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When you prioritize speed and profit over mobile security, the business suffers — yet 32% of 600 surveyed professionals continue to make the sacrifice and compromise their information. Of these, 38% say their business is “at significant risk” from mobile threats, according to new research from Verizon.

As part of its inaugural Mobile Security Index 2018, Verizon’s Wireless Business Group conducted an independent study of people responsible for buying and managing mobile devices for their organizations. Participating businesses ranged from 250 to 10,000+ employees.

Generally, respondents are very aware that mobile is dangerous: 85% report their business faces at least a moderate risk from mobile security threats and 74% say the risks of mobile devices have increased over the past year. Only 1% said the mobile risk had gone down.

Overall, 27% of participants report that in the past year their company experienced a security incident resulting in data loss or system downtime where mobile devices played a key role. Eight percent say that if their company didn’t experience an incident like this, one of their suppliers had. Companies were more likely to suffer data loss or downtime if they had sacrificed security, respondents say.

“Most agree that there is a serious and growing threat,” says Justin Blair, executive director of Business Wireless Services at Verizon. “The key thing we’ve seen is companies don’t have best practices in place.”

The problem is, according to Blair, organizations aren’t taking even basic steps to protect themselves. Survey data indicates less than half (49%) of respondents say their company has a policy for workers’ public wifi use, and 47% encrypt sensitive data moving across open, public networks. Less than 40% change all their default passwords, and only 59% place limitations on which mobile apps their employees can download from the Internet.

Fear of Rogue Insiders is High

“Employees are the greatest risk,” Blair notes. Nearly 80% say they considered their own employees a significant threat. It’s more than fear of them losing devices; more than half (58%) of respondents worry employees will do something bad for personal or financial gain.

Businesses are most worried about losing sensitive internal information, classified company information, financial data, or personally identifiable information. Employees can compromise these resources through their company’s failure to adopt basic practices, respondents report, adding that they access work programs on insecure networks, download dangerous apps, or use weak passwords.

Overall, the majority of respondents say they lack full control over the devices their employees use. Twenty-eight percent say employee-owned laptops with wifi or mobile data are used in their business. Only 61% say they own all mobile phones used for work. Those with BYOD policies, which are still popular in the workplace, say employee-owned devices are their biggest concern.

Security training is popular but not consistent. Most (86%) of respondents train employees on security, but 59% of them only give training when someone joins the company or gets a new device. Of those who are most worried about employees, 35% give no training at all.

The Growth of Mobile and IoT Threats

Nearly 60% of respondents use IoT. Those who do are more likely to say downtime is a bigger threat than data loss. The majority (79%) say IoT is the greatest risk facing organizations. “For the most part, those IoT devices are machine-to-machine communication. Most of the time there’s no one involved in the operation of that data,” Blair points out, adding that on a smartphone, someone is more likely to recognize abnormal behavior, like if it slows down or shuts off. Because IoT devices communicate with each other, he says, it takes far longer to pick up on the signs of a potential cyberattack.

“People may not understand the magnitude of how powerful some of those devices are, but at the same time many of them go unmanned,” he continues. “In many cases it’s still new, we’re seeing IoT as a space that continues to grow.”

Blair says there is “a little bit of unknown” when it comes to mobile security threats and solutions. Businesses know the risk is there, he says, but aren’t entirely sure what do to about it. Many struggle with a lack of C-level support, perceived low threat level, lack of skills and resources, lack of budget, and lack of device user awareness, which ranked the highest as a significant barrier.

Budget is less of a problem: 61% of respondents anticipate their mobile security budget will increase in the next 12 months. Less than 40% report it will stay the same. As mobile devices become increasingly integral to peoples’ jobs, Blair anticipates the enterprise focus on mobile security will continue to grow.

“It’s always been my feeling that smartphones, tablets, and IoT devices are more and more becoming business-critical endpoints,” he says. “If every employee has a smartphone and not a laptop, the number of mobile devices will outweigh the number of non mobile devices.”

Related Content:

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• C-Suite Divided Over Security Concerns
• Vulnerabilities Broke Records Yet Again in 2017
• Rise of the ‘Hivenet’: Botnets That Think for Themselves

 Black Hat Asia returns to Singapore with hands-on technical Trainings, cutting-edge Briefings, Arsenal open-source tool demonstrations, top-tier solutions and service providers in the Business Hall. Click for information on the conference and to register.

Kelly Sheridan is Associate Editor at Dark Reading. She started her career in business tech journalism at Insurance Technology and most recently reported for InformationWeek, where she covered Microsoft and business IT. Sheridan earned her BA at Villanova University. View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/the-mobile-threat-4-out-of-10-businesses-report-significant-risk/d/d-id/1331105?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

In cybersecurity it can sometimes be hard seeing the forest for the trees. Constant reports about new attacks, breaches, exploits and threats can make it hard for stakeholders to get a picture of the full impact of cybercrime.

Two reports this week are the latest to take a crack at it.

One of the reports is from McAfee in collaboration with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). It shows that cybercrime currently costs the global economy a startling $600 billion annually, or 0.8% of the global GDP. The figure represents a 20% jump from the $500 billion that cybercrime cost in 2014.

The other report from Cisco is based on interviews with 3,600 CISOs and shows among several other things that nearly half of all attacks these days end up costing the victim at least $500,000. Eight percent of companies in the Cisco report said cyber attacks had cost them over $5 million; for 11% the costs ranged between $2.5 million and $4.9 million. The figures include direct and indirect costs such as those associated with lost revenue, customers, and lost opportunities.

Together, the two reports paint a picture of a landscape that is getting from bad to worse in a hurry.

“Cybercrime impacts economic growth. This is not an IT issue but something much bigger,” says Raj Samani, chief scientist at McAfee. “Nearly every breach focuses on attribution or the technique, but we rarely ever discuss what the real impact is,” Samani says. The net result is that many organizations continue to view cybercrime as a somewhat abstract issue. “I am constantly told ‘this does not impact me,'” Samani says. “Yet cybercrime impacts every one of us.”

As with many other reports that have attempted to calculate total cybercrime costs, the $600 billion figure in the McAfee/CSIS report is based on estimates. It represents total estimated losses due to theft of intellectual property and business confidential information, online fraud and financial crimes, personally identifiable information, financial fraud using stolen sensitive business information and other factors. Other estimates have put the number much higher, some far lower.

As the report makes clear, underreporting by victims and the overall paucity of real data surrounding cybercrime incidents worldwide have made it extremely hard to get a truly precise estimate of cybercrime costs. In many cases, organizations only report a fraction of their actual losses from cybercrime to avoid reputational damage and liability risks. So to calculate cybercrime costs, McAfee and CSIS borrowed modeling techniques that have been used previously to estimate costs associated with other criminal activities such as maritime piracy, drug trafficking, and transnational crime by organized groups.

The exercise showed that costs of cybercrime have increased significantly in recent years as the result of state-sponsored online bank heists, ransomware, cybercrime-as-a-service, and the growing use of anonymity-enabling technologies like Tor and Bitcoin, McAfee and CSIS said. Malicious activity on the Internet is at an all-time high, with some vendors reporting 80 billion malicious scans, 4,000 ransomware attacks, 300,000 new malware samples and 780,000 records lost to hacking on a daily basis, the report said.

The theft of intellectual property and business confidential information has been a huge reason for the higher cybercrime costs globally. According to McAfee and CSIS, intellectual property theft accounts for at least 25% of overall cybercrime costs. Such theft can include everything from patented formulas for paints to designs for rockets and other military technology. Over the years, the theft of IP has become a huge problem for many industries and has impacted the ability of companies to compete and to profit from their innovations. Yet, it remains one of the most underreported forms of cybercrime.

“[IP theft] is probably the most surreptitious form of data theft,” Samani says. For example, a ransomware infection is clearly obvious, and with other forms of data theft or breaches there is an obligation to report. “However IP theft and calculating the cost becomes invisible to the victim, particularly since proving that a competing product was derived from a historical breach is very difficult,” he says.

Europe appears to be the region most impacted by cybercrime, but that is likely also in part due to the maturity of the breach reporting habits of organizations there compared to other regions, Samani says.

Cisco’s report meanwhile showed that in addition to increasing financial costs, organizations are also becoming more vulnerable to attacks on their supply chain. Supply chain attacks, according to the company, have increased in complexity and frequency and have heightened the need for organizations to pay close attention to their hardware and software sources.

Enterprise security environments have become much more complex as well. Twenty-five percent of the security executives Cisco interviewed said their organizations used security products from between 11 and 20 vendors. Sixteen percent said their organizations were using between 21 and 50 products. The complexity has begun impacting enterprises’ ability to defend against threats, Cisco said.

Franc Artes, an architect in the security business group at Cisco says the new report marks the first time the company asked respondents to indicate a range of their financial loss from a security incident. In last year’s report, one-third of those who suffered a breach reported a revenue loss of 20%, he says.

Cisco’s latest survey shows that attackers are evolving their techniques faster than the ability of defenders to keep up. Troublingly, as organizations continue to leverage their operational technology (OT) infrastructure and create connectivity to these systems, the recognition of it being a vital attack vector has grown as well, Artes says.

“Nearly 70% of the respondents stated they see their OT infrastructure as an attack vector; 20% stated that while it wasn’t currently, they expected it would be in the next few years.”

Related content:

• Cybercrime Costs for Financial Sector up 40% Since 2014
• Cybercrime Costs Each Business $11.7M Per Year
• Americans Rank Criminal Hacking as Their Number One Threat
• Cybercrime Costs to Reach $8 Trillion by 2022

Black Hat Asia returns to Singapore with hands-on technical Trainings, cutting-edge Briefings, Arsenal open-source tool demonstrations, top-tier solutions and service providers in the Business Hall. Click for information on the conference and to register.

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/global-cybercrime-costs-top-$600-billion-/d/d-id/1331106?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Image Source: WICHAI WONGJONGJAIHAN via Shutterstock

Cryptocurrency mining has emerged as the new big threat for organizations worldwide.

Many cybercriminals, looking to cash in on the crypto-craze, have begun hijacking computers and using their resources secretly to mine for cryptocurrencies.

One tactic has been to install miners for popular cryptocurrencies—especially Monero—on host systems and add them to massive cryptomining botnets. Another common tactic has been to embed mining tools in websites and secretly use the computing resources of visitors to these sites to mine for Monero and other digital currencies. Research released by Imperva Tuesday also reported that 88% of all remote code execution attacks in December 2017 drove targets to cryptomining malware download sites. 

The trend has impacted individuals and business severely. Vendors have reported numerous businesses suffering major operational disruptions as a result of mining tools being installed on servers and other business systems. In a report this week, Check Point Software Technologies estimated that a staggering 23% of organizations worldwide appear to have been impacted by the Coinhive mining tool alone. The company’s list of top 10 malware threats for January 2018 includes three cryptomining tools.

Here, in no particular order, are seven of the most prolific cryptocurrency miners and botnets currently plaguing users globally.

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/7-cryptominers-and-cryptomining-botnets-you-cant-ignore/d/d-id/1331099?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

On January 12, 2018, cybersecurity firm Trend Micro revealed that Russia-linked hackers tried to infiltrate the US Senate, leveraging phishing attacks to harvest access credentials. These tactics suggest that the hackers were laying the groundwork for a widespread compromise of Senate employees. And while these findings might further bolster the public view that the Kremlin is trying to influence our democracy, security professionals should not get distracted by the media frenzy that these revelations created and instead focus on the real lessons.

By creating fake websites that were mimicking the login page for the Senate’s email server, the attackers followed a common blueprint to harvest access credentials that can later be used for lateral attacks and extraction of sensitive information. Taking advantage of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), hackers ultimately tried to gain access to systems and applications located across organizational boundaries. It’s well known, but often overlooked, that identity is the top attack vector for cybercriminals and state-sponsored attackers alike. According to Verizon’s 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report, 81% of hacker-initiated data breaches involved weak, default, or stolen passwords.

These statistics confirm that widely accepted security approaches based on bolstering a trusted network do not work. And they never will. The proof? According to analyst firm Gartner, organizations spent a combined $150 billion on cybersecurity in 2015 and 2016. Meanwhile, we’re experiencing a continuous increase in security incidents, which raises doubts about the effectiveness of these investments. During approximately the same period, 66% of organizations surveyed by analyst firm Forrester reported five or more data breaches. When conducting post-mortem analysis of the data breaches that occurred in 2017, it becomes apparent that many of these big breaches can be attributed to a longstanding failure to implement basic cybersecurity measures (e.g., multifactor authentication, or MFA), botched usage of existing security tools to streamline the mitigation of known vulnerabilities, and lack of security measures for protecting sensitive data.

Return to the Essentials of Cybersecurity
Instead of earmarking security investments for bolstering traditional perimeter defenses, which is a futile exercise, organizations must return to the essentials of cybersecurity. In doing so, they can improve their security posture and limit exposure to data breaches.

