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Palo Alto Networks has confirmed plans to acquire Evident.io in a $300 million cash transaction. This is the latest in a series of acquisitions within the security industry as cloud providers, network security firms, and datacenter security companies buy cloud-focused startups.

Evident.io was founded in 2013 by Justin Lundy and Tim Prendergast, both of whom will join Palo Alto as part of the acquisition. The company’s focus is on security and compliance automation and its Evident Security Platform monitors cloud deployments, assesses risk, and provides remediation guidance.

Palo Also intends to leverage Evident.io’s technology to extend its API-based security capabilities, and help organizations analyze configurations and account settings to ensure cloud deployments are both secure and compliant. Its idea is to integrate both companies’ tools into a single approach for monitoring, storage security, and compliance reporting.

“This acquisition is validation of the market’s need to adapt legacy IT security based on broad public cloud adoption,” says Threat Stack CEO Brian Ahearn. “No company is just a software company — most are also quickly becoming cloud companies.”

Security companies have been shopping for cloud startups as more businesses transfer their applications to the public cloud. Legacy security solutions don’t accommodate cloud environments, an issue driving consolidation among security providers.

Other major companies ramping up their cloud offerings through acquisitions include Trend Micro, which bought application security firm Immunio in November 2017, and McAfee, which acquired Skyhigh Networks the same month. VMware snapped up VeloCloud Networks in December. Oracle confirmed plans to purchase Zenedge in February 2018.

Read more details on the Palo Alto/Evident.io merger here.

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• 20 Cybersecurity Vendors Getting Venture Capital Love

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Managed security services provider Critical Start today announced it will acquire security analytics firm Advanced Threat Analytics. Financial details of the cash and stock deal were not disclosed.

Critical Start already has had a partnership with Advanced Threat Analytics, running its analytics platform in its security operations center.

“We have won major enterprise deals against the largest legacy MSSPs because the combination of our CyberSOC, expert analysts and the ATA platform offer our clients something unique – managed security services delivered in a completely transparent process using a mobile-first, zero trust platform,” said Rob Davis, CEO of Critical Start. “We’re excited to have the Advanced Threat Analytics employees and technology join Critical Start as they will provide clear and compelling competitive differentiation for us in the rapidly expanding market for MSSP/MDR services.”

Critical Start also plans to provide resellers the combined CyberSOC/ATA team and technology for the managed security services space.

Read more here.

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Your incident response plan probably isn’t as strong as you think it is, according to a new pool of research showing a broad gap between the perceived strength of incident response plans and their true effectiveness.

In “The Third Annual Study on the Cyber Resilient Organization,” Ponemon researchers surveyed more than 2,848 IT and IT security pros from around the world. They learned businesses continue to struggle to respond to security incidents, primarily because they lack formal incident response plans and sufficient budgets.

Nearly half (48%) of respondents rate their “cyber resilience” as high or very high, an increase from 32% one year prior. Researchers define cyber resilience as “the alignment of prevention, detection and response capabilities to manage, mitigate and move on from cyber attacks.”

However, 77% of respondents admit they don’t have a formal incident response plan applied consistently across their organization. Nearly half say their plan is informal or nonexistent.

“There’s a bit of a discrepancy,” says Ted Julian, vice president of product management at IBM Resilient. “Respondents are saying they’re feeling more confident about their cyber resilience, yet when you look at the details of the components that would create good cyber resiliency, they didn’t score nearly as well.”

These components include skilled talent, information governance practices, formal incident response plan across the business, technologies addressing the severity and volume of attacks, sufficient funding, senior management support, and visibility into data and applications.

The top reason cited for improved cyber resiliency was hiring skilled personnel (61%), followed by better information governance (60%), and visibility into data assets and applications (57%).

Yet hiring continues to be an obstacle: the inability to hire and retain skilled personnel was the second-most common barrier to cyber resilience, reported 56% of respondents. Seventy-nine percent said the importance of having skilled security pros in an incident response plan was “high” or “very high,” and 77% rated the difficulty in hiring and retaining them as very high.

Part of the reason is incident response experts need a broad range of skills. They have to know a little bit of everything: endpoint, network, operating system, the ins and outs of malware.

“It’s notoriously difficult, both to keep these people and to find them,” he says. “People with incident response skills are in extremely high demand … it’s a diverse, hard-to-find skill set that exacerbates this talent crunch.”

The largest barrier to cyber resiliency was lack of investment in new cybersecurity technologies including artificial intelligence and machine learning (60%). Julian explains how tools leveraging AI can help with “alert fatigue” so analysts can focus on more complex tasks. Some key components of incident reponse plans — checking the EDR platform, deploying URL monitoring — can all be automated, he says.

Incident Response Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All

Some will have an incident response plan that’s really thin, and it’s hard to say it does anything particularly well, says Julian. Others will try to overcompensate by including every possible scenario in one plan, in which case their strategy is unwieldy.

Different incidents require different responses. What will you do if there’s a DDoS attack? A ransomware attack? What happens in the case of a stolen laptop? Creating a separate plan for each distinct type of incident is critical.

You also must factor in everyone involved. A common mistake, especially in organizations with less mature plans, is neglecting to include third parties. If an incident occurs at a company that handles your customers’ data, you need a process to respond appropriately.

Julian emphasizes the importance of practicing plans once they’ve been developed. Fire drills and tabletop exercises, during which team members go through the motions to understand their roles and responsibilities, will prove critical in the chaos following a data breach.

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Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/77--of-businesses-lack-proper-incident-response-plans/d/d-id/1331275?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

A newly discovered malware distribution operation that has been advertising its services on underground markets since late December 2017 is the latest example of the growing maturation of cybercrime as a service.

BlackTDS is a cloud-hosted traffic distribution system (TDS) for distributing malware. Security vendor Proofpoint, which has been tracking the service for the past several weeks, describes it as lowering the entry barrier for threat actors that want to engage in drive-by attacks.

The service isn’t a completely turnkey one, since threat actors must still find a way to drive traffic to BlackTDS. “[But] it is otherwise a fairly complete solution, including social engineering for Web-based attacks that is fairly simple and inexpensive to configure and use,” says Kevin Epstein, vice president of threat operations at Proofpoint.

A TDS is designed to take traffic from different sources; filter it based on parameters such as user agent, browser, and geography; and then redirect users to various websites, depending on their profile. Malicious distribution systems like BlackTDS use the parameters to redirect users of interest to specific malicious websites and payloads instead.

“For example, an actor might want to send Australian users who click on a malicious link in an email to a banking Trojan configured with injects for Australian banks but make sure that everyone else gets ransomware,” Epstein explains.

The use of traffic distribution systems to distribute malware is not new. As far back as 2011, Symantec had reported on cybercriminals using a TDS to distribute exploit kits and malware to targets matching specific profiles. In 2016, Forcepoint reported on a threat actor using a malicious TDS dubbed BlackHat-TDS to redirect users to websites that hosted exploit kits.

As Forcepoint had noted at the time, threat actors running a TDS can set up blacklists of IP ranges to filter out traffic from security vendors and Web crawlers while ensuring traffic from ordinary users gets redirected to malware and exploits.

What makes BlackTDS different is that it is being delivered as a highly scalable, easy to deploy, and relatively inexpensive service. Threat actors can simply drive traffic to BlackTDS using spam, malicious advertisements, and other means; set up or provide access to their malware; and then let the service handle the rest of the distribution process.

“The actual redirection, filtering, and hosting of social engineering templates with connections to hosted malware or exploit kits, as well as the user-facing mechanisms behind drive-by attacks, all get handled by this single cloud-based service,” Epstein says. “All the actor needs to provide is the traffic and payload or exploit kit access.”

BlackTDS promises hosting that is difficult for researchers and sandboxes to identify and for anti-malware filters to automatically reject. BlackTDS is also relatively inexpensive, with some of its advertised services starting at $6 per day to $90 per month.

One indication of how effective BlackTDS has been so far is its use by TA505, a threat actor known for distributing ransomware and banking Trojans at massive scale. According to Proofpoint, TA505 recently used BlackTDS in a huge spam campaign designed to direct Internet users to a site selling discount pharmaceuticals.

TA505’s use of BlackTDS shows the service is quite scalable and has attracted the attention of one of the most prolific malware distributors on the Web, Epstein says. “We can only speculate on the exact implications here, but we will continue to watch for the use of BlackTDS by TA505,” he says.

For enterprises, services like BlackTDS once again reinforce the need for defenses at multiple layers such as the network layer, Web and email gateways, and endpoint devices, Epstein says. Attacks are becoming less dependent on active exploits than on user clicks, so education and training are critical as well, he says.

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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.

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Malware targeting Windows machines still dominates the threat landscape, but hackers gradually have been expanding their target range to increasingly popular Apple MacOS platforms. A team of researchers now has created an automated MacOS malware analyzer that streamlines and simplifies the process of detecting and studying the growing ecosystem of malicious code targeting Macs.

MacOS research tools typically have relied on manual analysis of malware, notes Pham Duy Phuc, a malware analyst with Netherlands-based Sfylabs BV. Phuc says he first began developing the so-called Mac-A-Mal tool while pursuing his Master’s Degree at the University of Trento in Italy.  

“There are tools for malware reverse-engineering, debugging, and malware analysis on Mac,” including commercial tools like Hopper and IDA, and open-source tools like Radare2, MachO View, lldb, Otool, and Dtrace, Phuc noted in an email interview. But these tools mostly require manual analysis, which means the researcher also must have some know-how in order to use them.

“Each tool only solves one piece of the puzzle and it depends on experience of the researcher. Using these tools manually takes too much time and effort, and will never combat malicious software,” said Phuc. “For a demand of thousands [of] malware per day, an automated framework with combination of useful tools would make malware analyst daily job easier.”

Phuc and Fabio Massacci, his former professor at the University of Trento, will demonstrate Mac-A-Mal at Black Hat Asia in Singapore next week. The two also plan to soon release the tool as open-source.

[See researchers demonstrate Mac-A-Mal live at Black Hat Asia in Singapore next week, March 22-23: conference and registration information.]

 Mac-A-Mal uses a combination of static- and dynamic code analysis to detect MacOS malware, as well as to cheat anti-analysis methods that some malware authors use to evade detection and investigation. It gathers malware binary behavior patterns, such as network traffic, evasion methods, and file operation. The tool uses kernel-level system calls, which allows it to operate undetected. “It takes actual behavioral data of malware samples, executions, inside a sandbox,” he said.

Half of Mac Malware = Backdoors

The researchers used the tool to parse some 2,000 Mac samples on VirusTotal, which led to the discovery of a previously unknown adware campaign that uses legitimate Apple developer certificates, keyloggers, and Trojans. They believe the adware operation is the handiwork of the APT32 aka OceanLotus group believed to be out of Vietnam, and it’s targeting Chinese and Vietnamese organizations.

“By studying the first generation of Mac OceanLotus samples through our framework, we found some similar behavioral signatures amongst the family. In March 2017, we found a second generation of Mac APT32 which [has a] zero-detection rate over more than 50 antivirus vendors … hunting those behaviors on VirusTotal,” he said. That new variant is more advanced, he said.

Phuc says the team also discovered hundreds of other Mac malware samples that with manual tools would be difficult to identify, and nearly half of all Mac malware collected in 2017 on VirusTotal were backdoor Trojans. The majority of malware samples were adware, mostly OSX/Pirrit and OSX/MacKeeper. “We observed a total of 86 different Mac malware families until 2017, and 49% of them belongs to backdoor/Trojan” categories, he said.

Mac-A-Mal basically works like this: it finds MacOS malware and places the samples in a sandbox where it performs static analysis on multiple samples at the same time. “The sandbox is armored with network sniffer, system calls and behavior logging, as well as anti-evasion from kernel-mode to send back a report to analysis machine,” Phuc explained.

Kernel-level monitoring has its advantages, according to Phuc. Namely it’s a more complete view from the lower level of the operating system, while at the same time keeping Mac-A-Mal under cover from anti-analysis detection. Next up for Mac-A-Mal is machine learning capabilities: “We would like to later apply more robust and advanced techniques for better features extraction from the analysis, and machine learning for a larger scale of Mac samples,” Phuc said.

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.

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Kelly Jackson Higgins is Executive Editor at DarkReading.com. She is an award-winning veteran technology and business journalist with more than two decades of experience in reporting and editing for various publications, including Network Computing, Secure Enterprise … View Full Bio

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