STE WILLIAMS

The final minimum tab for Equifax’s failure to patch a known web application security flaw—that later proved to be the root cause of the company’s disastrous data breach in 2017—is over $1.38 billion.

The US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia Monday granted final approval of a settlement arrived at last July between the Federal Trade Commission and Equifax. Under the settlement, Equifax has agreed to set aside at least $380.5 million to settle claims related to its 2017 breach. The company has also agreed to spend at least $1 billion on information security and related technologies over a period of five years.

Personal data, including Social Security Numbers belonging to some 147 million US consumers was compromised in the breach. Equifax has blamed the incident on a buggy component in the open-source Apache Struts framework for which a patch was available at the time of the breach.

Money from the $380.5 million fund will be used to pay for credit monitoring services and compensation of up to $20,000 to individuals who can show documented out-of-pocket expenses directly related to the breach. The court-approved settlement allows individuals to claim up to 20 hours—at $25 per hour—for any time they might have had to spend taking preventative measures to protect their data against fraud and misuse following the breach. Up to 10 of those hours can be self-certified and requires no documentation.

Equifax will also provide up to four years of free three-bureau credit monitoring and identify protection services to victims of the data breach. In addition, the company will provide another six years of its own credit monitoring and identity protection service for free. Victims who were legal minors at the time of the breach are eligible for a total of 18 years of free credit monitoring.

Substantial as the costs are for Equifax, they could go even higher. The settlement for instance requires Equifax to set aside an additional $125 million in the event the $380.5 million fund proves insufficient to pay all claims. On top of that, the costs for the six years of additional credit monitoring that Equifax is required to provide under the settlement are not part of the $380.2 million fund. In approving the settlement, the court estimated that the market value of the free credit monitoring service—if all 147 million victims sign up for it—at an additional $2 billion for Equifax.

“This settlement is the largest and most comprehensive recovery in a data breach case in U.S. history by several orders of magnitude,” District Judge Thomas Thrash, Jr. wrote. “The minimum cost to Equifax of the settlement is $1.38 billion and could be more, depending on the cost of complying with the injunctive relief,” and other measures, he wrote.

Rui Lopes, sales engineering and technical support director at Panda Security says the security breach suffered by Equifax in 2017 was one of the biggest data in history. The big question is whether it could have been prevented. “And the answer is simply ‘yes,'” Lopes says. “Equifax left the door open to cybercriminals by not updating an open-source web application development framework.”

However, Jack Mannino, CEO at nVisium says what the incident really highlights, is the difficulty involved in running a security program at scale, especially for those under constant attack.

Though there were demonstrated gaps in security monitoring and secure development that contributed to the breach, the security issues at Equifax were not unique to them he says.  “Most organizations commonly struggle with keeping software libraries and dependencies up to date,” Mannino says. “However, given the value of the data they protect, it demonstrates that there are real consequences to these events.”  

Equifax’s Data Breach Settlement Website and settlement notice contains all details about the final settlement and the reliefs and benefits available under it. Consumers have until Jan. 22, 2020 to file a claim.

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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.”

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

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/2017-data-breach-will-cost-equifax-at-least-$138-billion-/d/d-id/1336815?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Retail and banking technology professionals are keenly aware of the large number of devices that connect to their enterprise’s network via Ethernet and Wi-Fi. IT sprawl at each branch adds complexity to network visibility and security, and that complexity means increased risk of a breach. Endpoint security alone, without proper edge security, won’t be enough to reduce these risks — and even a next-generation firewall service isn’t always enough to secure the perimeter.

As a result, organizations are breached because they fail to detect the threat early enough to respond rapidly and effectively. Traditional security solutions are simply not adequate for the level of visibility and control that are required to mitigate today’s threats.

The typical bank IT system, for example, uses multiple financial applications as well as video and voice to enable services such as kiosks for consumers to conference with financial experts miles away.

These branches also need to access financial applications that are hosted in the cloud. Connecting all the bank branches or branch offices of a retail company at a reduced bandwidth cost is the crux of the answer. However, the near-real-time nature of the application puts enormous demands on the network to deliver guaranteed performance without risking the data’s security or integrity.

Because of this, enterprises such as finance and retail have begun examining the role of software-defined networking as a best practice for their future IT needs, particularly as it relates to security.

Software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) addresses flexibility with transport independence and enables connections over direct Internet broadband as well as multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) circuits and LTE/5G. SD-WAN with multicloud connectivity in particular has allowed enterprises to seamlessly move data and workloads from data centers to the branches to the public cloud. [Editor’s note: The author’s company is one of many that offer services in this area. See Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report for more information.]

The flexibility of the application access that SD-WAN provides from end to end, however, comes with a price if not properly secured: That is, security breaches can occur from anywhere, especially from the branches. The “local Internet breakout” feature — the ability for a branch to work over the Internet without needing to backhaul to the data center — creates a specific need to secure the Internet breakout link. This means enterprises, such as retailers or banks, need to evolve their branch security, in particular, with the overall threat landscape in mind.

Luckily, SD-WAN puts a premium on security, due to the regulatory environment and the need to keep customer data safe and secure. For example, every link is encrypted via IPSec in order to secure the content. This ability to segment traffic is essential for ensuring that credit card transactions are protected from untrusted traffic. Going beyond the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard compliance is the best possibility to close those unused links and prevent rogue devices from connecting to the network via Ethernet.

Ideally, SD-WAN can use policies to automate security assurance and can take automatic remedial security actions based on suspicious network behavior that is detected in real time and without user action.

Consider a scenario where a customer needs to have guest access at a bank branch or at a retail shop. Once this access is provided, that user’s file downloads need to be quarantined for viruses and other threats. Embedded intrusion prevention and detection systems (IPS/IDS) and antivirus functionality are needed at the branch network where this Wi-Fi connection is going to be established. URL/web filtering is also necessary to prevent this guest user from accessing unwanted and potentially virus-laden websites.

The prevention of this unwanted access is also not just limited to the guest users. It can be applied to the bank or retail shop employees as well in restricting access to specific websites and unauthorized access to things such as corporate data centers, for example. With security policies defined per user group or retail location, such access can be controlled.

A truly flexible SD-WAN security implementation should not just mandate embedded security; it should also provide the flexibility to supplement any onboard security from the SD-WAN vendor with additional features from the cloud security vendor. When a traffic flow needs to be further scrubbed, this approach then allows it to be redirected to the security measures deployed in the cloud. As part of the automatic response to a threat, it is important to dynamically insert a security service for suspected traffic. This dynamic insertion may involve instantiation of a security virtual network function within the customer premises equipment at the branch.

To prevent further security attacks, one needs visibility into what is happening on the network today. The visibility and analytics should provide reports and alerts based on security policy violations, byte/packet count of the volumetric distributed denial-of-service attack, number of accesses to malicious sites, user/location-based activity, etc. These reports help in-network forensics and troubleshooting as well.

Enterprises currently consider SD-WAN to be a best practice because of its flexibility, scalability, performance, and agility to deploy and manage a larger number of branches; there also is embedded security in SD-WAN branches and the controller.

Because of its security functions (such as a stateful firewall, URL/web filtering, IPS/IDS, visibility and analytics at the link level as well as the application level), SD-WAN provides security for today’s vast landscape of IT connections from the data center to the branch to the cloud, aiding an enterprise’s journey toward digital transformation.

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Charuhas Ghatge is a Senior Product and Solutions Marketing Manager at Nuage Networks and is responsible for promoting SDN and SD-WAN products and solutions for service providers and enterprises. Charuhas has held a number of engineering, product management, and marketing … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/how-sd-wan-helps-achieve-data-security-and-threat-protection-/a/d-id/1336724?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Many businesses that are transitioning to public cloud environments, microservices architectures, and 5G networks are creating new blind spots in the attack surface for criminals to leverage, according to a new report from Radware.

The security vendor recently surveyed more than 560 security professionals from small and large companies around the world on how they are preparing for and dealing with cyberattacks. Their responses showed that a substantial percentage of organizations are struggling to get a handle on cyber-risk because they lack visibility across their network environment.

