Robots Want Bitcoins too!
Ransomware attacks have boomed during the last few years, becoming a preferred method for cybercriminals to get monetary profit by encrypting victim information and requiring a ransom to get the information back. The primary ransomware target has always been information. When a victim has no backup of that information, he panics, forced to pay for its return.
Security Theater and the Watch Effect in Third-party Assessments
Before the facts were in, nearly every journalist and salesperson in infosec was thinking about how to squeeze lemonade from the Equifax breach. Let’s be honest – it was and is a big breach. There are lessons to be learned, but people seemed to have the answers before the facts were available. It takes time to dissect these situations and early speculation is often wrong. Efforts at attribution and methods take months to understand. So, it’s important to not buy into the hysteria and, instead, seek to gain a clear vision…
WannaCry vs. Petya: Keys to Ransomware Effectiveness
With WannaCry and now Petya we’re beginning to see how and why the new strain of ransomware worms are evolving and growing far more effective than previous versions. I think there are 3 main factors: Propagation, Payload, and Payment.* Propagation: You ideally want to be able to spread using as many different types of techniques as you can. Payload: Once you’ve infected the system you want to have a payload that encrypts properly, doesn’t have any easy bypass to decryption, and clearly indicates to the victim what they…
A Wake-up Call for SATCOM Security
During the last few months we have witnessed a series of events that will probably be seen as a tipping point in the public’s opinion about the importance of, and need for, security. The revelations of Edward Snowden have served to confirm some theories and shed light on surveillance technologies that were long restricted. We live in a world where an ever-increasing stream of digital data is flowing between continents. It is clear that those who control communications traffic have an upper-hand. Satellite Communications (SATCOM) plays a vital…
Practical and cheap cyberwar (cyber-warfare): Part II
Disclaimer: I did not perform any illegal attacks on the mentioned websites in order to get the information I present here. No vulnerability was exploited on the websites, and they are not known to be vulnerable. Given that we live in an age of information leakage where government surveillance and espionage abound, I decided in this second part to focus on a simple technique for information gathering on human targets. If an attacker is targeting a specific country, members of the military and defense contractors would make good human…
Practical and cheap cyberwar (cyber-warfare): Part I
Every day we hear about a new vulnerability or a new attack technique, but most of the time it’s difficult to imagine the real impact. The current emphasis on cyberwar (cyber-warfare if you prefer) leads to myths and nonsense being discussed. I wanted to show real life examples of large scale attacks with big impacts on critical infrastructure, people, companies, etc. The idea of this post is to raise awareness. I want to show how vulnerable some industrial, oil, and gas installations currently are and how easy it is…
When a Choice is a Fingerprint
We frequently hear the phrase “Attribution is hard.” And yes, if the adversary exercises perfect tradecraft, attribution can be hard to the point of impossible. But we rarely mention the opposite side of that coin, how hard it is to maintain that level of tradecraft over the lifetime of an extended operation. How many times out of muscle memory have you absent-mindedly entered one of your passwords in the wrong application? The consequences of this are typically nonexistent if you’re entering your personal email address into your work client, but…