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Biometric Authentication Seeing Wide Adoption In Businesses

According to a new report published by Spiceworks, nearly 90 percent of businesses will use some type of biometric technology for authentication by the year 2020. In fact, some 62 percent of companies already use biometrics in some form, with another 24 percent stating their intention to do so within the next two years.

The particulars break down like this:

57 percent of companies using biometric authentication use fingerprint scanners
14 percent use facial recognition
Five percent make use of hand geometry recognition
Three percent use iris scanners
Two percent use voice recognition
Two percent use palm-vein recognition

There are only a handful of companies that provide biometric solutions. Of those, Apple dominates the space, providing 34 percent of fingerprint scanning solutions and 14 percent of facial recognition solutions.

The rest of the market breaks out as follows:

Lenovo Fingerprint Manager is used by 13 percent of companies that utilize biometrics
Samsung fingerprint readers are used by 13 percent
Microsoft’s Windows Hello (face login) is used by 13 percent
Android’s Face Unlock is used by seven percent

As widespread as biometric adoption has been, only 10 percent of CIOs felt that biometric solutions were secure enough to be the sole means of authentication. IT security professionals have reached largely the same conclusion, with just 23 percent of them thinking that biometrics could replace traditional text-based passwords within the next two years.

The two biggest hurdles they see are the relative lack of transparency provided by biometric solutions providers about flaws and vulnerabilities discovered in their systems, and the lack of transparency around the biometric data collected by vendors.

Peter Tsai, a senior technology analyst at Spiceworks had this to say about the report: “Many IT professionals aren’t convinced biometrics can serve as a secure and reliable replacement for the standard username and password combo. Unless technology vendors can address the security issues and privacy concerns associated with biometrics, the technology will likely be used side-by-side in the workplace with traditional passwords or as a secondary authentication factor for the foreseeable future.”

Chili’s Is The Latest To Suffer A Credit Card Breach

Brinker International (the parent company of the Chili’s restaurant chain) formally announced that on May 11, they discovered malware on an undisclosed number of their point of sales terminals. Details are sketchy at this point, because the investigation is still ongoing, but the company had the following to say about the incident:

“If you used your payment card at a Chili’s restaurant between March and April 2018, it does not mean you were affected by this incident. However, out of an abundance of caution, we recommend that you remain vigilant and consider taking one or more steps to avoid identity theft, obtain additional information, and protect your personal information.”

Among other things, the company is recommending that all customers who have dined at a Chili’s restaurant during the period when the malware was active should contact one of the national credit reporting agencies and set up a fraud alert or a security freeze. You should, of course, also closely monitor the payment card you used, to be sure that you recognize all of the charges hitting that particular payment card.

At this point, it is unknown exactly how many Chili’s locations were impacted, nor exactly how many customer records were compromised. It could be weeks, or even months before we have those details, so the company’s recommendation is a good one.

So far, Brinker’s handling of the aftermath of the issue has been exemplary, and based on that, we have every reason to expect that they’ll continue to handle well to its conclusion. The problem is that we keep seeing successful breaches like this because the hackers are changing their tactics more quickly than company IT resources can adapt and respond to. Until and unless that changes, we’ll be treated to more reports like this.

21 Percent Of Internet Traffic Riddled With Bad Bots

How much of your website’s traffic is driven by bots? The answer may surprise you. Overall, bots account for nearly half of all web traffic. The “good” bots account for 20.4 percent, and “bad” bots account for 21.8 percent.

Hackers, scammers and fraudsters commonly use bad bots to scrape content, test stolen account credentials, issue spam, conduct digital ad fraud by generating bogus clicks, conduct brute force attacks, and mine data from competitors.

Distil Networks keeps tabs on bad bot activities in their annual “Bad Bot Report”. This year’s analysis reveals that gambling websites and commercial airline companies suffer a disproportionate percentage of bad bot attacks, with 53.1 percent of gambling traffic coming from bad bots, and 43.9 percent of airline traffic coming from bad bots.

83.2 percent of bad bot attacks are initiated via Chrome, FireFox, Internet Explorer, and Safari web browsers. 10.4 percent come from mobile browsers, with Android, Opera, and Safari Mobile being the most commonly used.

82.7 percent of bad bot traffic originates in data centers, which is up from 60.1 percent in 2016, indicating that hackers are coming to increasingly centralize and scale their efforts.

Tiffany Olson Jones, the CEO of Distil Networks had this to say about the recently published report:

“This year, bots took over public conversation as the FBI continues its investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 US presidential election and new legislation made way for stricter regulations. Yet as awareness grows, bot traffic and sophistication continue to escalate at an alarming rate. Despite bad bot awareness being at an all-time high, this year’s Bad Bot Report illustrates that no industry is immune to automated threats and constant vigilance is required in order to thwart attacks of this kind.”

While the total number of bad bot attacks continues to increase, the landscape is shifting. For the first time since the Bad Bot report has been published, Russia topped the list as the most blocked country, with 20.7 percent of companies issuing country-specific IP block requests, while China, which topped last year’s list, fell to sixth place, with 8.3 percent.

This is a problem that’s not going to go away. Continued vigilance is a must.

Beware Fake Craigslist Email Could Contain Ransomware

If you post ads on Craigslist for short term employment, be aware that there’s a new malspam campaign that aims to distribute Sigma ransomware on the computers of unwary users.

By all outward appearances, the emails seem to come from Craigslist in response to ads posted in Craigslist’s “Gigs” section for short term employment. The emails will generally express interest in whatever job the user has posted and include a protected Word or RTF document which recipients will assume are resumes.

If the recipient enters the password to unlock the document, they’ll then be presented with a screen that asks them to enable the content in the document. Unfortunately, this is the step that dooms the user. The file isn’t a resume at all, but merely a delivery vehicle.

As soon as the content is enabled, the ransomware will be installed, the user’s files will be encrypted, and then will “helpfully” post a message explaining that the files have been encrypted, and explaining that to get access to them again, they’ll have to pay a $400 fee, which rises to $800 if the user waits longer than seven days to request the decryption key.

Unfortunately, there’s no known way to decrypt Sigma-encrypted files other than paying the ransom.

This is a new twist on a very old game. Even worse, it’s enjoying a relatively high success rate because people who post ads for short term employment on Craigslist expect to get responses from people they don’t know. They expect that those people will be sending resumes for review.

The “tell” is that when a potential employee sends you a resume, it’s almost certainly not going to be password protected. In this case, your best bet would be to reply to the sending and ask them to send you a non-protected resume if they’re genuinely interested in the job.

Energy Companies Under Attack From Malware

The energy sector is in danger, and almost nobody is talking about it. This, according to a newly published report by Kaspersky Labs.

At issue are ICS (Industrial Control System) computers. Hackers are increasingly targeting them, having recently been given a robust set of tools to do so.

Recall that in 2010, Kaspersky Labs uncovered the first instances of a malicious computer worm known as “Stuxnet.” This worm was a beast. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, and all indications were that it had been created at the behest of a nation-state with deep pockets.

Its purpose was to invade PLC’s (Programmable Logic Controllers) which are essentially primitive computers used by almost every modern industry. In many ways, these rudimentary computers are what makes modern society possible. Worse, they have almost no protections in place, because until Stuxnet, no one even considered the possibility that they would be the target of an attack.

The problem is that the damage caused by attacking these controllers isn’t limited to the digital realm.

In Iran, Stuxnet was used to cause significant damage to that country’s fledgling nuclear program by causing dozens of their centrifuges to explode.

Since the code has now been in the wild for many years, variants of the worm have been developed. The fear has been that the newer, more robust variants could be used to target critical infrastructure around the world.

That now appears to be happening. According to the Kaspersky Labs report, nearly 40 percent of all analyzed ICS’s in the energy sector have been attacked at least once by malware.

So far, those attacks haven’t caused any significant damage in the physical world, but this is a simple numbers game. Sooner or later, it’s going to happen, and with tragic consequences.

Attacks on Health Organizations Increasing At Alarming Rate

It used to be the case that credit card companies and retail outlets were the primary targets of hackers around the world. Make no mistake, they still get attacked with regularity, but the hackers have found a new and even more lucrative target: Health Organizations.

According to a new report jointly produced by the Ponemon Institute and Merlin International, the medical/healthcare industry suffered nearly a quarter (23 percent) of all the data breaches that occurred in 2017. It gets worse. Those breaches exposed PHI and PII of more than five million individuals.

The reason for the shift away from credit card data to medical records comes down to profits. PHI and PII can often be sold on the Dark Web for ten times the amount that credit card information will bring. The hackers are simply obeying the laws of economics and going where the money is.

Brian Wells, the Director of Healthcare Strategy at Merlin International had this to say about the report:

“In an increasingly connected, digitally centric world, hackers have more opportunities and incentive than ever to target healthcare data, and the problem will only increase in scope over time.

Healthcare organizations must get even more serious about cyber security to protect themselves and their patients from losing access or control of the proprietary and personal information and systems the industry depends on to provide essential care.”

Worst of all, a shocking percentage of medical/healthcare companies don’t seem to be serious about cyber security at all. Although the average cost of a medical data breach is approximately four million dollars, a staggering 49 percent of companies in the industry don’t have an incident response plan of any kind. There’s no process in place to properly respond to an attack, or to mitigate the fallout if a breach occurs. These companies are sitting ducks.

New Vulnerability May Expose Encrypted Emails

Security researchers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have discovered a dangerous new email vulnerability called “Efail.” Exploiting this new email vulnerability would allow hackers to decrypt emails encrypted with either PGP or S/MIME – including emails that were sent several years earlier. Both of these encryption tools are commonly used by politicians, journalists and other professionals who need a secure means of electronic communication. Since the standards are so well established, they’re used widely and regarded as fool-proof. Sadly, that’s no longer the case.

EFF researchers had this to say about the newly discovered vulnerability:

“In a nutshell, Efail abuses active content of HTML emails (for example, externally loaded images or styles) to exfiltrate plaintext through requested URLs. The attacker changes an encrypted email in a particular way and sends this changed encrypted email to the victim. The victim’s email client decrypts the email and loads any external content, thus exfiltrating the plaintext to the attacker.”

In simpler terms, it’s about as bad as it could possibly get. Once a hacker has access to your email account, they can use the embedded HTML tags inside your mail to force your email system to decrypt those messages so the hackers can see exactly what they contain.

EFF’s recommendation is that if you rely on either PGP or S/MIME for email encryption, your best bet is to simply disable them, and uninstall the tool or tools used to decrypt those messages.

It should be noted however, that there are others in the security community who disagree with this assessment. A spokesman for ProtonMail tweeted out the following response:

“Efail is a prime example of irresponsible disclosure. There is no responsibility in hyping the store to @EFF and mainstream media and getting an irresponsible recommendation published (Disable PGP), ignoring the fact that many (Engimail, etc.) are already patched.”

Despite the divided opinion, if it’s something you’re concerned about, you can neatly side step the problem by simply opting for plain text messages, rather than using HTML-emails.

Hackers Zone In On Microsoft Products To Attack

Congratulations to Adobe Flash Player for not being the software most targeted by hackers. Security vendor “Recorded Future” has just published their annual list of the software hackers most commonly focus on when targeting computers and handheld devices for attack.

For the last several years, Adobe’s Flash Player has topped the list, but this year they have been dethroned. Microsoft now has the embarrassing honor. There are multiple Microsoft programs on this year’s list, with some of them having exploits that date back more than a decade.

It’s a shameful honor to say the least, and even worse, in this year’s report, Microsoft captured seven of the top ten places.

The most often abused security flaw this year was CVE 2017-0199. Found in a variety of Microsoft Office products, the flaw allows a hacker to embed and execute VBS (Visual Basic Scripts) that contain Powershell commands into an Office document. Recorded Future has found exploit kits for sale on the Dark Web that automate the process going for between $400 and $800.

Hot on the heels of the #1 entry is CVE 2016-0189, which is one of a whole raft of Internet Explorer vulnerabilities that allow hackers to take unfettered control of a victim’s PC, laptop, or smartphone. It is one of the reasons Microsoft has moved away from IE in preference for Microsoft Edge.

Despite this dismaying news, Recorded Future notes that attacks via exploit kit are down significantly, with a staggering 62 percent drop in new variants.

The report’s author, Scott Donnelly, had this to say:

“The observed drop in exploit kit activity overlaps with the rapid decline of Flash Player usage. Users have shifted to more secure browsers and attackers have shifted as well. Spikes in cryptocurrency mining malware and more targeted victim attacks have filled the void.”

Despite the shifting landscape, the central lesson is clear. Hackers tend to take advantage of known exploits. Companies that keep their software properly patched dramatically reduce their chances of being targeted.

More Bad News From The Equifax Breach

<img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-7903 alignleft” src=”https://www.securepc-wi.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/data-breach-equifax-resized.jpg” alt=”” width=”300″ height=”225″ />The news just keeps getting worse for Equifax. The company has already had to revise their estimates of how many people were impacted by last year’s breach more than once, and now, they’re having to revise their estimate yet again. This latest revision comes after company officials had to testify before Congress, which has been formally investigating the matter.

<strong>Prior to the release of Equifax’s latest “statement of record,” here’s a snapshot of how bad the data breach was:</strong>
<ul>
<li>5 million consumers had their Social Security numbers compromised</li>
<li>99 million consumers had address information exposed</li>
<li>3 million consumers had gender information exposed</li>
<li>3 million consumers had their phone numbers exposed</li>
<li>209,000 consumers had their credit card numbers exposed</li>
<li>97,500 consumers had their Tax Identification numbers exposed</li>
</ul>
<strong>Now, in addition to all of that, the company is adding the following:</strong>
<ul>
<li>6 million consumers had their driver’s license numbers exposed</li>
<li>12,000 had their Social Security and Taxpayer ID cards exposed</li>
<li>3200 consumers had their passports exposed</li>
<li>An additional 3000 had other documents, such as military and state ID’s compromised</li>
</ul>
As bad as it looks that the company has to keep revising their estimates upward, there’s a logical reason for it. The data that was stolen didn’t come from a single database. On top of that, the databases themselves all had highly variable structures, which has made it exceedingly difficult for forensic analysts to accurately assess the extent of the damage. All that to say, since the process is still ongoing, we may see yet another upward revision of the scope and scale of the breach.

Of course, the company is doing what most companies do in cases like these: They’re offering a year’s worth of free credit monitoring to impacted customers. The ironic part of their offer though, is the fact that Equifax is offering their own credit monitoring service free for a year, which converts to a paid monitoring service after the year is up. As Congressional officials rightly pointed out, this means that the company is essentially profiting off of its own breach, which is disturbing to say the least.

Most “Wannacry” Hacks Were On Windows 7 Machines

Last year’s Wannacry attack was bad, but in many ways, it was a self-inflicted wound. According Webroot’s recently published “Annual Threat Report,” almost all of the machines that succumbed to the Wannacry attack were running Windows 7. That attack is estimated to have caused in excess of $4 billion in total losses.

The central problem is that businesses have been much slower than individuals to make the shift from Windows 7 to the much more secure Windows 10. For example, in January 2017, only one Enterprise computer in five was running Windows 10, a figure which climbed to 32 percent by year’s end.

Contrast that with the number of Enterprise computers running Windows 7. In January 2017, a staggering 62 percent of Enterprise computers were still running Windows 7. That figure declined as the year went on, but only marginally, dropping to 54 percent by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Windows 8 was running on 5 percent of Enterprise computers in January 2017, and had dropped to 4 percent by the end of the year. Windows Vista and XP both represented a tiny fraction (less than 1 percent) of Enterprise OS’s.

Contrast that to the Windows 10 migration figures for individuals. In January 2017, 65 percent of home users had made to switch to Windows 10. By the end of the year, that figure had grown to an impressive 72 percent.

A Webroot spokesperson had this to say about the report:

“While Windows 10 won’t solve all security woes, it’s a step in the right direction. Combined with advanced endpoint protection that uses behavioral analysis and machine learning, adopting Windows 10 can greatly reduce enterprises’ vulnerability to cyber-attacks.”

All that to say, if you haven’t moved away from outdated operating systems at your company, this is yet another compelling reason to do so immediately. No matter what legacy systems you may be running that rely on old OS’s, it’s just not worth the risk.