Twenty-two percent of the respondents didn’t know if their organizations had been attacked recently, 27% of organizations that were attacked had no idea what their attackers might have been after, and nearly half (46%) were unable to tell if they had experienced an SSL-based distributed denial-of-service attack. Thirty percent did not monitor so-called east-west traffic, meaning they would be unable to detect lateral movement.

Unsurprisingly, many organizations are experiencing a very high volume of cyberattacks. Nearly one-third of those surveyed said their organizations experience attacks on either a daily or a weekly basis. “The main takeaway is that as organizations make strategic transformations — in technology, environments, and processes — they inevitably create a lot of cracks and blind spots,” says Ben Zilberman, head of product marketing for application security at Radware.

Until even relatively recently, the adoption of microservices architectures, the public cloud, and technologies such as 5G was somewhat limited across enterprises. But with more organizations adopting these technologies, new cracks have begun to emerge in their defenses. “While businesses are better prepared to cope with threats they know and understand, the dynamics of change [is creating] more ways for hackers to get in,” Zilberman says.

Radware’s survey showed that financial services companies are no longer the favorite targets of cyberattackers. A higher percentage of organizations in the education and retail sectors reported daily attacks — 45% and 39%, respectively — than financial services organizations (37%). Other heavily targeted sectors included government and healthcare, with 36% of organizations reporting daily attacks, followed by service providers (35%), professional services (34%), and manufacturing (32%).

Nation-State Attacks
Significantly, the percentage of cyberattacks that were attributed to nation-state-backed threat actors jumped 42% compared with 2018. Zilberman says that rather than an increase in nation-state attacks, the new data suggests that enterprise organizations are getting better at identifying and attributing attacks to state-backed groups. “It may have to do with the establishment of national agencies, like CERTs, that help organizations, particularly critical ones within critical infrastructures,” he says.

For organizations targeted by nation-state actors, the danger is not just data theft and espionage. In many cases, government-backed threat groups are also infiltrating and injecting dormant tools into targeted networks to be activated if war or other hostilities break out between rival nations. The tools can be remotely controlled and used to trigger large-scale disruptions and shutdowns of critical government, military, and civil systems.

For the most part, though, a majority of cyberattacks in the US and elsewhere continue to be financially motivated. Seven in 10 of US organizations that reported being attacked in the survey said their attackers were looking for a ransom or some other form of financial gain. More than three in 10 organizations also described attacks against them as being motivated by political or “hacktivist” reasons or as being cyberwar or geopolitically related. Radware said it expects to see massive Internet of Things botnets being used to thwart election-related activity in 2020.

Organizational response to the changing threat landscape continues to be decidedly mixed. “Some neglect and deny and believe stacking up solutions will deliver on the promise,” Zilberman notes. Others are simply keeping on doing what they have always done. “They continue to design and manage their information security using old methods that don’t match the current requirements.”

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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.” 

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

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/cloud-adoption-and-technology-change-create-gaps-in-enterprise-security/d/d-id/1336808?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

The first Patch Tuesday of 2020 has the industry buzzing about 49 CVEs, in particular a Windows CryptoAPI spoofing vulnerability disclosed to Microsoft by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

CVE-2020-0601, which affects Windows’ cryptographic functionality, exists in Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server 2019. It’s categorized by Microsoft as Important and rated as level one, or “exploitation more likely,” in its advisory released today. Neither Microsoft nor the NSA has seen this vulnerability used in the wild, and the agency said it has not seen it in a tool.

The certificate-validation flaw exists in the way Windows CryptoAPI (Crypt32.dll) validates Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) certificates. An attacker could exploit the bug by using a spoofed code-signing certificate to sign a malicious executable so the file appears to be from a known and trusted source. The move could trick both users and anti-virus software, the DHS explains in an emergency directive on today’s patches. Neither a user nor the AV program would know a file was malicious.

