When Sophos Phish Threat was released in January, we pointed out that:

1. Email remains one of the most problematic sources of infection; and
2. It’s the ordinary, well-meaning people who often let poisonous emails into their organizations.

Phishing is an old problem, but news stories continue to show that people remain easy prey.

New attacks, old tactics

A recent Naked Security article outlined the bad guys’ efforts to infect their prey using scams centered around tax season, with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) warning of fresh email schemes targeting tax professionals, payroll staff, human resources personnel, schools and average taxpayers. In another scam, attackers polluted Amazon listings with links that redirected victims to a very convincing Amazon-looking payment site.

Now come fresh reports that attackers are using malicious PDF attachments and messages that appear to be from their company’s HR departments, as well as bogus Facebook friend requests. [For the full story, read Latest phishing tactics: infected PDFs, bogus friend requests, fake HR emails.]

Microsoft Malware Protection Center team member Alden Pornasdoro warned of the malicious PDF files. Unlike in other spam campaigns, he wrote, the PDF attachments in question don’t contain malware or exploit code. Instead, they rely on social engineering to lead people to phishing pages where they are asked to divulge sensitive information.

In another case, ZDNet reported that sending a bogus friend request was the best way to get someone to click on a link – even when the email was being sent to a work email address.

In one simulation conducted by MWR Infosecurity, a quarter of users who were tested clicked the link to be taken through to a fake login screen, with more than half going on to provide a username and password. Four out of five then downloaded the sinister file. Meanwhile, a spoof email claiming to be from the HR department referring to an appraisal system also proved effective.

Successful attacks through social engineering

Recent developments show that the ancient technique of social engineering is alive and well. Understanding it is the first step in mounting a better defense. We previously wrote:

Social engineering is the act of manipulating people into taking a specific action for an attacker’s benefit. You might think it sounds like the work of a con artist – and you’d be right. Since social engineering preys on the weaknesses inherent in all of us, it can be quite effective. And without proper training it’s tricky to prevent. If you’ve ever received a phishy email, you’ve seen social engineering at work. The social engineering aspect of a phishing attack is the crucial first step – getting the victim to open a dodgy attachment or visit a malicious website.

As the blog post noted, phishing can’t work unless the first step – the social engineering – convinces you to take an action.

To help raise awareness, security vendors have offered a number of products and services companies can use to launch simulations – essentially phishing fire drills — which can show employees up close how easy it is to be duped by social engineering.

For Sophos customers, that product is Phish Threat.

How it works

With Phish Threat, users choose a campaign type, select one or more training modules, pick a simulated phishing message, and decide which users to test. Reporting tells you how many messages have been sent out, who’s clicked, and, of those, who’s gone through the required modules.

Security awareness programs are not new, and some security experts have questioned their effectiveness, since users continue to make the same mistakes.

In our opinion, simulations give awareness programs more teeth. The more employees get caught on the phishing hook during a simulation, the less likely they are to forget the lesson.

That may sound like a self-serving statement. But the proof is in the never-ending avalanche of news headlines.

Read the original article, here.

It’s no secret these days that cyber threats are rampant and varied. Ransomware, malware and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are not frequently mentioned in the mainstream press, but they are everyday news in technology and finance trade publications.

Cyberattacks are an everyday occurrence for some companies, a rare occurrence for others. Some companies are keenly aware of attacks on their networks, but other companies are not. Even in some companies that have dedicated IT security staff and systems in place, major security breaches have occurred. It can take months or even years for an organization to realize that it has been breached.

Yes, a DDoS Attack Could Happen to You

Some professionals may be in a state of denial, psychologically; i.e., they believe that “no one would try to hack our site because we’re not high-profile, or we have nothing that a hacker would want.” To make such an assumption is definitely a big mistake, and could cost your company a lot of time and money. The vast majority of organization networks include data that is valuable to someone, somewhere. Besides credit card numbers and email addresses, sensitive data may include medical records or social security numbers.

Hackers’ Money Motivation: DDoS Extortion & Ransomware

The market price for stolen sensitive data has been decreasing, but data is still priceless to its owners, so hackers are increasingly committing cyber extortion to extract money from victims. The message they convey is basically, “Pay the ransom or I’ll steal and expose your sensitive data.” Alternatively, hackers sometimes threaten to launch a DDoS attack unless a ransom is paid. Or, they actually launch a DDoS attack and promise to stop the attack if the ransom is paid. (Would you trust the promise of a cybercriminal?)

What does Extortion Have to do with DDoS attacks?

A DDoS attack is not a security breach. But recently there are reports of multi-layered cyber-attacks that combine ransomware and DDoS attacks. The hacker method is to use DDoS to take down the first layer of defense, such as a firewall or intrusion prevention system (IPS), and then map the floor plan of their target’s environment, and determine any weak points and vulnerabilities that can later be exploited through other methods, such as ransomware.  How do they do that without getting noticed, you may ask?  Via small, sub-saturating attacks that cause temporary, minor network outages to mask a more nefarious malware infiltration or data theft.

DDoS Attacks Big or Small

It’s interesting that DDoS attacks are getting larger in volume; we have entered a new era, with terabit-sized DDoS attacks like the one on Dyn and Krebs Security are becoming common. Yet the smaller, hard-to-detect DDoS attacks are much more common and can be just as—if not more—damaging. The fact is, enterprises nowadays must worry about all types and sizes of DDoS attacks. Companies have to assume that they will most likely experience a DDoS attack (if they haven’t already!)

What Should Enterprises Do?

Defense is essential but, admittedly, not every enterprise can afford DDoS mitigation solutions. Fortunately, more and more service and hosting providers are rolling out DDoS protection as a service (DDPaaS), which makes DDoS protection more affordable for organizations of all sizes. So, ask your Internet service provider whether they offer DDoS protection as a service; thanks to Corero’s DDPaaS enabling technology.

To learn more about how DDoS attacks and protection are evolving, download the Evolution of DDoS Report.  

Read the original article, here.

Doctors sometimes make mistakes that harm the patient. Police often fail to protect and serve. When that happens, people rightly demand the failures be analyzed and fixed. But no one ever calls for the elimination of all doctors and police.

Why then, do some call for the end of antivirus and anti-malware when failures happen? It’s a question that has vexed us for a long time.

Researchers uncover vulnerabilities in security products on a regular basis. A recent example is Trend Micro, which faced scrutiny in January after researchers reported some 223 vulnerabilities across 11 of the vendor’s products. Tavis Ormandy, a prolific and gifted Google Project Zero researcher who most recently discovered Cloudbleed, regularly targets security products, including those produced by Sophos and such vendors as Kaspersky and Symantec.

Along the way, someone either declares it the end of antivirus, anti-malware and endpoint protection, or calls for its demise. Last year, during another disclosure of Trend Micro vulnerabilities, security experts even declared antivirus a threat to security.

Can we all do better? Absolutely. Like all technology created since the dawn of time, antivirus sometimes falls short of its mission. As an industry, we need to continue to find weaknesses and fix them as quickly as possible.

Does doing better mean we set aside antivirus and anti-malware, just as some believe vaccines should be shelved? Hardly.

To help frame the issue, I sat down with Sophos CTO Joe Levy.

Iatrogenesis happens, followed by schadenfreude

“In responding to the occasional question about the claims of harm from endpoint security products, it occurred to me how strikingly similar such a belief system is to the anti-vaxxer movement. Both mean well, but unfortunately have the potential to do more harm than those they indict. Nonetheless, those who point out problems with antivirus make valid points,” Levy said. “All software has flaws.”

Levy offers two other observations:

1. This is a case of yelling ‘iatrogenesis’ (harm caused by the healer) in a crowded theater. It is particularly sensational because of the irony, and in many cases, a source of schadenfreude (pleasure derived from the misfortune of others).
2. The attack surface of security software is often enlarged by the level of privilege needed to operate efficiently (i.e. in the kernel) and to do the kind of work that it needs to (file/network interception, process termination, system cleanup, etc.)

