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FBI Director Says HVEs, Domestic Extremists, and FTOs Are Most Persistent Terrorist Threat to U.S.

In testimony before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee yesterday, FBI Director Christopher Wray identified the most persistent terrorism threats to the U.S. as homegrown violent extremists (HVEs), domestic extremists, and foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs). Drawing a link between two of the groups, he explained how FTOs have made extensive use of the Internet and social media to disseminate propaganda and training materials to attract and influence individuals in the U.S., giving rise to HVEs.

OpenSMTPD Vulnerability

The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) has released information on a vulnerability affecting OpenSMTPD. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system. OpenSMTPD is an open-source server-side implementation of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) that is part of the OpenBSD Project. CISA encourages users and administrators to review CERT/CC’s Vulnerability Note VU#390745 and apply the necessary updates.

EKANS Ransomware Has Direct Implications for ICS Operations, and It May Not Be the First

Until mid-2019, previous ICS-impacting ransomware had been limited to only IT-based mechanisms that enabled the propagation into control system environments. ICS cybersecurity firm Dragos assesses the newly disclosed EKANS ransomware (also reported as SNAKE) is not the first sample with direct ICS-impacting implications.

AutomationDirect C-More Touch Panels (ICSA-20-035-01) – Product Used in the Water and Wastewater and Energy Sectors

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published an advisory on an insufficiently protected credentials vulnerability in AutomationDirect C-More Touch Panels. Firmware versions prior to 6.53 are affected. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability may allow an attacker to get account information such as usernames and passwords, obscure or manipulate process data, and lock out access to the device. AutomationDirect recommends users upgrade to version 6.53.

Over Half of Organizations Successfully Phished in 2019

According to Proofpoint’s just released State of the Phish report, 55 percent of surveyed organizations dealt with at least one successful phishing attack in 2019. The survey involved more than 600 information security professionals, who also reported a high frequency of social media engineering attempts across a range of methods. Other forms of attack reflected cyber criminals' continued focus on compromising individual end users.

New Snake Malware Adds to Increasing List of Ransomware

SentinelLabs reports it has observed a new ransomware, called “Snake,”  in targeted campaigns over the last month. According to SentinelLabs, Snake stands out among current ransomware variants for being more aggressive and more complex. Upon infection, relevant files are overwritten with encrypted data. Each modified file is also tagged with the string “EKANS” (Snake backwards). In addition, the names of modified files are appended with random characters, rather than a singular or uniform extension change.

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