Historic summit between Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin 'fruitful'
Putin has a track record of making world leaders wait for him, but on Wednesday the Russian leader arrived at the venue around half an hour early.
BUY-BACK: The risk of
continuing business during a caretaker period.
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|
FCW
April 15,
2019
Twenty-eight
members of the House Homeland Security Committee are urging appropriators to
boost cyber funding at the Department of Homeland Security above what the White
House has requested. In a letter sent to the House Appropriations Committee,
the signatories -- including Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and ranking
member Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) -- asked for a raise in the spending cap for DHS
cyber spending, saying years of flat funding levels at the department will not
be enough to "properly resource" the newly established Cybersecurity
and Infrastructure Security Agency and its mission. "We urge the committee
to break from the status quo and increase the Homeland Security Subcommittee's
302(b) allocation commensurate with the threat," the members wrote.
"It is imperative that [the allocation] enable CISA to mature and grow the
services it provides to secure federal and critical infrastructure
networks."
ADMINISTRATION
The New
York Times
April 18,
2019
In the
months before the 2016 presidential election, Russia’s military intelligence
agency penetrated computer systems in at least one Florida county government
and planted malware in systems at a manufacturer of election equipment, the
special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, said in his office’s final report on
Russian interference in the election. The report did not cite any evidence that
the breaches compromised election results in Florida or elsewhere, and said Mr.
Mueller had left further investigation of the incidents to the F.B.I. and the
Department of Homeland Security. The disclosure of the suspected breach added
to accounts of Russia’s systematic effort to access voter-registration rolls
and other election systems outlined last year by American intelligence
officials and in federal indictments. The special counsel’s report also cited
another attack on computers in Illinois, which had already been reported, while
the attack in Florida had not previously been disclosed. The penetration of the
election equipment manufacturer, identified elsewhere as VR Systems of
Tallahassee, Fla., had been known — but not that malware specifically had been
planted. The company makes electronic pollbooks and other devices that help
officials run elections, but does not make voting machines.
E&E
News
April 18,
2019
U.S. energy
regulators are pursuing a risky plan to share with electric utilities a secret
"don't buy" list of foreign technology suppliers, according to
multiple sources. The move reflects the federal government's growing concern
that hackers and foreign spies are targeting America's vital energy
infrastructure. And it's also raised new questions about the value of
top-secret U.S. intelligence if it can't get into the hands of power industry
executives who can act on it to avoid high-risk vendors. Joseph McClelland,
director of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Office of Energy
Infrastructure Security, told a Department of Energy advisory committee last
month that officials are working on "an open-source procurement list"
for utilities to use when deciding where to source their software and
equipment.
Fifth
Domain
The Air
Force is creating a cadre of specialized defensive cyber teams that will
protect critical Air Force missions and installations. These teams, known as
mission defense teams, “have got to be there on the flight team to support
mission generation” and will be “no different than the weapons troop or
avionics or crew chief,” Ted Uchida, deputy director of operations at Air
Combat Command, said April 11 at an event at Langley Air Force Base. The teams
are an outgrowth of the service’s communications squadrons, which in the past
performed much of the IT and cyber defense at the base or wing level. The new
crews differ from the cyber protection teams that the Air Force, and other
services, provide to U.S. Cyber Command. They are made possible, in part,
because the Air Force is outsourcing the more mundane tasks of IT management on
installation’s to industry, freeing these folks to focus on cyber defense.
Already, Air Force officials see a need for this skillset. For example, certain
mission defense teams could be assigned to defend the avionics in a fighter jet
from malware. Uchida said one Air Force staffer recently discovered malware on
the memory loader verifier on an F-16 leading officials to ask how it got there
and whether it penetrated the aircraft’s primary system. This incident sparked
discussions about how to build up of mission defense teams that could focus on
protecting weapon systems.
Nextgov
April 16,
2019
When it
comes to website security, the federal government is doing something right.
