STE WILLIAMS

Microsoft today debuted two new security services: Azure Sentinel, a cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) system, and Microsoft Threat Experts, a service through which security operations teams can leverage expertise from Microsoft’s experts.

The two services arrive at a time when two major trends are converging on security: SOC teams are struggling with an overwhelming amount of daily alerts and a lack of staff to handle them, and more organizations are moving their data and processes over to the cloud.

“As the cloud has revolutionized modern IT architecture, more and more enterprise workloads have moved to the cloud,” says Steve Dispensa, program management lead for Microsoft’s cloud and AI security division. The transition especially makes sense for security workloads, he adds, as they’re both data- and compute-intensive.

Enter Azure Sentinel, which Microsoft reports is the first native SIEM within a major cloud platform. Many organizations still rely on traditional SIEM tools, which typically can’t keep up with the cloud’s scale and complexity. The AI built into Sentinel scours large volumes of data from users, applications, servers, and devices running on-prem or in the cloud. Microsoft reports early adopters of Sentinel have seen an overall reduction of up to 90% in alert fatigue.

“One of the key goals of Azure Sentinel was to really help SOC operators use their limited bandwidth in the most effective way possible,” Dispensa notes.

Azure Sentinel pulls data from Office 365, combs for threats, and combines findings with other security data for analysis. Its integration extends beyond Microsoft: Users can leverage Azure Sentinel to pull data from clouds and software built by companies including Cisco, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, and Symantec, said Ann Johnson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of security solutions, in a briefing ahead of next week’s RSA Conference.

“An early goal of Azure Sentinel was to be able to integrate well with the infrastructure and services actually in use at these large enterprises,” Dispensa says. This isn’t just Microsoft cloud, he points out, and not just on-prem infrastructure, but apps and services in third-party clouds.

Data import for Office 365 is free, though you need to be a licensed Office 365 customer. Azure Sentinel is limited to Azure subscribers and is available in public preview starting today, Feb. 28. The preview period is also free; pricing will be announced in the future, Microsoft says.

Microsoft Threat Experts: Now Your Threat Experts
Alongside its Azure Sentinel announcement, Microsoft unveiled a service dubbed Microsoft Threat Experts, which connects the company’s security experts with its in-house security staff. The idea is to give businesses an opportunity to augment security as part of Microsoft 365.

Microsoft Threat Experts is a managed threat-hunting service built into Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection. It’s intended to provide two capabilities. The first is targeted attack notifications, which are alerts tailored to organizations’ critical threats. They’re intended to inform the victim with timeline, scope of breach, and method of intrusions, for example.

The second is “experts on demand.” When a breach exceeds the target’s ability to investigate, Microsoft’s security experts will provide technical consultation. If full incident response is necessary, the client can transition to working with Microsoft incident response services.

Dustin Duran, lead for Microsoft Threat Experts, says all participants in the program are full-time Microsoft employees who can provide either of the service’s capabilities. “The same set of people have intimate knowledge of the operating system and features of security products, so they’re able to do both,” he explains.

Windows Defender ATP customers can now apply to join the preview of this service via the Windows Defender Security Center.

Related Content:

• In 2019, Cryptomining Just Might Have an Even Better Year
• More Than 22,000 Vulns Were Disclosed in 2018, 27% Without Fixes
• Stay Ahead of the Curve by Using AI in Compliance
• Whose Line Is It? When Voice Phishing Attacks Get Sneaky

Join Dark Reading LIVE for two cybersecurity summits at Interop 2019. Learn from the industry’s most knowledgeable IT security experts. Check out the Interop agenda here.

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/cloud/microsoft-debuts-azure-sentinel-siem-threat-experts-service/d/d-id/1334005?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

A data leak at Dow Jones exposed the financial firm’s Watchlist database, which contains information on high-risk individuals and was left on a server sans password.

Watchlist is used by major global financial institutions to identify risk while researching individuals. It helps detect instances of crime, such as money laundering and illegal payments, by providing data on public figures. Watchlist has global coverage of senior political figures, national and international government sanction lists, people linked to or convicted of high-profile crime, and profile notes from Dow Jones citing federal agencies and law enforcement. 

The leak was discovered by security researcher Bob Diachenko, who found a copy of the Watchlist on a public Elasticsearch cluster. The database exposed 2.4 million records and was publicly available to anyone who knew where to find it – for example, with an Internet of Things (IoT) search engine, he explained in a blog post.