As the U.S. Senate phishing attack illustrates, weak or stolen user credentials remain the primary entry point for hackers, which is why access control is still the Achilles’ heel of many security programs, since practitioners must balance data availability with measures that prevent unauthorized usage (e.g., theft, disclosure, modification, destructions). Meanwhile, hackers often target privileged users because their accounts provide a beachhead into the entire network. Therefore, strict enforcement of well-defined access control policies and continuous monitoring of access paths to ensure they are working as intended are essential for the success of data integrity initiatives.

In this context, MFA plays an essential role in minimizing the risk of falling victim to phishing attacks. When leveraging MFA, knowing someone’s user name and password is no longer enough to assume the victim’s identity. The likelihood for the hacker to gain access to something their victim knows, something they have, and something they are, is very limited.

Rethink Security: Never Trust, Always Verify
However, MFA is just a first step in securing your organization more effectively. Today’s dynamic threat landscape requires a broader shift in an organization’s security strategy. Instead of the old adage “trust but verify,” the new paradigm is “never trust, always verify.” This Zero Trust Security model is championed by many industry leaders including Google, Forrester, and Gartner.

The basic concept of Zero Trust is that users inside a network are no more trustworthy than users outside a network. Therefore, traditional perimeter-based security approaches are inadequate. Zero Trust Security assumes that everything — including users, endpoints, networks, and resources — is always untrusted and must be verified to decrease the chance of a major breach.

Zero Trust Security assumes that untrusted actors already exist both inside and outside the network. Trust must therefore be entirely removed from the equation. Zero Trust Security requires powerful identity services to secure every user’s access to apps and infrastructure. Once identity is authenticated and the integrity of the device is proven, authorization and access to resources is granted — but with the just enough privilege necessary to perform the task at hand.

Effective Zero Trust Security requires a unified identity platform consisting of four key elements within a single security model. Combined, these elements help to ensure secure access to resources while they significantly reduce the possibility of access by bad actors. The model includes:

• Verifying the user
• Validating their device
• Limiting access and privilege
• Learning and adapting

This approach must be implemented across the entire organization. Whether giving users access to apps or administrators access to servers, it all comes down to a person, an endpoint, and a protected resource. Users include not only employees but also contractors and business partners who have access to your systems.

Ultimately, it takes Zero Trust Security to trust. But once security professionals embrace this new paradigm, it empowers their organizations and protects their customers in ways that go far beyond typical security concerns, such as enabling digital transformation, increasing data awareness and insights, and reducing existing internal silos between security, IT, DevOps, SecOps, which often lead to the blame game.

Related Content:

• 8 Nation-State Hacking Groups to Watch in 2018
• Threats from Russia, North Korea Loom as Geopolitics Spills into Cyber Realm
• White House: Russian Military Behind NotPetya Attacks

Black Hat Asia returns to Singapore with hands-on technical Trainings, cutting-edge Briefings, Arsenal open-source tool demonstrations, top-tier solutions and service providers in the Business Hall. Click for information on the conference and to register.

Tom Kemp is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Centrify Corporation, a software and cloud security provider that delivers solutions that centrally control, secure, and audit access to on-premises and cloud-based systems, applications, and devices for both end and … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/takeaways-from-the-russia-linked-us-senate-phishing-attacks/a/d-id/1331082?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

The American Trucking Associations (ATA) announced Wednesday the launch of Fleet CyWatch, a new service for members of the trucking industry to share threat information and report cybercrimes affecting fleet operations. The Fleet CyWatch program is open to motor carrier and council members of ATA, the US’s largest national trade association for the trucking industry. 

“As the industry responsible for delivering America’s food, fuel and other essentials, security is of paramount importance, particularly in an increasingly technologically connected world,” said Chris Spear, ATA president and CEO, in a statement. “Fleet CyWatch is the next logical step in our association’s and our industry’s commitment to working with law enforcement and national security agencies to keep our supply chain safe and secure.”

Fleet CyWatch was developed in conjunction with the US Federal Bureau of Investigations to improve cybercrime reporting and response and to improve motor carriers’ cybersecurity awareness and threat prevention.   

See more 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/threat-intelligence/trucking-industry-launches-info-sharing-cybercrime-reporting-service-/d/d-id/1331104?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple