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.
The Other Side of Cloud Data Risk
What I’m writing here isn’t about whether you should be in the cloud or not. That’s a complex question, it’s highly dependent on your business, and experts could still disagree even after seeing all of the inputs What I want to talk about is two distinct considerations when looking at the risk of moving your entire company to the cloud. There are many companies doing this, especially in the Bay Area. CRM, HR, Email—it’s all cloud, and the number of cloud vendors totals in the hundreds, perhaps even thousands. We’re…
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…
APIs are 2FA Backdoors
Two-factor Authentication (2FA) today is something like having a firewall in the year 2000: if you say you have it, it basically stops any further questioning. Unfortunately, when you have a powerful and mismanaged API, 2FA is about as effective as having a stateful firewall protecting a broken web application. It’s time we accept as an industry that API keys and secrets are essentially usernames and passwords, except they’re designed to be used in an automated way to perform your company’s most sensitive functions, often instrumented by…
Post #WannaCry Reaction #127: Do I Need a Pen Test?
In the wake of WannaCry and other recent events, everyone from the Department of Homeland Security to my grandmother are recommending penetration tests as a silver bullet to prevent falling victim to the next cyber attack. But a penetration test is not a silver bullet, nor is it universally what is needed for improving the security posture of an organization. There are several key factors to consider. So I thought it might be good to review the difference between a penetration test and a vulnerability assessment since this is a…
Five Attributes of an Effective Corporate Red Team
After talking recently with colleagues at IOActive as well as some heads of industry-leading red teams, we wanted to share a list of attributes that we believe are key to any effective Red Team. [ NOTE: For debate about the relevant terminology, we suggest Daniel’s post titled The Difference Between Red, Blue, and Purple Teams. ] To be clear, we think there can be significant variance in how Red Teams are built and…