It’s important to note that data in the database, which has since been taken down, originated from public sources. Watchlist collects licensed and available news from publications around the world; a research team provides updates on listed individuals’ names and relations.

While it is public data, Diachenko warned that exposing Watchlist “could be reckless” given the nature of information it contains and the people included in it.

This isn’t the first time a misconfigured cloud server has put Dow Jones data at risk. In July 2017, a data leak exposed personal information of millions of customers. The culprit? An Amazon Web Services S3 bucket set to let any AWS Authenticated User download its data.

Read more details on the Watchlist leak here.

Join Dark Reading LIVE for two cybersecurity summits at Interop 2019. Learn from the industry’s most knowledgeable IT security experts. Check out the Interop agenda 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/cloud/dow-jones-leak-exposes-watchlist-database/d/d-id/1334006?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

In life in general — and, of course, in security specifically — it is helpful to understand when I am the problem or when my organization is the problem. By that, I mean that it is important to discern when an approach to a problem is simply ineffective. When I understand that an approach doesn’t work, I can try different things until I find the right solution. This is the definition of repetition.

Redundancy, on the other hand, is when I (or my organization) keeps trying the same approach and nothing changes. It makes no sense to expect different results without a different approach. This, of course, is the definition of redundancy. What can the difference between repetition and redundancy teach us about security? An awful lot.

Intelligence: When run properly, a mature intelligence capability can help an organization understand the risks and threats it faces, bolster its detection abilities, and improve its response capabilities. On the other hand, a poorly run intelligence capability confuses decision-makers, deluges alert queues with false positives, and slows incident response.

I’ve seen organizations try to shove poor intelligence sources and an underdeveloped capability into security operations in an effort to leverage them. The results aren’t pretty. More surprising than the results is the tendency of these organization to try this same approach again and again with the expectation that something valuable will somehow emerge from it. That’s not repetition. It’s redundancy.

Vendor risk management: Most medium-to-large businesses have a vendor risk management (VRM) program. The maturity of VRM programs varies widely across the security industry. Nearly all VRM programs have one thing in common: They involve a painfully manual, labor-intensive process. What’s amazing to me is not that organizations struggle with a process that needs improvement. That is to be expected and will improve with time as new approaches and solutions become commonplace. What amazes me is that organizations expect different or improved results from the same broken process. That’s redundancy.

Vulnerability management: Staying on top of vulnerabilities is of the utmost importance to a security organization. Whether it be endpoints, servers, web applications, or otherwise, it’s important for an organization to understand where its potential points of exposure are. But to stop there is foolish. What good is a weekly report of vulnerabilities without correlating it with overall risk, sensitive and/or confidential data, system criticality, and other dimensions? Those additional dimensions give an organization the ability to leverage vulnerability information to mitigate and reduce risk. That’s an approach that can be repeated. Continuing to run weekly reports merely to put them on the shelf? That’s redundant.

Alerting content: Alert fatigue is a known problem that organizations struggle with. Blindly implementing default signature sets recommended by vendors and others without considering how they attempt to detect, address, and reduce risks the organization is concerned about isn’t a recipe for success. It’s most often a recipe for unmanageable alert volumes and an avalanche of team-drowning false positives. The fact that many organizations struggle with alert fatigue is not in the least surprising. The fact that those same organizations continue to complain about alert fatigue and expect better results without ever adjusting their approach is quite surprising. That’s just plain redundant.

Incident response: Anyone who has worked in the security field for some amount of time understands the necessity and value of a mature incident response capability. What’s less widely understood is the long and winding road that leads to just such a capability. I’ve never met a well-oiled incident response team that came together magically overnight. It’s to be expected that certain processes, procedures, and functions may not work perfectly, or even fairly well, at the get-go. More important than things working perfectly is learning from when things don’t work perfectly. This is easier said than done, of course.

For an organization to truly improve its incident response capability, it needs to examine its strengths and weaknesses as well as its successes and failings. This requires that the organization view itself as the problem, in the sense that there are certain functions within incident response that the security team does not perform well. Only then can repetition work its magic to improve the organization’s incident response capability. Otherwise, we’re in the realm of redundancy.

Related Content:

• Your Employees Want to Learn. How Should You Teach Them?
• KISS, Cyber the Humble but Nourishing Chickpea 
• Setting the Table for Effective Cybersecurity: 20 Culinary Questions
• 8 Security Buzzwords That Are Too Good to Be True

Join Dark Reading LIVE for two cybersecurity summits at Interop 2019. Learn from the industry’s most knowledgeable IT security experts. Check out the Interop agenda here.