With this vulnerability, an attacker could issue a maliciously crafted certificate for a hostname that didn’t authorize it. As a result, a browser that relies on CryptoAPI would not issue a warning to the user, giving the intruder access to modify or inject data on user connections. Successful exploitation could also allow an attacker to launch man-in-the-middle attacks and decrypt confidential data on users’ connections to the affected software.

Some places where trust may be breached include HTTPS connections, signed files and emails, and signed executable code launched as user-mode processes, the NSA says in an advisory. An attacker could compromise Web certificates and spy on traffic as part of a man-in-the-middle attack, or compromise digitally signed emails. For apps using signatures for verification, an attacker could manipulate a user into deploying a malicious app that is signed and seems real.

If exploited, CVE-2020-0601 could render affected platforms “fundamentally vulnerable,” officials say, and the consequences of not patching this flaw are “severe and widespread.” The agency anticipates remote exploitation tools will be made quickly and widely available.

“The blast radius is pretty close to as bad as you can get,” says Will Ackerly, CTO and cofounder of Virtu, who spent eight years with the NSA, where he was a technology architect and created the Trusted Data Format (TDF). If the operating system believes software is trusted, users won’t see certain dialogues and certain blocks will be bypassed.

“It attacks trust,” says Dr. Richard Gold, director of security engineering at Digital Shadows, of the vulnerability. “It is no longer possible to rely on the cryptographic guarantees provided by an unpatched system.” In this sense, he continues, this is a “very serious” bug as it attacks the trust businesses have in a system to verify updates, check signatures, and other measures.

New NSA-Vendor Cooperation

Microsoft has publicly credited the NSA with reporting CVE-2020-0601, a shift away from the agency’s practice of keeping vulnerabilities under wraps. It marks the start of a new approach by the NSA, said NSA director of cybersecurity Anne Neuberger on a call with reporters today.

“We thought hard about that,” said Neuberger with respect to the decision to allow attribution. While the NSA has been discovering vulnerabilities for a long time, it has never permitted public attribution to reporting a vulnerability. 

NSA experts look very carefully at software, especially software the US government plans to use including Windows and commercial products. They did an evaluation and turned it over to Microsoft. It’s unclear how much time passed between the NSA’s discovery of the bug and Microsoft’s patch.

Neuberger says the agency routinely finds vulnerabilities but with respect to the reporting process, “we’re working to do several things differently along the way.” The NSA follows the vulnerabilities equities process (VEP), which is used by the federal government to determine how to treat vulnerabilities on a case-by-case basis: should they be disclosed to the public to improve computer security, or should they be kept secret for offensive government use? VEP was created between 2008-2009; the government publicly disclosed the process in Nov. 2017.

Virtu’s Ackerly says this shift is the next step of a gradual change he noticed during his time with the NSA. Neuberger has coordinated with other agencies and counties, where her counterparts spoke to the value of public engagement. Now we’re seeing the NSA move forward on this.

Will see more vulnerability reports from the NSA? “We’ll approach each situation on its own merits,” Neuberger said in response.

But Don’t Stop Patching There

Microsoft today also disclosed multiple Windows RDP bugs. CVE-2020-0609 and CVE-2020-0610 are critical Windows RDP Gateway Server remote code execution vulnerabilities that exist when an unauthenticated attacker connects to a target system using RDP and sends specially crafted requests. Both are pre-authentication and require no user interaction; to exploit them an attacker would need to send a specially crafted request to a target system’s RD Gateway via RDP. The two vulnerabilities affect Windows Server 2012 and newer.

There is also CVE-2020-0611, a Remote Desktop Client RCE vulnerability that exists when a user connects to a malicious server. An attacker would first need to have control of the server and then convince a user to connect via social engineering, DNS poisoning, or a man-in-the-middle attack. If successful, they could execute arbitrary code on the connecting machine and install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. This bug affects Windows Server 2012 and newer, as well as Windows 7 and newer.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is unaware of active exploitation of these vulnerabilities, officials wrote in advisory AA20-014A. Organizations are advised to prioritize patching for mission-critical systems, internet-facing systems, and networked servers.

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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/microsoft-patches-windows-vuln-discovered-by-the-nsa-/d/d-id/1336807?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple