National Consumer Protection Week (NCPW) is March 3–9. This annual event encourages individuals and businesses to learn about their consumer rights and how to keep themselves secure. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and its NCPW partners provide free resources to protect consumers from fraud, scams, and identity theft.
An article from Privacy PC discusses the types of IP spoofing, the kinds of attacks it’s used for, and how to protect yourself against this activity. IP spoofing is the name given to what might otherwise be called IP forgery or IP fraud. It’s a process whereby an attacker uses a fake IP address to hide their identity and carry out things like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and identity thefts.
In its most recent Threat Landscape Report, cybersecurity firm Netscout reports the second half of 2018 “revealed the equivalent of attacks on steroids” with greatly increased attacks on Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Specifically, it found IoT devices are under attack five minutes after being plugged in and targeted by specific exploits within 24 hours.
ICS security company Dragos has announced a series of upcoming webinars on recent annual reports it issued.
In its just released X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, IBM summarizes the most prominent threats raised by its research teams from over the past year Some of the major shifts IBM observed include decreased reliance on malware, and on ransomware in particular, and increased numbers of cryptojacking attacks - the illegal use of an organization's or individual's computing power without their knowledge to mine cryptocurrencies - and business email compromise (BEC) scams.
In a recent article, threat analysts from Dragos respond to a series of questions they received from members of the information security and IT communities on the topic of industrial control systems (ICS) security. The analysts answered questions about the differences between IT and OT security operations skill sets, how to scan ICS environments during assessments, and the ICS threats that keep them up at night, among others.
An article from F-Secure cautions cyber attack victims from following the natural urge to turn machines off and then on. Killing the power wipes out any data stored on the RAM, which in invaluable to investigators. “Turning off the computer is like destroying evidence – evidence that can help uncover who the attackers are and what they’ve done,” says Janne Kauhanen, a member of F-Secure’s Cyber Security Services team. Instead, F-Secure recommends disconnecting all networks, including Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, and Mobile Data Network connections.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released Special Publication 1800-5, Mobile Device Security Cloud and Hybrid Builds, a guide for how organizations can secure mobile devices used for work. As observed by the guidance, while mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have enabled employees to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently, the security controls that go along with them have not kept pace with the risks they can introduce.
After a concerted attempt at responsible disclosure to the vendor who designed his power company’s website, an anonymous security researcher shares his September 2018 discovery of poor password practices. According to ArsTechnica, the researcher reached out to SEDC, an Atlanta firm that provides utility software solutions, after the troubling discovery that his power company’s website was sending plain-text passwords in-lieu of a reset for forgotten credentials.
Researchers at Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) examined five popular password managers and found that for each it was possible to extract “trivial secrets” from a locked password manager, which sometimes included the master password. Assessing the underlying functionality of 1Password, Dashlane, KeePass and LastPass on Windows 10, the researchers discovered that in some cases the master password could be found in plaintext in the computer’s memory when the password manager was locked and that they could extract the master password using standard memory forensics.
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