human memory to manage and protect their passwords. Another popular method is sticky notes, used by 42% of professionals and 41% of consumers, respectively. Only 36% of professionals and 37% of consumers use a browser extension to autofill or remember passwords, and even fewer use a password manager.

Less than half (46%) of professional respondents said they require 2FA to gain access to corporate accounts. More than half (51%) of individuals use a personal device to access work-related items; of these, 56% don’t use 2FA. This trend underscores the idea that authentication is more of a people problem than a tech problem, Ponemon points out.

“In this case, we basically have technologies that facilitate good security practices that may not be used entirely,” he explains. “People may not feel truly secure unless they have passwords.” The “vast majority” of people view 2FA and passwords as different, Ponemon adds.

IT security pros reported that SMS codes (41%), backup codes (40%), and mobile authentication apps (37%) are the three main 2FA methods they support or plan to support for customers. Despite the concern for their personal data, only 49% of consumers said they are improving account security with a layer of protection beyond a username and password. Slightly more (56%) are only willing to adopt new security tech if it’s easy to use and significantly increases security.

Mobile Devices, More Problems
Mobile device usage is ramping up, driving concern among consumers and professionals alike. Fifty-five percent of IT security pros reported personal mobile devices are permitted at work, and 45% of employees, on average, said they use their personal devices for work. One worrying statistic found 62% of organizations don’t take necessary steps to protect information on smartphones, and, overall, they struggle to find a simple and effective way of protecting corporate account access.

“Mobile devices pose a very interesting crossroads between how we think about 2FA and how we think about security, in general,” says Chong. Both security pros (65%) and individuals (53%) believe biometrics would increase the security of their organizations or accounts. More than half (56%) of individuals and 52% of security pros said the same about hardware tokens.

Securing mobile devices across an organization can be very complex, as opposed to securing laptops and desktops, because more people rely on mobile to communicate, Ponemon adds.

“Most people just don’t realize the whole nervous system of an organization is based on the ways people communicate, and mobile becomes a very significant part of that process,” he says.

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Check out The Edge, Dark Reading’s new section for features, threat data, and in-depth perspectives. Today’s featured story: “8 Things Users Do That Make Security Pros Miserable.“

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

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Operators of some older Tesla vehicles might be surprised to learn that a single piece of two-inch black electrical tape is all it takes to trick the camera sensor in their cars into misinterpreting a 35-mph speed sign as an 85-mph sign.

Researchers at McAfee who discovered the issue said they were able to get a Tesla, equipped with version EyeQ3 of the Mobileye camera platform, to autonomously accelerate 50 miles above the speed limit.

The hack — which involved extending the middle of the “3” on the traffic sign with black tape — appears to only work on Teslas equipped with Mobileye version EyeQ3 (Tesla hardware Pack 1), according to McAfee. Attempts by the researchers to re-create the attack on Tesla models with the latest version of the Mobileye camera did not work. The newest Teslas no longer implement Mobileye technology, and they don’t appear to support traffic sign recognition, McAfee said.

“We are not trying to spread fear here and saying that attackers are likely going to be driving cars off the road,” says Steve Povolny, head of McAfee Advanced Threat Research. A Tesla model with the particular Mobileye version will reliably misinterpret the speed limit sign and attempt to accelerate to the misclassified speed limit if the driver has engaged traffic-aware cruise control, Povolny says. But the likelihood of that happening in a real-life situation without the driver becoming aware of the issue and taking control of the vehicle is remote, he says.

The real goal of the research is to raise awareness of some of the nontraditional threat vectors that are emerging with the growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) capabilities in modern technologies. At the moment, hacks like these are still in the academic realm.

“If we project 10 to 20 years into the future, at some point these issues are going to be become very real,” Povolny says. “If we have completely autonomous vehicles and computing systems that are making medical diagnosis without human oversight, we have a real problem space that is coming up.”

Broader Research
McAfee’s research involving Mobileye is part of a broader study the company is conducting into so-called “model hacking,” or adversarial machine learning. The goal is to see whether weaknesses that are present in current-generation ML algorithms can be exploited to trigger adverse results. The Berryville Institute of Machine Learning (BIML) has classified adversarial attacks as one of the biggest risks to ML systems. In a recent paper, the think tank described adversarial attacks as being designed to fool a ML system by providing it with malicious input involving very small changes to the original data.

In the past, researchers have shown how an AI-powered image classification system can be tricked into misinterpreting a stop sign as a traffic speed limit sign using a few pieces of strategically placed tape on the sign. Before the hack involving Mobileye cameras, McAfee researchers found they could use a few pieces of tape to get an in-house image classifying system to misinterpret a stop sign as an added lane sign. They also discovered they could trick the image classifier into misinterpreting speed limit signs.

The researchers wanted to find out whether they could use the same techniques to trick a proprietary system. They focused on Mobileye because the company’s cameras are currently deployed in some 40 million vehicles. In some vehicles the cameras are used to determine the speed limit and to feed that data into their autonomous driving or driver-assist systems.

Initially the researchers used four stickers on the speed limit sign to confuse the camera and found they could consistently fool the system into thinking it was a different speed limit than what it really was. They kept reducing the number of stickers on the sign until they discovered all they really needed was one piece of tape.

“What we have done is trigger some weaknesses that are often inherent in all types of machine-learning systems and the underlying algorithms,” Povolny says.

The algorithms used by the Mobileye cameras, for instance, are very specifically trained off a set of data they expect to see, he says – for example, things like known traffic signs or objects in the environment. But that training can often leave gaps in the ability of the system to identify unknown or even slightly nonstandard input. “We basically leverage those gaps or blindspots in the algorithms themselves to cause them to misclassify,” Povolny says.

According to McAfee, it informed Tesla and Mobileye of its research in September and October 2019, respectively. “Both vendors indicated interest and were grateful for the research but have not expressed any current plans to address the issue on the existing platform,” McAfee said. “Mobileye did indicate that the more recent versions of the camera system address these use cases.”

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Check out The Edge, Dark Reading’s new section for features, threat data, and in-depth perspectives. Today’s featured story: “8 Things Users Do That Make Security Pros Miserable.“

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year … View Full Bio

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We can all agree that the Iowa caucuses were a mess. So much so that some people are calling for the removal of all election technology. Information is still trickling in about what went wrong with an app that was designed to report in-person caucus results to party leaders. Some caucus participants said they couldn’t download the app, while others didn’t know how to use it. What we do know is that this app was developed in secret, over a short period of time, and without the benefit of review by government agencies or independent security teams.

Basically, Iowa did everything wrong when it comes to deploying a new technology — especially a new technology being used in such a high-stakes election.

Having worked many years as an FBI Special Agent on cyber threats from nation-states, and as a security expert who has reviewed dozens of mobile voting systems for both their technical and security capabilities, it’s easy for me to see why people are comparing Iowa’s app to mobile voting and calling for paper ballots. But we shouldn’t. In fact, eight mobile voting pilots in six separate jurisdictions around the US have been conducted safely and securely with audits, no security breaches, and a paper trail (locations include Seattle, Utah County, and Denver).

First and foremost, a real mobile voting system actually involves voters using the system to cast votes. A real mobile voting system has an established two-step process for authorization and authentication between the voter and the jurisdiction. It provides a pseudo-anonymous experience, in which the voter marks a ballot and securely submits it to their jurisdiction, where it is received, acknowledged, recorded, and later tallied among the many other ballots. More importantly, a real mobile voting system will have been tested, again and again, with constant input from local election administrators who are acutely aware of how technology can and must work for their voters.

At the core of mobile voting is its ability to take advantage of the confluence of decades’ worth of technology advancements and best practices to create a secure environment for the voter. From biometric authentication and end-to-end encryption to cyberattack mitigation and third-party penetration testing, security best practices have been baked into smartphones used by millions to safely make purchases, conduct business, access bank information, and secure their homes. And while not all phones and applications are created equal, it is the ability of engineers to access the security features provided by system manufacturers that allows for these technologies — when leveraged properly — to resist attacks, detect intrusions, and protect sensitive data. 

This is not to say that mobile voting systems are immune to attack more than traditional election systems. We all know about voting machines breaking down, vulnerabilities in voting kiosks, unencrypted fax and email ballots by military and overseas citizens, and the infamous hanging chads and butterfly ballots in the 2000 general election. But to compare all election technologies to an app that was scraped together in two months and failed to undergo testing or training belittles the hard work of election vendors across the country for painstakingly building voting technologies that undergo rigorous auditing and testing.

The lesson from Iowa should not be for election officials to turn their backs on technology. Our takeaway should be that new technologies need to undergo strict testing by government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, independent security firms, and the white-hat hacker community at large to find vulnerabilities in advance so they don’t happen on election night. We should start small so we can test the concept and strengthen security capabilities in controlled settings. Security is an iterative process that gets better over time. There is no room for error in our elections, especially when it comes to data leakage, compromised encryption, broken authentication, or denial-of-service attacks.

I am from Colorado, a heavy mail-in ballot state. My father prefers to vote in person. My mother exclusively votes by mail. My brother uses his smartphone for pretty much everything. Mobile voting should match the voting experience of those who vote in person, by mail, or over the Internet, and must always be just one of many voting channels available to a voter. Let’s not allow one bad attempt stop us from finding new ways to achieve this.

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Andre McGregor is co-founder of ShiftState, a cybersecurity firm focused on applying effective enterprise security practices to organizations looking for a new perspective on managing risk. He possesses deep knowledge of cybercriminal and cyber-counter intelligence techniques … View Full Bio

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[2/19/2020 UPDATE: Dragos issued a research note this afternoon saying the event CISA cited in its advisory this week is likely one reported by the US Coast Guard last year. “Based on information shared with Dragos, as well as noted in public reporting, the CISA alert likely describes the same event reported by the U.S. Coast Guard in 2019,” Dragos wrote. Dark Reading provided further reporting on this ransomware attack last month.] 

The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning critical infrastructure operators of a ransomware attack that hit a natural gas compression facility, causing the operation to shut down for two days. While no programmable logic controllers (PLCs) operating machinery were affected, and the facility never encountered out-of-control conditions, a number of pieces of the operational technology (OT) network did see an impact — pieces that included human-machine interfaces and systems that polled and logged data from low-level controllers.

According to the alert, the attack began with a spear-phishing campaign that provided credentials to the company’s IT network before pivoting to the OT network. Commodity ransomware was then used to encrypt data on both networks. Normal operations have since resumed.

Read more here.

Check out The Edge, Dark Reading’s new section for features, threat data, and in-depth perspectives. Today’s featured story: “8 Things Users Do That Make Security Pros Miserable.“

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

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