U.S. government websites outscored sites from all other sectors in an online
trust audit released Tuesday which recognizes excellence in data security,
consumer protection and responsible privacy practices. “To put the audit
findings in context, almost every sector improved its security and privacy
practices, and the record scores reflect that,” Technical Director of the
Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance Jeff Wilbur said in a statement. “The
U.S. government in particular made stunning improvements, from near last in 2017
to top of the class in 2018.” The tenth annual Internet Society’s Online Trust
Audit and Honor Roll reviewed more than 1,200 consumer-facing websites to
identify organizations that place a premium on security and privacy—as well as
those that can do better. OTA’s report said the federal government category
“surged to the front” of the list, with 91 percent of sites placing on the
honor roll. It’s a “dramatic turnaround” from last year when government sites
bottomed out at 39 percent recognition on the honor roll list.
FCW
April 16,
2019
The federal
government's top IT security chief floated the possibility of new regulations
to shore up protections and transparency in the technology supply chain and
canvassed industry for feedback. While speaking at a cybersecurity event in
Virginia hosted by the Intelligence National Security Alliance, Federal Chief
Information Security Officer Grant Schneider questioned whether the U.S.
government and suppliers have even worked out a successful model to weigh
security risks in purchasing and acquisition. Such a model, he said, would
naturally lead individuals, the private sector and federal agencies to
discriminate against low-cost, low-security parts and components in favor of
costlier, more secure ones. "We're very much looking for feedback on how
we do market incentives, where we can focus in the federal government, because
I don't believe that the free market is necessarily going to get us there in
cybersecurity," Schneider said. "At least, it's not going to get us
there fast enough."
CyberScoop
April 16,
2019
A revamped
policy framework for offensive U.S. cyber operations is much quicker than its
predecessor and has yielded “operational success,” a top White House
cybersecurity official said Tuesday. Last August, President Donald Trump
rescinded the Obama-era policy, known as Presidential Policy Directive 20,
which governed U.S. hacking operations, and replaced it with the new framework.
Critics said PPD-20’s intricate interagency process unnecessarily delayed
offensive operations, while advocates called it an important mechanism for
accounting for all of the potential repercussions of a cyberattack. The new
structure “gives more authority to the people who need to actually make those
decisions” about offensive operations, Grant Schneider, the federal information
security officer, said at an event hosted by the nonprofit Intelligence and
National Security Alliance. U.S. officials are focused on ensuring that the
Pentagon “has the tools available to leverage offensive cyber capabilities,” he
added. The remarks from Schneider, the National Security Council’s top
defensive-focused cybersecurity official, were some of his most extensive yet
on the new policy and legal framework for green-lighting government
cyberattacks.
TechCrunch
A hacker
group has breached several FBI-affiliated websites and uploaded their contents
to the web, including dozens of files containing the personal information of
thousands of federal agents and law enforcement officers, TechCrunch has
learned. The hackers breached three sites associated with the FBI National
Academy Association, a coalition of different chapters across the U.S.
promoting federal and law enforcement leadership and training located at the
FBI training academy in Quantico, VA. The hackers exploited flaws on at least
three of the organization’s chapter websites — which we’re not naming — and
downloaded the contents of each web server. The hackers then put the data up
for download on their own website, which we’re also not naming nor linking to
given the sensitivity of the data. The spreadsheets contained about 4,000
unique records after duplicates were removed, including member names, a mix of
personal and government email addresses, job titles, phone numbers and their
postal addresses.
INDUSTRY
Infosecurity
Magazine
April 19,
2019
The Weather
Channel, based in Atlanta, Georgia, has been hit with a cyber-attack that
knocked it off the air for 90 minutes. On April 18, 2019, the
organization took to its Twitter channel to confirm that it had been hit by a
"malicious software attack" on its network but as of press time
hasn't released any specifics on the attack itself. When the AMHQ show should
have started, viewers saw taped programming, Heavy Rescue. AMHQ's Twitter feed
also confirmed that it was "experiencing technical difficulties."
Around 90 minutes later, the show returned with its anchors informing of the
cyber incident. "The Weather Channel, sadly, has been the victim of a
malicious software attack today," said anchor Jim Cantore.
CyberScoop
April 18,
2019
Facebook
confirmed Thursday that password credentials belonging to millions of Instagram
users were stored in an insecure format. The company quietly updated a blog
post first published March 21 to say millions of Instagram passwords, not tens
of thousands as initially stated, were stored in a readable format accessible
by company employees dating back to 2012. The social media company did not
specify how many millions of users were affected. “We will be notifying these
users as we did the others,” the company said in its update. “Our investigation
has determined that these stored passwords were not internally abused or
improperly accessed.” Facebook last month said an internal investigation had
determined that hundreds of millions of users’ passwords were stored in a
format that could have allowed employees to view them. More than 20,000
employees could have accessed information about between 200 million and 600
million users, KrebsOnSecurity reported at the time.
Axios
April 18,
2019
After years
of dire warnings about hackers wreaking havoc on computers that run physical
processes in factories and infrastructure, you’d think industrial firms would
already have their top cybersecurity officers running cybersecurity at their
plants. Today, that’s the case for only 35% of big facilities — but the
situation is finally changing. According to a 2018 Gartner report, only 35% of
firms had the chief information security officer's (CISO) department or an equivalent
in charge of their industrial networks — often referred to as operational
technology (OT) as opposed to business systems, the traditional IT. But that
number is projected to double by 2021. It's a huge trend in just the last 18
months,” said Amit Yoran, CEO of Tenable and the former director of Homeland
Security’s United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team.
Vice
Motherboard
April 18,
2019
On July 5,
2015, a vigilante hacker known as Phineas Fisher posted online more than 400
gigabytes of internal data stolen from the servers of the infamous European
spyware vendor Hacking Team. That embarrassing breach sparked a slow decline
for the company, with key employees leaving, and other companies taking over
the market. Four years later, despite the influx of cash from a mysterious
Saudi Arabian investor, and what appeared to be a slow but steady recovery,
Hacking Team is no more. At the beginning of April, Swiss-Italian company
InTheCyber announced that it had acquired a majority stake into Hacking Team,
and that it was merging the two companies into a new one called Memento Labs.
The goal, according to the new owner of the company, Paolo Lezzi, is to
rebuild. That’s why, when we asked if he was worried Phineas Fisher could come
back, he laughed. “Right now there’s not much damage to make,” Lezzi said in a
phone call. “The company was compromised, and it’s in a tough situation.”
Ars Technica
April 17,
2019
The wave of
domain hijacking attacks besetting the Internet over the past few months is
worse than previously thought, according to a new report that says
state-sponsored actors have continued to brazenly target key infrastructure
despite growing awareness of the operation. The report was published Wednesday
by Cisco’s Talos security group. It indicates that three weeks ago, the
highjacking campaign targeted the domain of Sweden-based consulting firm Cafax.
Cafax’s only listed consultant is Lars-Johan Liman, who is a senior systems
specialist at Netnod, a Swedish DNS provider. Netnod is also the operator of
i.root, one of the Internet’s foundational 13 DNS root servers. Liman is listed
as being responsible for the i-root. As KrebsOnSecurity reported previously,
Netnod domains were hijacked in December and January in a campaign aimed at
capturing credentials. The Cisco report assessed with high confidence that
Cafax was targeted in an attempt to re-establish access to Netnod
infrastructure.
AP
April 17,
2019
Keir Giles’
first thought was that the man’s cheap-looking suit didn’t seem right for a
private equity executive. The man seated in front of him at the London hotel
claimed to live in Hong Kong, but didn’t seem overly familiar with the city.
Then there was the awkward conversation, which kept returning to one topic in
particular: the Russian antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab. He also asked Giles to
repeat himself or speak louder so persistently that Giles said he began
wondering “whether I should be speaking into his tie or his briefcase or
wherever the microphone was.” “He was drilling down hard on whether there had
been any ulterior motives behind negative media commentary on Kaspersky,” said
Giles, a Russia specialist with London’s Chatham House thinktank who often has
urged caution about Kaspersky’s alleged Kremlin connections. “The angle he
wanted to push was that individuals — like me — who had been quoted in the
media had been induced by or motivated to do so by Kaspersky’s competitors.”
The Associated Press has learned that the mysterious man, who said his name was
Lucas Lambert, spent several months last year investigating critics of Kaspersky
Lab, organizing at least four meetings with cybersecurity experts in London and
New York.
CyberScoop
April 17,
2019
A hacking
campaign that targeted victims around the world used Blogspot, Pastebin and the
link-shortening service Bit.ly to carry out its attacks, according to research
published Wednesday by the security vendor Palo Alto Networks. Palo Alto’s Unit
42 research group in March uncovered what it has called the Aggah campaign, a
digital crime spree focused on organizations in the U.S., Middle East, Europe
and throughout Asia. The group distributes malicious macro-enabled documents
which rely on Blogspot posts and multiple Pastebin posts for a
command-and-control infrastructure. Researchers suggested the hacking campaign
originated with the Gorgon Group, a collective that’s carried out a string of
attacks from Pakistan over the past year, though Unit 42 said it’s too soon to
directly attribute the Gorgon Group with any level of certainty.
“Unfortunately, our current data set does not afford insight into the
attackers’ motivation other than to compromise a large number of victims,” Unit
42 stated in a blog post Wednesday. “While a lot of this activity behaviorally
appears to be potentially related to the Gorgon Group’s criminal activity, it
is currently unclear and requires additional analysis to prove.”
Reuters
April 16,
2019
Indian IT
services firm Wipro Ltd said on Tuesday some of its employee accounts may have
been hacked due to an advanced phishing campaign and that the company had
launched an investigation to contain any potential impact. The Bengaluru-based
company was responding to a Reuters query after cyber security blog
KrebsOnSecurity said Wipro's systems had been breached and were being used to
launch attacks against some of its clients. KrebsOnSecurity, citing anonymous
sources, said Wipro's systems were being used to target at least a dozen
customer systems. "We detected a potentially abnormal activity in a few
employee accounts on our network due to an advanced phishing campaign,"
Wipro said in an emailed statement. The company also said it had retained an
independent forensic firm to assist in the investigation. Wipro did not say
which clients, if any, had been compromised.
Wired
April 15,
2019
On Friday,
Microsoft sent notification emails to an unknown number of its individual email
users—across Outlook, MSN, and Hotmail—warning them about a data breach.
Between January 1 and March 28 of this year, hackers used a set of stolen
credentials for a Microsoft customer support platform to access account data
like email addresses in messages, message subject lines, and folder names
inside accounts. By Sunday, it acknowledged that the problem was actually much
worse. After tech news site Motherboard showed Microsoft evidence from a source
that the scope of the incident was more extensive, the company revised its
initial statement, saying instead that for about 6 percent of users who
received a notification, hackers could also access the text of their messages
and any attachments. Microsoft had previously denied to TechCrunch that full
email messages were affected. It may seem odd that a single set of customer
support credentials could be the keys to such a massive kingdom. But within the
security community, customer and internal support mechanisms are increasingly
seen as a potential source of exposure. On the one hand, support agents need
enough account or device access to be able to actually help people. But as the
Microsoft incident shows, too much access in the wrong hands can cascade into a
dangerous situation.
The New
York Times
April 15,
2019
Within days
of a cyberattack, warehouses of the snack foods company Mondelez International
filled with a backlog of Oreo cookies and Ritz crackers. Mondelez, owner of
dozens of well-known food brands like Cadbury chocolate and Philadelphia cream
cheese, was one of the hundreds of companies struck by the so-called NotPetya
cyberstrike in 2017. Laptops froze suddenly as Mondelez employees worked at
their desks. Email was unavailable, as was access to files on the corporate
network. Logistics software that orchestrates deliveries and tracks invoices
crashed. Even with teams working around the clock, it was weeks before Mondelez
recovered. Once the lost orders were tallied and the computer equipment was
replaced, its financial hit was more than $100 million, according to court documents.
After the ordeal, executives at the company took some solace in knowing that
insurance would help cover the costs. Or so they thought. Mondelez’s insurer,
Zurich Insurance, said it would not be sending a reimbursement check. It cited
a common, but rarely used, clause in insurance contracts: the “war exclusion,”
which protects insurers from being saddled with costs related to damage from
war. Mondelez was deemed collateral damage in a cyberwar.
Ars Technica
April 13,
2019
Over the
past three weeks, a trio of critical zeroday vulnerabilities in WordPress
plugins has exposed 160,000 websites to attacks that allow criminal hackers to
redirect unwitting visitors to malicious destinations. A self-proclaimed
security provider who publicly disclosed the flaws before patches were
available played a key role in the debacle, although delays by plugin
developers and site administrators in publishing and installing patches have
also contributed. Over the past week, zeroday vulnerabilities in both the Yuzo
Related Posts and Yellow Pencil Visual Theme Customizer WordPress plugins—used
by 60,000 and 30,000 websites respectively—have come under attack. Both plugins
were removed from the WordPress plugin repository around the time the zeroday posts
were published, leaving websites little choice than to remove the plugins. On
Friday (three days after the vulnerability was disclosed), Yellow Pencil issued
a patch. In-the-wild exploits against Social Warfare, a plugin used by 70,000
sites, started three weeks ago. Developers for that plugin quickly patched the
flaw but not before sites that used it were hacked. All three waves of exploits
caused sites that used the vulnerable plugins to surreptitiously redirect
visitors to sites pushing tech-support scams and other forms of online graft.
INTERNATIONAL
POLITICO
April 18,
2019
Special
counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report hammered home a crucial reminder
Thursday: The Kremlin mounted a massive online campaign to wreak havoc on U.S.
democracy in 2016. It also underscored the urgency of fixing the nation’s election
security gaps before 2020 — a task that state and local governments have been
slow to take on. "The Russian government interfered in the 2016
presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion," Mueller wrote
in the 448-page document, which lays out new details about a Kremlin-backed
plot that compromised Democrats' computer networks and targeted state and local
election offices. Mueller wrote that investigators also found evidence of
repeated communications — but not "coordination" — between associates
of then-candidate Donald Trump and people claiming to have damaging information
on Hillary Clinton. The report says one attack — the first attempt by Russia's
military intelligence service to compromise Clinton's personal office — came
within about five hours of Trump publicly asking "Russia, if you're
listening," to find 30,000 emails that had been deleted from the former
secretary of state's infamous personal email server.
Wired
April 18,
2019
Nearly
three years after the mysterious group called the Shadow Brokers began
disemboweling the NSA's hackers and leaking their hacking tools onto the open
web, Iran's hackers are getting their own taste of that unnerving experience.
For the last month, a mystery person or group has been targeting a top Iranian
hacker team, dumping their secret data, tools, and even identities onto a
public Telegram channel—and the leak shows no signs of stopping. Since March
25, a Telegram channel called Read My Lips or Lab Dookhtegan—which translates
from Farsi as "sewn lips"—has been systematically spilling the
secrets of a hacker group known as APT34 or OilRig, which researchers have long
believed to be working in service of the Iranian government. So far, the leaker
or leakers have published a collection of the hackers' tools, evidence of their
intrusion points for 66 victim organizations across the world, the IP addresses
of servers used by Iranian intelligence, and even the identities and
photographs of alleged hackers working with the OilRig group.
AFP
April 16,
2019
Ecuador
said on Monday it has suffered 40 million cyber attacks on the webpages of
public institutions since stripping Wikileaks founder Julian Assange of
political asylum. Patricio Real, Ecuador's deputy minister for information and
communication technologies, said the attacks, which began on Thursday, had
"principally come from the United States, Brazil, Holland, Germany,
Romania, France, Austria and the United Kingdom," as well as from the
South American country itself. Assange was arrested and carried out of
Ecuador's embassy in London on Thursday after President Lenin Moreno removed
his diplomatic protection following seven years of self-imposed exile in the
building. Moreno accused Assange of interfering in the "processes of other
states" and "spying."
ZDNet
April 16,
2019
In a
document published today, the European Commission has revealed that they don't
have any actual evidence of Kaspersky software being used for spying on behalf
of the Russian government, as the US government alluded in 2017. The document
was the Commission's reply to a series of questions submitted by Gerolf
Annemans, a European Parliament member on behalf of Belgium, in March this
year. The questions were related to a motion the European Parliament voted in
June 2018 that put forward a general strategy and guidelines for an EU-wide
joint plan on cyber defense. The document advised EU states to exclude and ban
programs and equipment that have been "confirmed as malicious,"
naming Kaspersky as the only example.
Reuters
April 15,
2019
Belgium's center for cybersecurity has found no evidence that telecoms
equipment supplied by Huawei Technology could be used for spying. The agency,
which reports to the Belgian prime minister, had been tasked with analyzing the
possible threat posed by Huawei, which supplies equipment to Belgian mobile
operators Proximus, Orange Belgium and Telenet. "Until now we have not
found technical indications that point in the direction of a spying
threat," a spokesman for the agency said on Monday. "We are not providing
a final report on the matter, but are continuing to look into it."
Computer Weekly
April 15,
2019
The
National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), together with Wayra UK, has launched a
national call for 10 startups to join its accelerator programme to develop the
next generation of cyber security products. Since its launch in 2017, the
government-funded NCSC Cyber Accelerator has mentored and supported the growth
of technology startups, with previous participants securing more than £20m in
funding. One of the main aims of the NCSC Accelerator is helping entrepreneurs
to get into the market and helping the market identify good solutions to real
problems. For this fourth cohort of startups, the accelerator is focusing on
projects aimed at enhancing cyber security through anticipating the early
stages of a cyber attack and enabling action to be taken on real-time threats,
vulnerability information and other intelligence.
Reuters
April 15,
2019
The United
States will push its allies at a meeting in Prague next month to adopt shared
security and policy measures that will make it more difficult for China's
Huawei to dominate 5G telecommunications networks, according to people familiar
with the matter and documents seen by Reuters. The event and broader U.S.
campaign to limit the role of Chinese telecommunications firms in the build out
of 5G networks comes as Western governments grapple with the national security
implications of moving to 5G, which promises to be at least 100 times faster
than the current 4G networks. The issue is crucial because of 5G's leading role
in internet-connected products ranging from self-driving cars and smart cities
to augmented reality and artificial intelligence. If the underlying technology
for 5G connectivity is vulnerable then it could allow hackers to exploit such
products to spy or disrupt them. The United States has been meeting with allies
in recent months to warn them Washington believes Huawei's equipment could be
used by the Chinese state to spy. Huawei Technologies Co Ltd has repeatedly
denied the allegations.
TECHNOLOGY
Nextgov
April 18,
2019
Mobile
devices and the internet are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in American
society, offering more connectivity than ever before. But as those technologies
grow more prevalent, researchers say a new divide is emerging between people
who can identify and mitigate possible cybersecurity threats and those who
cannot. ‘Underserved’ people—including foreign language speakers, senior
citizens, and low-income residents—face “higher-than-average risks” of falling
victim to cyber attacks compared to their better-served counterparts, according
to a report released this week by the University of California, Berkeley Center
for Long-Term Cybersecurity. “This cybersecurity gap is a new ‘digital divide’
that needs to be addressed—with urgency—by the public and private sectors
alike,” wrote Ahmad Sultan, who led the study. “The report is intended to help
city leaders understand how they could better understand this issue in their
own cities, and how they might forge public-private partnerships to address
cybersecurity concerns at the system level.”
