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Facebook apps secretly sending sensitive data back to the mothership

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A trio of privacy earthquakes shook Facebooklandia on Friday.

TL;DR: It turns out that…

Eleven third-party apps are sharing our sensitive data with Facebook. Don’t want the network to know when you menstruate? The purchase price for that house you ogled? Tough. News about the oversharing came from the Wall Street Journal [paywalled] on Friday, and as a result…
New York’s governor called on two state agencies to investigate this “secret” sharing of health and financial data, which apparently violates Facebook’s own policies, and which is reportedly done to both non-Facebook users and non-logged-in users, without much by way of explicit user consent. Meanwhile…
60 pages of un-redacted legal documents from a lawsuit between Facebook and app developer Six4Three were anonymously posted on GitHub. The documents haven’t been independently confirmed, The Guardian reports, but Facebook hasn’t denied their authenticity. The internal emails reveal that Facebook planned to spy on Android users and that Facebook itself had what it called a near-fatal brush with a data privacy breach when a third-party app came close to disclosing its financial results ahead of schedule.

To get to the bottom of the WSJ’s findings about the blabby apps, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that he’s putting multiple agencies to work on the matter.

If the WSJ’s investigation proves to be accurate, and if those freshly leaked internal emails from Six4Three prove authentic, it’s going to paint an even uglier picture of Facebook post-Cambridge Analytica, governmental investigations and fines …

… when one might have reasonably assumed that the company would have been backed up its protestations about data-bumbling third-party apps breaching its policies with at least a semblance of reining them in.

In the meantime, a few more details about this batch of fresh Facebook news:

You told Facebook WHAT??!

On Friday, the WSJ reported that iOS and Android apps are disgorging some of the personal health- and finance-related data of millions of users. From its report:

Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status.

In other words, personal data that users wouldn’t necessarily want to share with Facebook.

Nonetheless, the WSJ said, tests showed that Facebook’s software collects data from numerous apps within seconds of it being entered by the user, with no sign of a prominent or specific disclosure by the app. This is the case even when a user hadn’t logged into Facebook for authentication, or even if a user didn’t have a Facebook account to begin with.

That includes popular apps that have been downloaded by millions of users, including:

Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor by Azumio, the most popular heart-rate app in Apple’s App Store. It sends users’ heart rates immediately after a reading is taken.
The Flo Period and Ovulation Tracker: its developers claim that the iOS and Android app has been downloaded by over 70 million users worldwide. The app tracks when users get their periods and when they want to get pregnant: information it was, or may still be, reportedly passing on to Facebook.
Realtor.com sends Facebook the location and price of listings viewed by a user, as well as those marked as favorites, according to the WSJ’s tests.

I’ve asked those three companies for comment and will update the story if I hear back. As far as NY State Governor Cuomo is concerned, the conclusions reached by the WSJ’s investigation display what he called…

Facebook’s “outrageous abuse of privacy”

Cuomo said that the WSJ report represents “an invasion of privacy and breach of consumer trust” and that Facebook’s actions are an “outrageous abuse of privacy”.

Cuomo is asking for a probe from the New York Department of State and the Department of Financial Services, among others. He’s also called on relevant federal regulators to “step up and help us put an end to this practice and protect the rights of consumers.”

New Yorkers deserve to know that their personal information is safe, and we must hold internet companies – no matter how big – responsible for upholding the law and protecting the information of smartphone users.

Reuters reports that Facebook said in a statement that it would assist New York officials in their probe, but that the WSJ’s report focused on how other apps use people’s data to create ads. From Facebook’s statement:

As [the WSJ] reported, we require the other app developers to be clear with their users about the information they are sharing with us, and we prohibit app developers from sending us sensitive data. We also take steps to detect and remove data that should not be shared with us.

Third-party app violated Zuck’s privacy

Speaking of inappropriately sharing data, the GitHub-doxed documents include internal emails between Facebook execs that show that one of its own – as in, head honcho Mark Zuckerberg – almost fell victim to a near-catastrophic privacy breach brought about by a third-party app.

As The Guardian reports, in one email thread, former Facebook vice president Michael Vernal refers to some type of issue with an app that came close to disclosing the company’s financial results ahead of schedule.

From the email discussion:

Listen guys/gals – DO NOT REPEAT THIS STORY OFF OF THIS THREAD… I’m super, super serious here. I want us to follow-up on this and respond urgently here, but I also do not want this story spreading inside of Facebook or off of this thread at all. I can’t tell you how terrible this would have been for all of us had this not been caught quickly.

Another of the documents looks to be an 8-page July 2012 memo – one marked “highly confidential” – from Marne Levine, formerly Facebook’s vice president of global public policy.

At one point, Levine talks about plans for data collection on Android devices, writing:

We’ll be collecting users’ location data and matching it with cell site IDs. This information will be stored in anonymous form but will allow us to roll out location-aware ‘feature phone’ products in the future. Second the growth team wants to begin collecting certain limited information about whether users have a non-Google app store enabled and which default applications they are using for certain Facebook functions (camera, messages, etc) for competitive analysis and product improvement purposes.

Six4Three: The gift that keeps giving

These emails are just the latest documents to come out of a lawsuit brought against Facebook by the tiny, your-Facebook-friends-in-bikinis developer Six4Three. Six4Three has been wrangling with Facebook in US court since 2015 over allegations that Facebook turned off the Friends Data API spigot as a way of forcing developers to buy advertising, transfer intellectual property or even sell themselves to Facebook at bargain basement prices.

In December, the UK Parliament’s inquiry into fake news got its fingers into the legal Six4Three pie and came out with a fistful of Facebook staff’s private emails, which it then published.

Six4Three has alleged that the correspondence shows that Facebook was not only aware of the implications of its privacy policy, but actively exploited them. Damian Collins MP and his committee were particularly interested in the app company’s assertions that Facebook intentionally created and effectively flagged up the loophole that Cambridge Analytica used to collect user data.

The UK Parliament drew on the Six4Three documents as it prepared its recently released report on disinformation and fake news. One of its conclusions: that companies like Facebook shouldn’t be allowed to behave like “digital gangsters” in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law.

Are these internal emails for real?

Although the Guardian noted that it doesn’t have independent verification of the internal emails, Facebook itself didn’t deny that they’re legit. Rather, it stuck to its “these don’t tell the whole story” line in this statement:

Like the other documents that were cherrypicked and released in violation of a court order last year, these by design tell one side of a story and omit important context. As we’ve said, these selective leaks came from a lawsuit where Six4Three, the creators of an app known as Pikinis, hoped to force Facebook to share information on friends of the app’s users. These documents have been sealed by a Californian court so we’re not able to discuss them in detail.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nakedsecurity/~3/owr-Dr3-yLc/

ICANN demands DNSSEC combats DNS hijacking

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The Domain Name System (DNS), without which the web would be a mass of network numbers with no friendly server names such as example.net or nakedsecurity.sophos.com, is under threat from cyberattackers and domain overseer ICANN wants internet companies to do something about it.

That was the message in last week’s worried press release from ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

This message comes hot on the heels of similarly alarming warnings from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), alarmed by recent series of DNS attacks. The attacks try to take over email and web domains, diverting traffic to imposter servers.

The solution, according to ICANN, is for companies providing DNS infrastructure to get on with implementing a DNS security layer called DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) as soon as possible:

ICANN is calling for full deployment of the DNSSEC across all unsecured domain names.

Nearly 20 years after DNSSEC was first proposed, it remains a work in very slow progress that too many internet companies have chosen to ignore.

According to the APNIC registry, only around 20 per cent of the world’s DNS resolvers show any signs of using it.

Now, finally, there seems to be some urgency.

In November, Cisco Talos wrote about a large-scale cyber-campaign targeting Lebanon and the UAE at the centre of which was a DNS hijacking campaign traffic sophisticated enough not only to redirect traffic but to compromise SSL certificates and VPN tunnels.

Since then, similar campaigns have been documented by others which point to the successful compromise of the DNS infrastructure of dozens of organisations in at least 11 countries, including Sweden and the US.

Using DNSSEC, name lookups and updates are verified by cryptographic signatures, which makes the otherwise-simple DNS protocol more complex and time-consuming.

The added complexity in managing the public key infrastructure (PKI) needed to make DNNSEC work means higher costs that ISPs would rather do without for a system that might not add much security initially.

On the other hand, going through the long and difficult manual checks ICANN and others now recommend for DNS security in the absence of DNSSEC might be even worse.

What to do?

Whether you’re using DNSSEC or not, we’ll repeat the security advice issued in a recent US Department of Homeland Security emergency directive:

Verify that all important domains are resolving to the correct IP address and haven’t been tampered with.
Change passwords on all accounts used to manage domain records.
Turn on multi-factor authentication to protect admin accounts.
Monitor Certificate Transparency (CT) logs for newly issued TLS certificates that might have been issued by a malicious actor.

LISTEN NOW: LEARN MORE ABOUT DNS HIJACKING

[The section on DNS hijacking and what to do about it starts at 3’57”]

(Audio player not working? Download the MP3, listen on Soundcloud, or get it from iTunes.)

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nakedsecurity/~3/DK32HJD1pA8/

Mozilla fears encryption law could turn its employees into insider threats

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Mozilla has told the Australian government that its anti-encryption laws could turn its own employees into insider threats.

The Mozilla Corporation, which is the arm of the Mozilla Foundation that develops and maintains its software, made the striking warnings in a letter to the country’s government last week.

The letter, written to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, criticises the country’s controversial Telecommunication Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance Access) Act of 2018 (TOLA).

TOLA is Australia’s attempt to provide the government with access to encrypted communications. It enables the authorities to ask technology companies nicely for help decrypting a user’s communications, using an order called a technical assistant request (TAR). If they are technically able to help but don’t want to, the government can force them to with an order called a technical assistance notice (TAN).

What about companies that don’t want to help and say that they couldn’t anyway because their own technology stops them from giving up customer communications? In this case, the law allows the government to issue a technical capability notice (TCN). This forces the company to alter its systems to make them more, um, co-operative.

In its letter, Mozilla frets that TOLA’s language allows authorities to make these requests of individuals rather than of the companies they work for (otherwise known as designated communications providers, or DCPs). It says:

It is easy to imagine how Australian authorities could abuse their powers and the penalties of this law to coerce an employee of a DCP to compromise the security of the systems and products they develop or maintain.

It also warned that this would effectively force companies to treat Australian employees as potential saboteurs:

This potential would force DCP’s [sic] to treat Australia-based employees as potential insider threats, introducing another vector for compromise…

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that employees targeted with TOLA orders aren’t allowed to tell anyone, Mozilla added. It worries that this could enable the government to force an Australian employee to introduce weaknesses in code and then keep those changes secret.

According to Mozilla, TOLA’s danger is compounded by the fact that TCNs don’t require review from a judge, or from ministries outside the Attorney General’s office. TOLA powers can be delegated to relatively low-level government employees, the company warned:

Providing these powers to any police officer in Australia is irresponsible, risks the dangerous overuse of TOLA’s powers, and in doing so demonstrates a cavalier attitude toward the privacy and security of users in Australia and abroad.

TOLA powers can be delegated to foreign governments too, with what Mozilla calls “utterly insignificant safeguards”.

Mozilla raised its concerns and recommended ways to mitigate them but prefers another option. It said:

We do not believe that this law should have been passed in the first place, and we believe the best possible path is to repeal this legislation in its entirety and begin afresh with a proper, public consultation.

The software company wasn’t the only one to raise concerns. FastMail, an Australian email provider that prides itself on secure email services, worried in its own letter that government access to encrypted communication would damage consumer trust.

FastMail also argued that keeping a TCN secret wasn’t technically possible anyway. Weaknesses introduced via TCN would be detectable and would have to be understood by the whole team to avoid them being accidentally neutralised, it pointed out, adding:

TOLA’s requirements for secrecy put all companies which are built on a trusted relationship with their customers at risk. To conclude that additional capabilities built under TCN can be kept a secret, whether from staff or customers, is naive at best.

Of the 343 submissions that the Australian government received during the public comment period before it passed TOLA, only one was favourable, according to the Economist. The director general of the Australian Signals Directorate responded with a rare public statement supporting the law.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nakedsecurity/~3/_R82IeC4exE/

How Enterprises Are Developing Secure Applications

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Feb 25, 2019

Article source: https://www.informationweek.com/whitepaper/security-platforms/cybersecurity/how-enterprises-are-developing-secure-applications/405823?cid=mp_rptbx&_mc=mp_rptbx&_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

TurboTax Hit with Credential Stuffing Attack, Tax Returns Compromised

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Officials report an unauthorized party obtained tax return data by using credentials obtained from an outside source.

Update 2/26/2019: This article has been updated to reflect new information regarding the TurboTax incident.

Intuit, a financial software company and creator of services Mint, QuickBooks, and TurboTax, reports the latter has been hit with a credential stuffing attack targeting specific users’ tax return information.

The incident was discovered during a system security review, Intuit reported in a breach disclosure letter filed with the Office of the Vermont Attorney General and shared with affected users. Officials explain how an unauthorized party targeted specific TurboTax users by taking usernames and passwords “from a non-Intuit source,” which they used in a credential stuffing attack.

If their login was successful, attackers may have accessed data contained in a prior year’s tax return or current tax returns in progress. This includes name, Social Security number, address(es), birthdates, driver’s license number, and financial data (salary, deductions), as well as information belonging to other individuals included in the victim’s tax return, they report.

Upon discovering the problem, Intuit made affected accounts temporarily unavailable to protect data from further unauthorized access. It’s offering victims one year of free identity protection, credit monitoring, and identity restoration services via Experian IdentityWorks.

Update: Intuit has issued a statement to emphasize there has been no breach of its systems, and the incident described in the notification letter is related to unauthorized access of specific accounts.

Your Employees Want to Learn. How Should You Teach Them?

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Security practitioners are most likely to stay at organizations that offer career development. Here are eight tips to consider as you plan your course of action.

(Image: Anzebizjan – stock.adobe.com)

Cybersecurity is an industry of constant change. Organizations most prepared to face new and emerging threats are the same ones investing in the education of people who keep them safe.

It’s no secret: Businesses large and small struggle to find skilled security talent. The challenge doesn’t end when they land a good fit – it’s notoriously difficult to keep security professionals. Opportunity abounds. On average, infosec employees receive 1.5 recruiter messages per week, according to a survey by Cybrary of more than 3,100 IT, security, and other professionals.

“Everybody’s fighting for the same people,” says Cybrary co-founder and CEO Ryan Corey. The company’s research shows it takes an average of 12 months to get a security pro up to speed in a new role, he adds, but the average tenure for experts in the space is only 18 months.

If you want to beat the odds and keep your security team, invest in their career development. People in this industry want to learn and progress, Corey continues. Most of them are self-taught, taking courses at night or on the weekends. If their current organizations don’t offer them the opportunity to move forward professionally, they’ll move on to one that does.

“Over almost any other benefit – nobody asks about stock options or 5% bonuses – training is the first thing that comes out of people’s mouths,” says Robert Lee, SANS security fellow and curriculum lead for SANS DFIR, of the modern job interview process.

Here, Corey and Lee dive into the trends and challenges surrounding continuing education for cybersecurity pros. What do team members want to learn, and how do they want to learn it? Should you be sending them to conferences or trainings? And what if you educate them – only to lose them to another company? Read on to find out.

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/your-employees-want-to-learn-how-should-you-teach-them/d/d-id/1333950?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Come to Black Hat Asia and See the Future of Cloud Security

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Whether you’re looking to perfect your AWS auditing skills or practice the latest cloud exploitation techniques, next month’s Black Hat Asia can help you achieve your goals.

The remarkable popularity of cloud computing platforms has changed the way we do business, and it’s also created a whole new landscape of threats that cybersecurity professionals must master. Whether you’re looking to perfect your AWS auditing skills or practice the latest cloud exploitation techniques, next month’s Black Hat Asia in Singapore has the Trainings, Briefings, and Arsenal tools to help you achieve your goals!

There’s still space left to register for “AWS Azure Exploitation: Making The Cloud Rain Shells!”, a fast-paced and hands-on two-day Training course which teaches each participant the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) needed to infiltrate and expand access within cloud platforms. In this practical course you’ll learn how to exploit serverless applications for initial access into targets, pivot between data and control planes to expand access (e.g. secrets, snapshots), evade and disrupt cloud logging platforms to remain undetected.

“Make Redirection Evil Again – URL Parser Issues in OAuth” is a 25-minute Briefing that promises to introduce new OAuth redirection attack techniques which exploit the interaction of URL parsing problems with redirection handling in mainstream browsers and mobile apps. This is a big deal because numerous top-tier cloud service providers rely on OAuth client apps, and researchers have found that thousands of such apps (and potentially millions of users) are vulnerable to this new attack, which can have potentially severe consequences.

Swing by the Arsenal in the Black Hat Asia Business Hall to check out the “Cloud Security Suite: One Stop Tool for AWS/GCP/Azure Security Audit” demo, which promises to show you a streamlined method of auditing cloud security infrastructure. The Cloud Security Suite is designed to be “one tool to rule them all” capable of auditing the security posture of AWS/GCP/Azure infrastructures, as well as operating systems. It leverages current open-source tools as well as its own custom checks, so make time to stop by and check it out!

Black Hat Asia returns to the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore March 26-29, 2019. For more information on what’s happening at the event and how to register, check out the Black Hat website.

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/black-hat/come-to-black-hat-asia-and-see-the-future-of-cloud-security/d/d-id/1333957?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

A ‘Cloudy’ Future for OSSEC

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As more organizations move to the public cloud and to DevOps and DevSecOps processes, the open source alternative for host-based intrusion detection is finding new uses.

Used by more than 10,000 organizations around the world, OSSEC has provided an open source alternative for host-based intrusion detection for more than 10 years. From Fortune 10 enterprises to governments to small businesses, OSSEC has long been a standard part of the toolkit for both security and operations teams.

As more organizations move to the public cloud infrastructure and to DevOps and DevSecOps processes, OSSEC is finding new use cases and attracting new fans. Downloads of the project nearly quadrupled in 2018, ending the year at more than 500,000. Much of this new activity was driven by Amazon, Google, and Azure public cloud users.

While many security and operations engineers are familiar with OSSEC in the context of on-premise intrusion detection, this article will focus on the project’s growing use and applicability to cloud and DevSecOps use cases for security and compliance.

OSSEC Capabilities
OSSEC offers six key intrusion detection capabilities to users in any environment, on physical servers, in containers or virtual machines, or in public or private clouds.

Log-based intrusion detection (LIDS): Actively monitors and analyzes data from multiple log data points in real time.
File integrity monitoring (FIM): For both files and Windows registry settings in real time, detects changes to the system, and maintains a forensic copy of the data as it changes over time.
Rootkit and malware detection: Process- and file-level analysis detects malicious applications and rootkits.
Compliance auditing: Application- and system-level auditing ensures compliance with many common standards, such as PCI-DSS and CIS benchmarks.
System inventory: Collects system information, such as installed software, hardware, utilization, network services, and listeners.
Active response: Responds to attacks and changes on the system in real time through multiple mechanisms, including firewall policies, integration with third parties such as content delivery networks and support portals, as well as self-healing actions.

OSSEC provides intrusion detection capabilities on Linux, MacOS, and Windows, as well as on legacy operating systems, including AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris. This gives operators the ability to run a single host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS) across an entire environment.

Many organizations integrate OSSEC with a security information and event management (SIEM) system, such as Splunk, ArcSight, Elasticsearch, or QRadar, to pipe events to their security operations center (SOC). In this case, OSSEC plays the role of a log aggregator and only sends actionable information to the SIEM. This reduces data volume in the SIEM, which cuts down on noise for SOC personnel and often results in dramatic reductions in SIEM costs.

The Cloud and DevSecOps Imperative
As public cloud customers are discovering, moving to the cloud presents a host of security and compliance responsibilities for enterprise security and IT teams. While cloud providers handle hardware and infrastructure, cloud workloads themselves must be secured by the customer.

This fact is often obscured in the quest for cost savings and efficiencies of the public cloud. However, all major cloud providers publish “shared responsibility matrices” that highlight which security and compliance requirements are owned by the customer. This can be summarized nicely by Amazon as “Amazon is responsible for security and compliance of the cloud, the customer is responsible for security and compliance in the cloud.”

This leaves the enterprise with the need to bring its own security and compliance tools to the cloud. And traditional on-premise controls and network security don’t work in the perimeter-less software defined environment of the public cloud. Security must be built directly into the workload.

In this area, the cloud presents another challenge: Whatever additional security and compliance tools are added to the workload will increase the cost of cloud usage. In on-premise environments, enterprises do not need to concern themselves with the amount of computing resources consumed by their security software. In the cloud, this can cost real money.

OSSEC provides a solid foundation to meet multiple security and compliance requirements not handled by the cloud provider. It is installed directly on the workload and offers all of the same functional capabilities outlined above.

From a cost perspective, OSSEC offers two distinct advantages. First, it’s open source, so users can get started for free and without enduring long and complicated procurement processes. Perhaps more importantly, OSSEC runs in a very small footprint. When added to a cloud workload, it typically adds less than 3% overhead, which means it will have almost no impact on cloud usage costs.

Most organizations moving to the public cloud have also adopted a DevOps process with hundreds or even thousands of releases a week. To effectively secure these releases, security tools must be deployed easily using DevOps orchestration tools such as Ansible, Puppet, and Chef. OSSEC easily integrates with these tools as well as custom scripts to ensure it can be deployed with every release.

Getting Started with OSSEC
OSSEC is free and licensed under the GNU Public License. The project may be downloaded here, along with documentation, release notes, and options for commercial support and advanced functionality.

The annual OSSEC user conference will be held March 20-21 in Herndon, Virginia. The agenda includes a keynote talk from Daniel Cid, the founder of the OSSEC project, how-tos from OSSEC contributors and power users, and hands-on tutorials and workshops. Click here to learn more.

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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.

Scott Shinn is an avid advocate of open source security software and currently serves as the project manager of the OSSEC project. In addition to OSSEC, Shinn has contributed to dozens of open source projects, including substantial contributions … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/a-cloudy-future-for-ossec/a/d-id/1333927?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Attackers Continue to Focus on Users, Well-Worn Techniques

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From WannaCry and phishing to credential stuffing and cryptomining, attackers relied on many oldie-but-goodie attacks in 2018, according to a pair of new security threat reports.

Traditional attacks, such as phishing and credential stuffing, continue to dominate the threat landscape for most industries, while well-known malware, such as WannaCry, remain a threat for behind-the-curve companies, according to two annual cyberthreat reports released today.

In 2018, security firm Trend Micro detected 20.6 million phishing URLs, an increase of 82% over 2017, according to the firm’s “2018 Annual Security Roundup.” And in its Q4 2018 “Quarterly Threat” report, security firm Rapid7 found that suspicious attempts to log in were the most common attack detected by companies.

The data underscores that attackers are still focused on taking advantage of users and user accounts, says Jon Clay, director of global threat communications for security firm Trend Micro.

“We are seeing the threat actors are still targeting employees and targeting consumers with phishing attacks,” he says. “We are seeing a little more targeting in their approach, in terms of victims.”

The data from the reports presents a multifaceted view of the threat landscape that most companies face, but those threats depend a great deal on the level of maturity of a company’s security program and its industry.

For example, the utilities sector most often saw phishing attacks and attempts to compromise systems via Trojan horse programs, while most other industries typically had to deal with suspicious log-in attempts. Technology can help users make better decisions about events that could could compromise their systems.

“Most of these attacks are, if not user-driven, user-assisted,” says Tod Beardsley, director of research for Rapid7. Education and training are necessary, but not sufficient, he says. “I don’t think we want users to have to be forensic scientist to do their jobs,” he adds.

Here are some of the trends seen by Trend Micro and Rapid7 in 2018 and what they mean for 2019.

Old Attacks Still Work
Some of the most popular attacks — representing the most attack traffic detected by security firms — are older attacks. According to Rapid7, traffic containing attacks targeting the vulnerability exploited by EternalBlue and default passwords on telnet services were the most-detected attacks in 2018.

The EternalBlue exploit is most famously used by WannaCry, a self-propagating ransomware worm, that began spreading in 2017, but continues to attempt to infect other systems today.

“WannaCry is one of the top malware we are seeing every month detected through our sensors, mainly because it is a worm, and it tries to spread itself all the time,” Trend Micro’s Clay says.

Self-propagating malicious programs tend to stick around the Internet, infecting older, unpatched systems and continuing their automated spread. Conficker, for example, started spreading a decade ago, and infected systems continue to attempt to spread the program. Trend Micro detects 20,000 to 40,000 communications from those systems every month, Clay says.

Cryptomining and the Android Debug Bridge
In 2018, attackers often tried to monetize insecure systems by compromising them and installing cryptomining software to turn processing power into potential digital currency.

One key campaign targeted any Android device with an exposed service, known as the Android Debug Bridge. The attackers kicked off the operation last February, targeting Internet TV boxes (IPTV).

“It exploded in July because there was one specific mining campaign that was using it,” Rapid7’s Beardsley says. “Eventually it was blocked, in part, because IPTV was the focus of some lawsuits for piracy and not because of security.”

By December, Internet service providers started blocking the port, which hobbled the attack.

“Be mindful of new threat vectors,” Rapid7 stated in its report. “This was the first of many examples of attackers showing their skill, creativity, and flexibility when it comes to discovering and exploiting new areas of attack.”

Attackers Still Use the Front Door
By far, however, the most common types of attacks are bad actors logging into a service using stolen or commonly used credentials — “suspicious authentication” dominated the attack detections for most industries in 2018, according to Rapid7’s report. And with more than 1.5 billion working credentials in the hands of attackers, according to Rapid7 estimates, there is a lot of opportunity for attackers to just walk in the front door.

Making the situation more dire, most companies still do not require two-factor authentication (2FA) to harden their systems against credential stuffing and password guessing. As a result, such attacks still deliver acceptable risk-reward trade-offs for attackers, Rapid7’s Beardsley says.

“The status quo today is that most people have an OK password with no 2FA,” he says. “If I [as an attacker] can be very focused in my attacks, I can reach success rates that are really high with credential-based attacks — around 25%.”

The most popular default password combinations vary by service: Admin/admin is popular for Web servers, while root/123456 is popular for telnet services, according to Rapid7.

Companies should focus on consistent and frequent training of employees, adopt 2FA, and focus on the threats that are most common for their industries, the company stated in its report.

“Your humans are both your organization’s greatest assets and, unfortunately, the prime attack vector for attackers,” Rapid7 stated. “Heed the knowledge gained and reinforced about attackers relying on humans to focus on enabling your workforce to be co-defenders of your enterprise.”

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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.

Veteran technology journalist of more than 20 years. Former research engineer. Written for more than two dozen publications, including CNET News.com, Dark Reading, MIT’s Technology Review, Popular Science, and Wired News. Five awards for journalism, including Best Deadline … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/attackers-continue-to-focus-on-users-well-worn-techniques/d/d-id/1333960?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Kenna Security and Sonatype Partner for Open Source Vulnerability Intelligence

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The pairing brings Sonatype data on open source components to the Kenna Security platform.

Kenna Security and Sonatype have announced a partnership to provide risk assessment and vulnerability intelligence for open source projects. According to Sonatype research, between 80% and 90% of enterprise applications are made of open source components, and an average enterprise uses more than 150,000 open source libraries. Understanding the vulnerabilities found in those components is critical for overall enterprise security, the companies said in announcing the partnership.

The integration of the companies’ technology will enable customers to identify, prioritize, and remediate critical vulnerabilities while reducing false positives. Sonatype will provide the data on the open source components, which will be fed into the Kenna Security Platform for analysis and prioritization.