DDoS Attackers Revive Old Campaigns to Extort Ransom
Radware's researchers say the tactics recently observed with the attacks
launched by this particular group indicate a fundamental change in how it
operates. Previously, the operators would target a company or industry for a
few weeks and then move on. The 2020-2021 global ransom DDoS campaign
represents a strategic shift from these tactics. DDoS extortion has now become
an integral part of the threat landscape for organizations across nearly every
industry since the middle of 2020," the report states. The other major change
spotted is this threat group is no longer shy about returning to targets that
initially ignored their attack or threat, with Radware saying companies that
were targeted last year could expect another letter and attack in the coming
months. "We asked for 10 bitcoin to be paid at (bitcoin address) to avoid
getting your whole network DDoSed. It's a long time overdue and we did not
receive payment. Why? What is wrong? Do you think you can mitigate our
attacks? Do you think that it was a prank or that we will just give up? In any
case, you are wrong," the second letter says, according to Radware. "The
perseverance, size and duration of the attack makes us believe that this group
has either been successful in receiving payments or they have extensive
financial resources to continue their attacks," the report states.
Five Reasons You Shouldn't Reproduce Issues in Remote Environments
When attempting to reproduce an issue across multiple environments, one area
that teams must have solid processes around is test data management. Test data
can be critical in the reproduction of bugs in that if you don’t have the
right test data in your environment, the bug may not be reproducible. Due to
the sheer size of production data sets, teams must often work with subsets of
that data across test environments. The holy grail of test data management
processes is to allow teams to easily quickly subset production data based on
the data needed to reproduce an issue. In practice, things don’t always work
out so easily. It’s hard to know what attributes of your test data may be
influencing a specific bug. In addition, data security when dealing with PII
data can be a major challenge when subsets of data are used across
environments. Teams need to ensure that they are in compliance with corporate
data privacy standards by masking or generating new relevant data sets. Many
times it takes lots of logging and hands on investigation to uncover how data
discrepancies can cause those hard to find bugs. If you cannot easily manage
and set up test data on demand, teams will suffer the consequences when it
comes to trying to reproduce bugs in remote environments.
AI ethics: Learn the basics in this free online course
If you are interested, an excellent place to start might be the free online
course The Ethics of AI, offered by the University of Helsinki in partnership
with "public sector authorities" in Finland, the Netherlands, and the
UK. Anna-Mari Rusanen, a university lecturer in cognitive science at the
University of Helsinki and course coordinator, explains why the group
developed the course: "In recent years, algorithms have profoundly impacted
societies, businesses, and us as individuals. This raises ethical and legal
concerns. Although there is a consensus on the importance of ethical
evaluation, it is often the case that people do not know what the ethical
aspects are, or what questions to ask." Rusanen continues, "These
questions include how our data is used, who is responsible for decisions made
by computers, and whether, say, facial recognition systems are used in a way
that acknowledges human rights. In a broader sense, it's also about how we
wish to utilize advancing technical solutions." The course, according to
Rusanen, provides basic concepts and cognitive tools for people interested in
learning more about the societal and ethical aspects of AI. "Given the
interdisciplinary background of the team, we were able to handle many of the
topics in a multidisciplinary way," explains Rusanen.
Zero trust: A solution to many cybersecurity problems
CISOs of organizations that have been hit by the attackers are now mulling
over how to make sure that they’ve eradicated the attackers’ presence from
their networks, and those with very little risk tolerance may decide to “burn
down” their network and rebuild it. Whichever decision they end up making,
Touhill believes that implementing a zero trust security model across their
enterprise is essential to better protect their data, their reputation, and
their mission against all types of attackers. And, though a good start, this
should be followed by the implementation of the best modern security
technologies, such as software defined perimeter (SDP), single packet
authorization (SPA), microsegmentation, DMARC (for email), identity and access
management (IDAM), and others. SDP, for example, is an effective, efficient,
and secure technology for secure remote access, which became one of the top
challenges organizations have been faced with due to the COVID-19 pandemic and
the massive pivot from the traditional office environment to a
work-from-anywhere environment. Virtual private network (VPN) technology,
which was the initial go-to tech for secure remote access for many
organizations, is over twenty years old and, from a security standpoint, very
brittle, he says.
Comparing Different AI Approaches to Email Security
Supervised machine learning involves harnessing an extremely large data set
with thousands or millions of emails. Once these emails have come through,
an AI is trained to look for common patterns in malicious emails. The system
then updates its models, rules set, and blacklists based on that data. This
method certainly represents an improvement to traditional rules and
signatures, but it does not escape the fact that it is still reactive and
unable to stop new attack infrastructure or new types of email attacks. It
is simply automating that flawed, traditional approach – only, instead of
having a human update the rules and signatures, a machine is updating them
instead. Relying on this approach alone has one basic but critical flaw: It
does not enable you to stop new types of attacks it has never seen before.
It accepts there has to be a "patient zero" – or first victim – in order to
succeed. The industry is beginning to acknowledge the challenges with this
approach, and huge amounts of resources – both automated systems and
security researchers – are being thrown into minimizing its limitations.
This includes leveraging a technique called "data augmentation," which
involves taking a malicious email that slipped through and generating many
"training samples" using open source text augmentation libraries to create
"similar" emails.
Why Is Agile Methods Literacy Key To AI Competency Enablement?
First, quality AI is a highly iterative experimentation, design, build and
review process. Organizations that are aspiring to build strong AI and data
sciences competency centers will flounder if their core cultures are not
building agile skills into all operating functions, from top to bottom.
Given the incredible speed and uncertainties of everything becoming more
digital and smarter, the imperative for all talent to continually adapt,
reflect, and make decisions based on new information is a business
imperative. Leaders do not have the luxury to procrastinate too long before
acting on the new insights, and making decisions with confidence. Some
times, cultures can build a capacity for inaction versus action oriented
behavior. Agile leadership demands rapid precision, involving diverse
stakeholders, which in turn, yields more positive change dynamics (momentum)
and more importantly innovation capacity grows as a result of this energy
force. In a recent Harvard article, the authors pointed out that, “If people
lack the right mindset to change and the current organizational practices
are flawed, digital transformation will simply magnify those flaws.” Truly
agile organizations are able to capitalize on new information and make the
next move because they have what we call the capacity to act.
10 ways to prep for (and ace) a security job interview
Hiring managers typically look for strong technical skills and specific
cybersecurity experience in the candidates they want to interview,
particularly for candidates filling entry- and mid-level positions within
enterprise security. But managers use interviews to determine how well
candidates can apply those skills and, more specifically, whether candidates
can apply those skills to support the broader objectives of the
organization, says Sounil Yu, CISO-in-resident at YL Ventures. As such, Yu
says he and others look for “T-shaped individuals”—those with deep expertise
in one area but with general knowledge across the broader areas of business.
The candidates who get job offers are those who have, and demonstrate, both.
“Security is a multidisciplinary problem, so that depth is an important
asset,” Yu adds. Candidates love to say they’re passionate about security,
but many can’t figure out how to showcase it. Those who can, however, stand
out. Yu once interviewed a candidate via video and could see a server rack
in the background of this person’s home office. “He clearly liked tinkering
outside of work. You could see that he had tech skills and a passion for
them and a drive to learn about new technologies,” Yu says.
The changing role of IT & security – navigating remote work cybersecurity threats
The move to remote working and the complication of multiple devices and
locations is also raising the important questions related to software
licensing. Are you licensed for the apps that people are using at home, or
are you licensed on their computer in the office and on their computer at
home? Several businesses are now having to buy thousands of additional
software licenses so that employees can work on more than one computer, at a
time when cost optimisation is extremely important. One of the related
threats to businesses is running afoul of regulatory data privacy
protections like GDPR and CCPA, among others. Given the current state of
things, it is unlikely that a regulator would currently be hunting for
companies that might be improperly managing employee and customer data. It
appears regulators are largely being more lenient at this stage while
companies are busy just trying to survive. Whilst it is reasonably to
consider that, for a time, this will continue, there will come a time when
we see a return to enforcement and, in the meantime, there is no guarantee
that regulators will not review issues that come up as a result of a data
breach or loss. It’s always important to reinforce the best security
practices to your workforce, but it is especially important when your
employees are out of their normal routines.
Weighing Doubts of Transformation in the Face of the Future
You don’t have to [change], but you will be left behind. Seventy-four
percent of CEOs believe that their talent force and organization need to be
a digitally transformed organization, yet they feel like only 17% of their
talent is capable and ready to do that. That gap is glaring. That’s coming
from the tops of organizations and businesses. The first mover advantage has
kind of passed already. Now we’re getting into the phase of cloud migration
and the concept of everything-as-a-service. Digital transformation is easier
to attain. You don’t have to be the first mover or early adopter. The
companies that help you live, work, and play inside your home were pretty
resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tech, media, and fitness companies
like NordicTrack and Peloton that helped you stay inside your house, they
were the ones that needed to transform digitally immediately to deal with
the significant increase in demand along with significant supply chain
challenges. Now we are seeing other industries that saw a bit of a pause
during COVID -- consumer, travel, entertainment, energy -- those businesses
are seeing or expecting this uptick in the summer travel period, the pent-up
demand of Americans. Interest rates are very low, and they haven’t been able
to spend [as much] money for the last 12 to 18 months by the time the summer
comes around.
Good News: Cryptocurrency-Enabled Crime Took a Dive in 2020
While the total cryptocurrency funds received by illicit entities declined in
2020, Chainalysis reports, criminals continue to love cryptocurrency - with
bitcoin still dominating - because using pseudonymizing digital currencies
gives them a way to easily receive funds from victims. Cryptocurrency also
supports darknet market transactions, with many markets offering escrow
services to help protect buyers and sellers against fraud. Using
cryptocurrency, criminals can access a variety of products and services, such
as copies of malware or hacking tools, complete sets of credit card details
known as fullz, and tumbling or mixing services, which are provided by a
third-party service or technology that attempts to mix bitcoins by routing
them between numerous addresses, as a way of laundering the bitcoins.
Criminals have also been using a legitimate concept called "coinjoin," which
is sometimes built into cryptocurrency wallets as a feature. It allows users
to mix virtual coins together while paying for separate transactions, which
can complicate attempts to trace any individual transactions. Intelligence and
law enforcement agencies have some closely held ability to correlate the
cashing out of cryptocurrency with deposits that get made into individuals'
bank accounts.
Quote for the day:
"To have long term success as a coach or in any position of leadership, you have to be obsessed in some way." -- Pat Riley
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