Josh (Twitter: @ananalytical) is an experienced information security leader with broad experience building and running Security Operations Centers (SOCs). Josh is currently co-founder and chief product officer at IDRRA and also serves as security advisor to ExtraHop. Prior to … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/solving-security-repetition-or-redundancy--/a/d-id/1333983?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

A group of Turkish-speaking hackers is hijacking popular Instagram profiles, including those belonging to actors and singers, and, in some cases, promising to turn back control to the victims in exchange for a ransom or nude photos and videos.

Researchers from Trend Micro say they have recently observed several incidents where the group has been using a phishing scam to take over the Instagram profiles of people with between 15,000 and 70,000 followers. They have subsequently changed the primary contact information associated with the breached accounts to lock the original owners out.

The victims have ranged from famous personalities to owners of small businesses like photo equipment rental stores, the security vendor said in a report released Thursday. 

Owners of the stolen accounts have typically not been able to recover control using Instagram’s account-retrieval processes or even after they have complied with the ransom demand. Trend Micro’s report does not identify any victims by name nor does it revealed how many Instagram users might have been impacted by the current campaign.

“Trend Micro has not seen any evidence of the Turkish group targeting business Instagram accounts,” said Trend Micro threat researchers Jindrich Karasek and Cedric Pernet, in emailed comments to Dark Reading. “Their attacks were aimed directly toward popular individuals’ accounts, including those of influencers, actors, and other rich and famous people.”

Karasek and Pernet said Trend Micro has so far not seen any evidence that the Turkish group’s attacks could be the first step in planning another campaign with different targets. But that possibility cannot be ruled out. “Trend Micro continues to monitor this activity that can potentially be a part of a bigger campaign,” the two researchers said.

This is not the first report about Instagram accounts being hijacked by cybercriminals. Last August Mashable reported a campaign in which attackers believed to be operating out of Russia gained access to hundreds of Instagram accounts and subsequently locked the owners out by changing the primary email and password associated with the accounts. In many cases, key information, such as user handles and profile pictures, were changed as well, though the original posts from victim accounts were typically left untouched, Mashable had noted.

Then, as now, victims were typically unable to regain control of their stolen accounts. Many reported being frustrated by their inability to get Instagram to resolve the situation for them.

Instagram did not immediately respond to Dark Reading’s request for comment.

Bait and Phish
According to Trend Micro, the Turkish-speaking group behind the latest campaign is using phishing emails to try and get targeted victims to share their Instagram account log-in details. The attackers first search for and identify high-profile or popular Instagram accounts. Then they have been using previously hacked accounts to “follow” the targeted victims and get their email addresses using Instagram’s “send email” function, Trend Micro said.

“The compromise starts with a phishing email pretending to be from Instagram,” the company stated. “The email prods the potential victim to verify the account to get the Verified badge for the user’s Instagram profile.”

Users who click on the link are redirected to a phishing page that asks for the user’s date of birth, email address, and password. The hackers have been using that information to change the primary email and password information so the original user can no longer log in or recover the account.

“However, this method doesn’t work against two-factor authentications unless the attacker has stolen the victim’s smartphone or another device that works with their two-factor authentication setup,” a Trend Micro’s spokeswoman noted.

The Turkish group’s motives in hijacking the Instagram accounts appear somewhat unclear. The attackers interacting directly with the Instagram victims are likely motivated by the possibility of gaining notoriety within the hacker community, Karasek and Pernet said.

Attackers that are doing the actual coding and establishing infrastructure for the attacks may be motivated by the possibility of spreading the same scam or spreading other scams through the compromised Instagram accounts, they noted. “In the case of digital extortion, attackers can also get money, nude photos, or video, etc., by telling the victim they will give them their account back in exchange.”

Currently, there is no direct proof that other groups are doing the same thing, Karasek and Pernet noted. “Due to the widespread use of the Instagram platform, it is easy to target people and businesses with phishing scams,” the researchers said.

Related Content:

• Instagram Hack: Hundreds Affected, Russia Suspected
• Instagram Privacy Tool Exposed Passwords
• Social Media Platforms Double as Major Malware Distribution Centers
• 6 Ways to Beat Back BEC Attacks

Join Dark Reading LIVE for two cybersecurity summits at Interop 2019. Learn from the industry’s most knowledgeable IT security experts. Check out the Interop agenda here.

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/turkish-group-using-phishing-emails-to-hijack-popular-instagram-profiles-/d/d-id/1334008?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple