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Online safety is hard enough for most adults. We reuse weak passwords, we click on suspicious links, and we love to share sensitive information that should be kept private and secure. (Just go back a few months to watch adults gleefully sharing photos of their vaccine cards.) The consequences of these failures are predictable and, for the most part, proportional—a hacked account, a visit to a scam website, maybe some suspicious texts asking for money.

But for an often-ignored segment of the population, online safety is more about discerning lies from truth and defending against predatory behavior. These are the threats posed specifically to children with special needs, who, depending on their disabilities, can have trouble understanding emotional cues and self-regulating their emotions and their relationship with technology.

This year, for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Malwarebytes Labs spoke with Alana Robinson, a special education technology and computer science teacher for K–8, to learn about the specific online risks posed to special needs children, how parents can help protect their children with every step, and how teachers can best educate special needs children through constant reinforcement, “gamification,” and tailored lessons built around their students’ interests.

Importantly, Robinson said that special needs education for online safety is not about a handful of best practices or tips and tricks, but rather a holistic approach to equipping children with the broad set of skills they will need to safely navigate any variety of risks online.

“Digital citizenship, information literacy, media literacy—these are all topics that need to be explicitly taught [to children with special needs],” Robinson said. “The different is, as adults, we think that you should know this; you should know that this doesn’t make sense.”

Whether adults actually know those things, however, can be disputed.

“I mean, as I said,” Robinson added, “it is also challenging for adults.”

Our full conversation with Robinson, which took place on our podcast Lock and Code, with host David Ruiz, can be listened to in full below.

The large risk of disinformation and misinformation

The risks posed to children online are often similar and overlapping, no matter a child’s disability. Cyberbullying, encountering predatory behavior, interacting with strangers, and posting too much information on social media platforms are all legitimate concerns.

But for children with behavioral challenges, processing challenges, and speech and language challenges in particular, Robinson warned about one enormous risk above all: The risk of not being able to discern fact from fiction online.

“Misinformation and disinformation online [are] a great threat to our students,” Robinson said. “There were many times [my students] would come in and say ‘I saw this online’ and we would get into discussions because they were pretty adamant that what they saw is correct.”

Those discussions have increased dramatically in frequency, Robinson said, as her students—and children all over the world—watch videos at an impossibly fast rate on platforms like YouTube, which, according to the company’s 2017 statistics, streams more than one billion hours of video a day. That video streaming firehose becomes a problem when those same platforms have to consistently play catch-up to stop the wildfire-like spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories online, as YouTube just did last week when it implemented new bans on vaccine misinformation.

“I have students pushing back and telling me, no, we never landed on the moon, that’s fake,” Robinson said. “These are the things they’re consuming on these platforms.”

To help her students understand how misinformation can spread so easily, Robinson said she shows them how it can be daylight outside her classroom, but at the same time, if she wanted, she could easily post a video online saying that it is instead nighttime outside her classroom.

Robinson said she also encourages her students to ask if they’re seeing these claims made elsewhere, and she steers them to what are called “norm-based reputable sources”—trustworthy websites that can provide fact-checks while also removing her students from the progression of recommended online videos that are fed to them through algorithms that prioritize engagement above all else.

“This is what we call building digital habits,” Robinson said, emphasizing the importance of digital literacy in today’s world.

Constant reinforcement

The promise of a “solution” to misinformation and disinformation online almost feels too good to be true, whether that solution equips special needs children with the tools necessary to investigate online sources or whether it helps adults without special needs defend against hateful content that is allegedly prioritized by one enormous technology company to boost its own profits.

So, when Robinson was asked directly as to whether these teaching models work, she said yes, but that the models require constant reinforcement from many other people in a child’s life.

Comparing digital literacy education to math education, Robinson said that every single year, students revisit the topics they learned the year before. She called this return to past topics “spiraling.”

“Part of developing digital students into really successful, smart, discernible, digital adults is the ongoing, constant spiraling and teaching of these concepts,” Robinson said. “If you can collaborate with other content area educators in your building, you’re infusing these topics through subject areas.”

Essentially, Robinson said, teaching online safety and cybersecurity to special needs children needs to be the responsibility of more than just a single technology teacher. It needs to be taken on by several subject matter educators and by parents at home.

For parents who want to know how they can help out, Robinson suggested finding teaching moments in everyday, common mistakes. If a parent themselves falls for a phishing scam, Robinson said those same parents can take that as an opportunity to teach their children about spotting online scams.

“It’s an ongoing work and it never stops,” Robinson said.

Teach kids about what they like using

To help special needs children understand and take interest in online safety education, Robinson said she always pays attention to what her students are using and what they’re interested in. This simple premise makes lessons both applicable and interesting to all students—not just those with special needs—and it provides a way for children to immediately understand what they’re learning, why they’re learning it, and how it can be applied.

As an example, since so many of her students watch videos on TikTok, Robinson spoke to her students last year about the US government’s reported plans to ban the enormously popular app.

“The federal government was thinking of not allowing TikTok to be used here because it might’ve been a safety risk, and so we had that discussion, and I said ‘What happens if you couldn’t use TikTok anymore?’” Robinson said.

Robinson said this tailored approach also gives teachers and parents an opportunity to help kids not just stay safe online, but also learn about the tools they use every day to view online content. The tools themselves, Robinson said, can greatly impact how a child with special needs feels on any given day—sad, happy, worried, scared, anything goes—and that children with special needs can often use guidance in self-regulating and understanding their own emotions.

Robinson added that many of her lessons about online tools and platforms have a similar message: If a game or website or tool makes her students feels uncomfortable, they should tell an adult.

It’s a rule that could likely help even adults when they find themselves gearing up to get into an online argument for little legitimate reason.

Embrace the game

Finally, Robinson said that many of her students enjoy using online games to learn about online safety, and she specifically mentioned Google’s Internet safety game called “Interland,” which parents can find here.

Google’s Interland leads kids through several short “games” on online safety, with lessons centered around the topics of “Share with Care,” “It’s Cool to Be Kind,” and “Don’t Fall for Fake.” The browser-based games ask kids to go through a series of questions with real scenarios, and each correct answer earns them points while their digital character jumps from platform to platform. The website works with most browsers, but Malwarebytes Labs found that it ran most smoothly on Google Chrome and Safari.

Interestingly, when it comes to lessons that Robinson’s special needs students excel at, she said they are excellent at creating strong passwords—and at calling people out for using weak ones.

“I teach 100 students, 10 classes, [and] I used not a very strong password for every student in this one class … and I said ‘By the way, everyone has this [password],’ and they’re like, when I said everyone has this same password, they’re like ‘Oh no no! That’s not a strong password, oooh,’” Robinson said, laughing. “They literally let me have it.”

The post What special needs kids need to stay safe online appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Update, 7th October: Twitch has now confirmed the breach. The company’s statement is as follows:

We have learned that some data was exposed to the internet due to an error in a Twitch server configuration change that was subsequently accessed by a malicious third party.

At this time, we have no indication that login credentials have been exposed. We are continuing to investigate.

Additionally, full credit card numbers are not stored by Twitch, so full credit card numbers were not exposed.

Original post:

Big, breaking news going around at the moment. If you have a Twitch account, you may wish to perform some security due diligence. There are multiple reports of the site being compromised. And they absolutely do mean compromised:

There’s still no independent verification from Twitch itself yet. However, multiple people have confirmed that the leak details, which include streamer revenue numbers, match what they have in fact generated.

What has happened?

A 128GB torrent was released on the 4chan message board. The poster claims it incorporates all of Twitch including

• Source code for desktop, mobile, and console clients
• 3 years of creator payouts
• Some form of unreleased Steam competitor
• Various bits of data on several Twitch properties
• Internal security tools

The leak is marked as “part 1”. The current data appears to contain nothing in the way of passwords or related data, but that potentially may be included in whatever comes next. This is something we may well find out from Twitch if and when it makes a statement.

In the meantime, we’d strongly suggest taking some proactive steps.

What should Twitch users do?

Log into your Twitch account and change your password to something else. If you’ve used the password on other services then you need to change them there too. Then enable two-factor authentication on Twitch, if you’re not already using it.

One small possibility against the leaking of passwords is there’s not been any visible “strange” activity from big name accounts. One would assume all sorts of dubious message shenanigans would follow in the wake of such a data grab. However, it’s possible that stolen passwords are being kept under lock and key until any such “Part 2” arrives.

This makes it all the more crucial to take some action now and start locking things down.

We’ll be updating this post with more information as we get it, so if you’re a Twitch user please feel free to check back every so often.

The post Twitch compromised: What we know so far, and what you need to do appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

The Apache HTTP Server 2.4.49 is vulnerable to a flaw that allows attackers to use a path traversal attack to map URLs to files outside the expected document root. If files outside of the document root are not protected by “require all denied” these requests can succeed. This issue is known to be exploited in the wild.

The vulnerability

The Apache HTTP Server Project started out as an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems, including UNIX and Windows. It provides a secure, efficient, and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.

The flaw (listed as CVE-2021-41773) was introduced by a change made to path normalization in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.49. So, earlier versions are not vulnerable, nor are servers that are configured to “require all denied”.

Unfortunately, “require all denied” is off in the default configuration. This is the setting that typically shows an error that looks like this:

“Forbidden. You don’t have permission to access {path}.”

Path traversal attack

Path traversal attacks are done by sending requests to access backend or sensitive server directories that should be out of reach for unauthorized users. While normally these requests are blocked, the vulnerability allows an attacker to bypass the filters by using encoded characters (ASCII) for the URLs.

Using this method an attacker could gain access to files like cgi scripts that are active on the server, which could potentially reveal configuration details that could be used in further attacks.

Impact

The Apache HTTP Server Project was launched in 1995, and it’s been the most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996. In August 2021 there were some 49 million active sites running on Apache server. Obviously we do not know which server every domain is using, but of the sites where we can identify the web server, Apache is used by 30.9%.

A Shodan search by Bleeping Computer showed that there are over a hundred thousand Apache HTTP Server 2.4.49 deployments online, many of which could be vulnerable to exploitation.

Security researchers have warned that admins should patch immediately.

Another vulnerability

There’s a second vulnerability tackled by this patch—CVE-2021-41524—a null pointer dereference detected during HTTP/2 request processing. This flaw allows an attacker to perform a denial of service (DoS) attack on the server. This requires a specially crafted request.

This flaw also only exists in Apache Server version 2.4.49, but is different to the first vulnerability in that, as far as we know, it is not under active exploitation. It was discovered three weeks ago, fixed late last month, and incorporated now in version 2.4.50.

Mitigation

All users should install the latest version as soon as possible, but:

• Users that have not installed 2.4.49 yet should skip this version in their update cycle and go straight to 2.4.50.
• Users that have 2.4.49 installed should configure “require all denied” if they do not plan to patch quickly, since this blocks the attack that has been seen in the wild.

A full list of vulnerabilities in Apache HTTP Server 2.4 can be found here.

Stay safe everyone!

The post Patch now! Apache fixes zero-day vulnerability in HTTP Server appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Windows 11, the latest operating system (OS) from Microsoft, launches today, and organizations have begun asking themselves when and if they should upgrade from Windows 10 or older versions. The requirements and considerations of each organization will be different, and many things will inform the decisions they make about whether to stick or twist. One of those things will be whether or not Windows 11 makes them safer and more secure.

I spoke to Malwarebytes’ Windows experts Alex Smith and Charles Oppermann to understand what’s changed in Windows 11 and what impact it could have on security.

A higher bar for hardware

If you’ve read anything about Windows 11 it’s probably that it will only run on “new” computers. Microsoft’s latest OS sets a high bar for hardware, with the aim of creating a secure platform for all that’s layered on top of it. In effect, Microsoft is making its existing Secured-core PC standards the new baseline, so that a range of technologies that are optional in Windows 10 are mandatory, or on by default, in Windows 11.

In reality the hardware requirements will only seem exacting for a short period. Moore’s Law and the enormous Windows install base mean that yesterday’s stringent hardware requirements will rapidly turn into today’s minimum spec.

Three of the new OS’s hardware requirements play major, interlocking roles in security:

All hail the hypervisor

At a minimum, Windows 11 requires a 64-bit, 1 GHz processor with virtualization extensions and at least two cores, and HVCI-compatible drivers. In practice that means it requires an 8th generation Intel processor, an AMD Zen 2, or a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8180.

This is because Virtualization Based Security (VBS) has become a keystone concept in Microsoft’s approach to security. VBS runs Windows on top of a hypervisor, which can then use the same techniques that keep guest operating systems apart to create secure spaces that are isolated from the main OS. Doing that requires hardware-based virtualization features, and enough horsepower that you won’t notice the drag on performance.

Noteworthy security features that rely on VBS include:

• Kernel Data Protection, which uses VBS to mark some kernel memory as read only, to protect the Windows kernel and its drivers from being tampered with.
• Memory Integrity (a more digestible name for HVCI), which runs code integrity checks in an isolated environment, which should provide stronger protection against kernel viruses and malware.
• Application Guard, a protective sandbox for Edge and Microsoft Office that uses virtualization to isolate untrusted websites and office documents, limiting the damage they can cause.
• Credential Guard runs the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service in a virtual container, which stops attackers dumping credentials and using them in pass-the-hash attacks.
• Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-In uses VBS to isolate biometric software, and to create secure pathways to external components like the camera and TPM.

United Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI)

UEFI is a specification for the firmware that controls the first stages of booting up a computer, before the operating system is loaded. (It’s a replacement for the more widely-known BIOS.) From a security standpoint, UEFI’s key feature is Secure Boot, which checks the digital signatures of the software used in the boot process. It protects against bootkits that load before the operating system, and rootkits that modify the operating system.

Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0)

TMP is tamper-resistant technology that performs cryptographic operations, such as creating and storing cryptographic keys, where they can’t be interfered with. It’s probably best known for its role in Secure Boot, that ensures computers only load trusted boot loaders, and in BitLocker disk encryption. In Windows 11 it forms the secure underpinning for a host of security features, including Secure Boot’s big brother, Measured Boot; BitLocker (Device Encryption on Windows Home); Windows Defender System Guard; Device Health Attestation; Windows Hello; and more.

New in Windows 11

Windows 11 has some new tricks up its sleeve too.

Hardware-enforced Stack Protection

Windows 11 extends the Hardware-enforced Stack Protection introduced in Windows 10 so that it protects code running in kernel mode as well as in user mode. It’s designed to prevent control-flow hijacking by creating a “shadow stack” that mirrors the call stack’s list of return addresses. When control is transferred to a return address on the call stack it’s checked against the shadow stack to ensure it hasn’t changed. If it has, something untoward has happened and an error is raised.

Pluton

Windows 11 comes ready to embrace the impressively-named Pluton TPM architecture. It’s been a feature of the Xbox One gaming console since 2013, but doesn’t exit in PCs… yet.

Pluton sees the security chip built directly into the CPU, which prevents physical attacks that target the communication channel between the CPU and the TPM. And while Pluton is backwards-compatible with existing TPMs, it’ll do more if you let it. According to Microsoft, “Pluton also provides the unique Secure Hardware Cryptography Key (SHACK) technology that helps ensure keys are never exposed outside of the protected hardware, even to the Pluton firmware itself”.

Microsoft Azure Attestation (MAA)

No discussion about security in 2021 would be complete without somebody mentioning Zero Trust, so here it is. Windows 11 comes with out-of-the-box support for MAA, which can verify the integrity of a system’s hardware and software remotely. Microsoft says this will allow organizations to “enforce Zero Trust policies when accessing sensitive resources in the cloud”.

Evolution, not revolution

For several years, Microsoft’s approach to Windows security has been to create a chain of trust that ensures the integrity of the entire hardware and software stack, from the ground up. The latest version of Windows seeks to make that approach the default, and demands the hardware necessary to make it work. With Windows 11, Microsoft is making an aggressive attempt to raise the security floor of the PC platform, and that’s a good thing for everyone’s security.

Make no mistake that threat actors will adapt, as they have done before. Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups are well-funded enough to find a way through tough defences, ransomware gangs are notoriously good at finding the lowest-hanging fruit, and lucrative forms of social engineering like BEC are notoriously resistant to technology solutions.

And you can add to that the interlocking problems of increasing complexity, backwards compatibility, and technical debt. Operating systems and the applications they must support are a behemoth, and while Microsoft pursues its laudable aim of eliminating entire classes of vulnerabilities, new bugs will appear and a lot of legacy code will inevitably come along for the ride.

Decisions about whether to adopt Windows 11 will doubtless be impacted by the fact it won’t run on a lot of otherwise perfectly good computers. We expect this to have a chilling effect on organizations’ willingness to migrate away from Windows 10.

And there are other headwinds too. These days, new Windows operating systems are rarely greeted with great enthusiasm unless they’re putting right the wrongs of a particularly disliked predecessor. The bottom line is that Windows 10 works and OS upgrades are painful, so it is difficult to imagine that anyone will conclude they need Windows 11.

Migration away from older versions of Windows is inevitable eventually, and by the time mainstream support for Windows 10 ends in October 2025, users will undoubtedly be more secure. But we expect organizations to move away from Windows 10 slowly, which will delay the undoubted security benefits that will follow from wide-scale adoption of Windows 11.

The post Windows 11 is out. Is it any good for security? appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

“A global privacy disaster”, “espionage gold”, and “a state-sponsored wet dream” are just some of the comments one can read regarding the breach at Syniverse, a key player in the tech/telecommunications industry that calls itself the “center of the connected world.”

In a filing with the US Security and Exchange Commission, Syniverse said the breach affected more than 200 of its clients who have an accumulated number of cellphone users by the billions worldwide. Syniverse’s clients include Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Vodafone, China Mobile, Telefonica, and America Movil, to name a few.

The company revealed that it first noticed the breach in May 2021, but that the access had begun in May 2016—a whole five years before.

According to Motherboard, who first wrote about this story, Syniverse receives, processes, stores, and transmits electronic customer information, which includes billing information among carriers globally, records about calls and data usage, and other potentially sensitive data. It processes more than 740 billion SMS messages alone per year, routing text messages between users of two different carriers (both in the US and abroad).

The filing said that “Syniverse’s investigation revealed that the individual or organization gained unauthorized access to databases within its network on several occasions, and that login information allowing access to or from its Electronic Data Transfer (“EDT”) environment was compromised for approximately 235 of its customers.”

In an email interview with Motherboard, Karsten Nohl, a security researcher is quoted saying, “Syniverse systems have direct access to phone call records and text messaging, and indirect access to a large range of Internet accounts protected with SMS 2-factor authentication. Hacking Syniverse will ease access to Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and all kinds of other accounts, all at once.”

A telecomm industry insider, who spoke to Motherboard said: “With all that information, I could build a profile on you. I’ll know exactly what you’re doing, who you’re calling, what’s going on. I’ll know when you get a voicemail notification. I’ll know who left the voicemail. I’ll know how long that voicemail was left for. When you make a phone call, I’ll know exactly where you made that phone call from.”

“I’ll know more about you than your doctor.”

Motherboard asked Syniverse whether the hackers had accessed or stolen personal data on cellphone users, but Syniverse declined to answer. 

Syniverse said all EDT customers have had their credentials reset or inactivated, whether they were part of the breach or not. The company says no further action is required on behalf of those customers.

“We have communicated directly with our customers regarding this matter and have concluded that no additional action is required. In addition to resetting customer credentials, we have implemented substantial additional measures to provide increased protection to our systems and customers.” 

The post Criminals were inside Syniverse for 5 years before anyone noticed appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Mark Zuckerberg was left counting the personal cost of bad PR yesterday (about $6 billion, according to Bloomberg) on a day when his company couldn’t get out of the news headlines, for all the wrong reasons.

The billionaire Facebook CEO’s bad day at the office started with whistleblower Frances Haugen finally revealing her identity in a round of interviews that looked set to lay siege to the Monday headlines. Anonymous revelations by the former Facebook product manager had fuelled an entire Wall Street Journal series about the harm inflicted or ignored by Instagram and Facebook, and her unmasking was its denouement. It was supposed to be big news, and for a while it was.

But then something even bigger happened.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp completely disappeared. For six hours.

Despite losing access to the world’s favourite confirmation bias apparatus, conspiracy theorists didn’t miss a beat. Putting two and two together to make five, they decided that it was all too convenient and that Facebook was using the dead cat strategy to rob Haugen of the spotlight!

It was a convenient theory, but there is no evidence for it besides an interesting coincidence, and it ignores the fact that Facebook taking itself out to silence a whistleblower is a far more interesting story than Facebook simply taking itself out by accident. I’m afraid that in the absence of more compelling information, Hanlon’s Razor will have to suffice: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”.

BGP

What we can say for sure, is that Facebook took itself and its stablemates out with a spectacular self-inflicted wound, in the form of a toxic Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) update.

The Internet is a patchwork of hundreds of thousands of separate networks, called Autonomous Systems, that are stitched together with BGP. To route data across the Internet, Autonomous Systems need to know which IP addresses other Autonomous Systems either control or can route traffic to. They share this information with each other using BGP.

According to Cloudflare—which has published an excellent explanation of what it saw—Facebook’s trouble started when its Autonomous System issued a BGP update withdrawing routes to its own DNS servers. Without DNS servers, the address facebook.com stopped working. In Cloudflare’s words: “With those withdrawals, Facebook and its sites had effectively disconnected themselves from the Internet.”

Cloudflare appears to have noticed the problem almost straight away, so we can assume that Facebook did too. So why did it take six more hours to fix it? The social media scuttlebutt, later confirmed in Facebook’s own terse explanation, was that the outage disabled the very tools Facebook’s enormous number of remote workers would normally rely on to both communicate with each other and to fix the problem.

The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.

The unconfirmed part of the same scuttlebutt is that Facebook is so 21st century that folks were locked out of offices, and even a server room, which had to be entered forcibly in order to fix the configuration issue locally.

Of course that could just be another conspiracy theory, but as somebody who has themselves been stranded outside a building, forced to look through a glass door at the very computer that controls that door attempting and failing to boot from the broken network I had come to investigate, let me assure you that it’s not an outrageous suggestion.

The Facebook Empire withdrawing itself from the Internet didn’t stop people looking for it though. In fact, it made them look much, much harder (just imagine everyone, everywhere, frustrated, hitting “refresh” or reinstalling Instagram until they’re bored, and you get the idea). Unanswered DNS requests spiked, and DNS resolvers groaned, as computers groped around in the dark looking for the now non-existent facebook.com domains.

When they weren’t pummelling DNS resolvers, the rest of the Facebook diaspora was forced to find other forms of entertainment or other means of communication. Some local mobile phone operators reported being overwhelmed, and encrypted messaging app Signal said it welcomed “millions” of new users as people looked for alternatives to WhatsApp.

And let’s not forget that there are companies that rely on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to drive business, and there are services that use Facebook logins for authentication. And then there’s the influencers. All of them had to stop. For six hours. Won’t somebody think of the influencers?

When it finally sank in that nobody could use Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, it started to dawn on us all just how much so many of us have put Facebook and its products at the centre of our lives.

And then we all went to Twitter to tell everyone else how good or bad it all was. Thankfully, it withstood the onslaught.

Which leads us to the “so what?” part of our story. This is a security blog after all, and if this wasn’t a cyberattack you may be wondering what all of this has to do with security. Where’s the lesson in all of this?

Single points of failure people.

That’s it. That’s the tweet.

The post Facebook shoots own foot, hits Instagram and WhatsApp too appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, formerly known as National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. The idea is to raise awareness about cybersecurity, and provide resources for people to feel safer and more secure online.

The month is a collaboration between the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and it focusses on four themes, in turn: “Be Cyber Smart”, “Phight the Phish”, “Explore. Experience. Share”, and “Cybersecurity First”. Some of these are perhaps a little interchangeable or vague, but it’s certainly a dedicated effort. The questions is, is anybody listening?

Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a fixture of the calendar now, as are Data Privacy Day, World Password Day, and a host of other well-intentioned privacy and security themed events. There are so many of them now, and they come around so often, that some of the Malwarebytes Labs team were feeling a little jaded about this month’s event.

So, in the spirit of the event’s first theme, “Be Cyber Smart”, we asked two of our Malwarebytes Labs blog team, Chris and Jovi, whether the smart thing to do was forgot about it altogether.

The pros and cons of awareness campaigns

Jovi: I don’t see that anyone can have a problem with events such as this. It’s good to have regular reminders about our responsibility to keep ourselves and our families safe. It’s also a good opportunity to learn something new about security and privacy.

Chris: I mean, are they really learning something new? From experience, the content in these events doesn’t tend to differ much from year to year. A lot of it is the same basic information you see on mainstream news reports, or blogs. I’ve been involved with events like this since 2005, and one time at a panel with reps from the FTC and the NYAG…

(several minutes of completely unrelated factoids from the dawn of time follow)

Jovi: …I’m surprised that didn’t end with you tying an onion to your belt.

Chris, oblivious to onions: If it was worthwhile, you’d think there’d be some tangible, visible improvement in security by this point. Or at least a bunch of people saying “Wow, that ‘event-name-goes-here’ really helped me with this one problem I had. Hooray for ‘event-name-goes-here’.

Jovi: True, but then again, not everyone sees every relevant news report or even reads blogs. Some people get a lot of their security information from sources like Twitter, direct from infosec pros. Who then end up directing them to events like this anyway. There’s always a churn of new people who haven’t seen any of this before, so I don’t think it’s a problem to repeat some of the basics every year. Not everything has to be groundbreaking. If it’s easy to understand and helpful, that’s okay too.

Chris: Possible, but I also think many people have burnout from this kind of thing. How many times can you hear a major event, backed by Homeland Security, say “watch out for suspicious links” before you start to demand something a bit more involved? Admittedly, we don’t know what specifically is going to be covered during the month itself yet. It might be a mix of basic information and more complicated processes, which would be great! Another major event saying “don’t run unknown files”, though? Do we really need that? Or is there still a place for it?

Jovi: I once again direct you to “a churn of new people who haven’t seen any of this before”.

Chris: Ouch.

Jovi: You may be right about the fatigue aspect, though. I imagine it’s likely very difficult for anyone to really care that much about a month-long event. If you’re directly involved in some way, then fine. If you’re one of the many random people it’s aimed at? I think it’s probable they simply won’t care very much by week 3.

Chris: It may also be exacerbated if the thing they really want to do or look at happens during the final week. Will they even remember to go back by the tail-end of October to check it out?

Jovi: This is where the web resources for the event will be crucial, alongside lots of activity on social media. Handy little reminders to go back and check it out will work wonders.

Chris: Might work wonders.

Jovi: Ouch.

Chris: One novel thing I’ll definitely highlight is that they’re doing a whole bit about careers in tech. This is good. Not every event does this. There’s a lot of resources available and the opportunity for security companies, researchers, and anyone else to give tips on how to break into the industry. This will be particularly helpful for students about to graduate, and people thinking about a change in career.

Jovi: I’m mostly interested in the phishing week. You can’t go wrong with phish advice, especially when so many people are still working from home and potentially isolated from their security teams.

Chris: Is that any better than any other event doing a phish week though?

Jovi: It certainly doesn’t hurt to have them. I reckon big organisations and governments saying “we’re interested in this and you should be too” ultimately helps more than it hurts. We’d definitely feel their absence.

Chris: I’ll give you that. I’m not 100% convinced these events are making as much impact as some may think. This is what, the 18th one of these now? I’d be interested to know what the organisers think about how successful they are, what difference they’ve made. Even so, you’re likely right that we’re better served by having them than not at all.

Jovi: Amazing—did we finally agree?

Chris: Yes, please inform the DHS I’ve given permission for the event to go ahead.

Jovi: I’m sure they’ll be relieved.

Chris: This somehow feels like sarcasm.

Jovi: Definitely not.

Winding down

Whether you think events like this are a big boon to security discourse or too much like repeating ourselves for diminishing returns, they’re here to stay. We can all play a part in ensuring these annual reminders stay relevant. Whether you’re flying solo at home, an organisation, a security vendor, an SME, or a collection of interested students? Get involved!

Let the organisers know what you’d most like to see—if not at this event, then perhaps the next one. If these awareness campaigns exist in a vacuum, they’ll assume they’re getting everything right. Let’s help them along to fix the bits we’re not sure about and make it work for everyone.

The post Does Cybersecurity Awareness Month actually improve security? appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

One of the world’s ransomware groups appears to be a couple of members short today—and about two million dollars less rich—but nobody is sure which one. Police are staying tight-lipped about who’s short-handed following the arrest of two individuals in Kyiv, Ukraine. The arrests are part of a joint operation by the FBI, the French National Gendarmerie, and the Ukrainian National Police.

What little we do know comes by way of a terse Europol press release—which says that police seized $375,000 in cash, a further $1.3 million in cryptocurrencies and two “luxury vehicles”—and a press release and video by Ukrainian police.

The video shows police searching a surprisingly clean and tidy apartment. Among the usual ransomware gang paraphernalia of mobile phones, laptops, a fancy-pants computer “rig”, gaming chairs, and wads of cash, we also get a peak at some of the more surprising and mundane aspects of life as (or perhaps with) a modern day digital criminal. The video reveals enough flowers and little gift boxes to suggest it was a special day for somebody, as well as the occupants’ fondness for both Capri Sun, and brands like Louis Vuitton and Senso.

Of course what we really want to know is which ransomware group has taken a hit. There, we’re getting only crumbs from the police and guesswork from Twitter sleuths. Europol has divulged that the people arrested belong to an organised crime group “suspected of having committed a string of targeted attacks against very large industrial groups in Europe and North America from April 2020 onwards.” It says the criminals “would deploy malware and steal sensitive data from these companies, before encrypting their files”, a fairly vanilla description of modern-day ransomware. It describes the people arrested as “two prolific ransomware operators known for their extortionate ransom demands (between €5 to €70 million)”.

The individuals could belong to one of the well known ransomware groups, but it’s worth remembering that lots of ransomware is operated “as a service”, by affiliates. In either case, it’s fair to say that others will be along shortly to fill the void they leave, should those arrested be required to occupy a jail cell.

Europol says it helped the joint operation with analytical, malware, forensic, and crypto-tracing support. The last item is the least surprising on the list. The modern ransomware phenomenon is entirely reliant on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and many observers have identified it as ransomware’s Achilles heel.

Why? Because cryptocurrency payments are very public. While the identities of payers and payees are hidden behind pseudonymous IDs, the actual payments happen in broad daylight and are recorded forever in giant distributed databases called blockchains. If real people can be linked to those IDs, then their role in ransomware transactions can be revealed.

A few years ago, we were all fond of describing the analysis of relationships in very large databases as Big Data, and the Bitcoin blockchain is the biggest of Big Data. It contains every transaction ever made with the cryptocurrency, nothing can ever be removed from it, anyone can own a copy, and law enforcement’s ability to analyse the patterns within it improve with time, and every additional payment.

The US government has been turning up the heat on ransomware gangs this year and has been quite open about its intention to follow the money. So it won’t surprise you to learn that one of the people arrested in this recent raid is believed to be involved in money laundering. And no surprise that a similar raid against the Clop ransomware gang earlier this year that was also carried out by police in Ukraine, also in the area of Kyiv, also targeted the gang’s money laundering operation.

The post Police take a piece out of a ransomware gang, but won’t say which one appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Millions of Neiman Marcus customers have had their personal and financial information exposed in a data breach. In a press release the company confirmed unauthorized access to customer online accounts.

According to the press release 4.6 million customers of Neiman Marcus Group stores, specifically Neiman Marcus and Last Call, are being notified about the data breach by email.

What information was stolen?

For affected customers, it’s always important to know what information the threat actor may have gotten hold off. The personal information for affected Neiman Marcus customers varied and may have included:

• Names and contact information
• Payment card numbers and expiration dates (without CVV numbers)
• Neiman Marcus virtual gift card numbers (without PINs)
• Usernames, passwords, and security questions and answers associated with Neiman Marcus online accounts.

What has Neiman Marcus done?

To investigate the matter Neiman Marcus has engaged Mandiant, an American cybersecurity firm, and notified law enforcement. The investigation is ongoing.

Neiman Marcus has also informed the affected customers, and forced an online account password reset for affected customers who haven’t changed their password since May 2020. Neiman Marcus promised to continue to take actions to enhance its system security, and safeguard information.

The company has set up a phone number—(866) 571-9725—and web page for concerned customers, although at the time of publishing the website is not currently working.

What you can do

If you know or suspect you may have been affected by this data breach there are a few things you can do.

The most important one is to change your password and make sure you have not re-used the same login credentials elsewhere online. If you have, you’ll need to change that too. The same is true for any security questions.

Scammers like to make the most of data breaches like this by sending out fake emails trying to trick you into giving them your login credentials, so make sure you go directly to the website to change your password.

Unlike Neiman Marcus, other companies have offered free credit and identity monitoring services as a conciliatory measure after a data breach. In this case you would have to pay for that yourself. Credit monitoring services can’t actually stop cybercriminals from stealing your identity, but they can alert you if someone opens up a line of credit under your name.

Think about it this way, these services alert you to changes on your credit report if you can’t be bothered to check your own credit report. If that’s the case, then you may want to consider signing up and paying someone else to monitor your credit file for you, but the bottom line is that these credit monitoring services are just that—monitoring services, not protection.

If you find any unauthorized transactions involving your payment cards then immediately contact the relevant payment card company or financial institution.

Customers are entitled under U.S. law to one free credit report annually from each of the three nationwide consumer reporting agencies. To order a free credit report, you can visit www.annualcreditreport.com or call 1-877-322-8228.

Attribution

As this is an ongoing investigation, there is not much information to be had about any details that may point to a certain threat actor. The stolen data may at some point surface for sale on underground forum or dark web marketplace.

If you are wondering if the login credentials have been made publicly available, you may be able to find them at the website Have I been pwned? The same is true for other credentials. In fact, it doesn’t hurt to check your email address there every so often.

There’s no reason to be ashamed if you find your email address there, as long as you don’t use it in combination with the same password anymore. If you do, then make sure you change it as soon as you can. You can use a password manager or password book to keep track of all your different passwords.

Stay safe, everyone!

The post Neiman Marcus data breach affects millions appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs

• Teaching cybersecurity skills to special needs children with Alana Robinson: Lock and Code S02E18
• Phone screenshots accidentally leaked online by stalkerware-type company
• FoggyWeb, analysis of a Nobelium backdoor
• Instagram Kids put on hold
• Microsoft, CISA and NSA offer security tools and advice, but will you take it?
• Vaccine passport app leaks users’ personal data
• Telegram-powered bots circumvent 2FA
• Android Trojan GriftHorse, the gift horse you definitely should look in the mouth
• Apple Pay vulnerable to wireless pickpockets
• The FCC moves to curb SIM swap attacks

Malwarebytes released the Demographics of Cybercrime Report.

Other cybersecurity news

• Cambodia’s prime minister is Zoombombing opposition meetings. (Source: Rest Of World)
• Apple ignored 3 Zero-Day iPhone attacks for months, claims researcher. (Source: Forbes)
• When you ‘Ask app not to track,’ some iPhone apps keep snooping anyway. (Source: The Washington Post)
• Microsoft was warned about the Autodiscover flaw five years ago. (Source: The Register)
• Mission accomplished: Security plugin HTTPS Everywhere to be deprecated in 2022. (Source: The Daily Swig)
• Fake Amnesty International Pegasus scanner used to infect Windows. (Source: BleepingComputer)
• Google pushes emergency update for Chrome zero-days, the latest in a hectic year for vulnerabilities. (Source: CyberScoop)
• Mozilla rolls out fission to a fraction of users on the release channel. (Source: Mozilla blog)
• Paying hackers’ ransom demands is getting harder. (Source: DataCenter Knowledge)
• Hackers bypass Coinbase 2FA to steal customer funds. (Source: The Record)

Stay safe, everyone!

The post A week in security (Sept 27 – Oct 3) appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.