Just as patients sometimes develop complications after surgery, security technology sometimes fails, creating unintended harm for the user, Levy said. When that happens, detractors love to swoop in and bludgeon the offender.

Levy noted that when medical care goes wrong, we don’t see the masses calling for the end of doctors and hospitals. Sometimes police make mistakes and do harm in the line of duty. When that happens there’s public outrage, but no one calls for the end of police.

Like modern medicine and law enforcement, the security industry has a very high obligation to protect their users from harm. That means not only demonstrating effectiveness against attacks targeting operating systems and applications, but also against attacks targeting themselves. Despite this awareness, prevalent security software, like all other software with a large enough install base, is still sometimes found to be far from ironclad.

But just as we still need hospitals and police officers, we still need those security tools, Levy said. While Microsoft continues to make great strides in the security of their operating systems and applications year over year, a look at the number of Microsoft vulnerabilities per year illustrates the continuing need for additional protections. Microsoft security holes between 2009 and 2016, as catalogued on the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) website, are as follows:

2009: 74
2010: 106
2011: 103
2012: 83
2013: 106
2014: 85
2015: 135
2016: 155

In five of the last eight years, Microsoft released more than 100 security bulletins in a 12-month period. The number of bulletins each year haven’t fallen below 75 since 2009. Antivirus remains the first line of defense when attackers work to exploit vulnerabilities in either software or the software’s human operators.

“We take our obligation to protect very seriously, and we make continuous investments in the tools and programs to improve the security of our products, from our SDLC (secure development lifecycle), to static/dynamic/runtime security tools, to our bug bounty program, to name a few,” Levy said. “We are genuinely grateful to those security researchers who practice responsible disclosure. All of us in the security industry, whether software vendors or researchers, seek to make information systems more secure.”

He added: “We should all take a sort of Hippocratic Oath to do no harm, and that means both holding ourselves to a higher standard for building secure software, as well as putting end users before glory or sensationalism. Failure at either is a form of negligence, but calls for extermination are silly and irresponsible. The focus should not be on kicking the other when they’re down, but on making each other better.”

Read the original article, here.

The protection capabilities of Intercept X are now available to Endpoint Protection deployments managing their endpoint policy in Sophos Enterprise Console. Stop malware, prevent exploit vulnerabilities and get a deep clean on any potentially hidden malware using the Endpoint Exploit Prevention add-on.

Highlights

• Stops crypto-ransomware and automatically rolls any impacted files back
• Exploit Prevention mitigates the methods attackers use to exploit software vulnerabilities
• Forensic-level system cleanup

Stop ransomware before it takes hold

The proven CryptoGuard capabilities in Sophos Intercept X are now being used in Endpoint Exploit Prevention. The technology blocks ransomware as soon as it attempts to encrypt your files, returning your data to its original state.

• Brings the protection technology of Intercept X to Enterprise console-managed endpoints
• Protects endpoints from ransomware attacks
• Automatically rolls back encrypted file changes
• Stops both local disk and remote file-share encryption

Exploit technique mitigations

Our anti-exploit technology stops threats before they become an issue by recognizing and blocking common malware delivery techniques. This process protects your endpoints from exploit kits and malicious payloads looking to exploit both known and unknown software vulnerabilities. 

Advanced threat removal

Removing malware is no longer just a case of quarantine and delete. If malware is detected on an endpoint, how do you know what the malware did to your machine before it was stopped? Sophos Clean technology is used within Endpoint Exploit Prevention to detect the remains of malware and perform a deep system clean. The technology records forensic-level audit logging, tracking every change and cleaning the hidden malware.

Managed by Sophos Enterprise Console

Endpoint Exploit Prevention requires no new agent deployment for existing Sophos Endpoint Protection customers who are using Enterprise Console. The addition of the license unlocks new policy capabilities and automatically deploys agent components. Looking for Root Cause Analysis attack visualizations, in addition to protection? Switch to Intercept X and manage your endpoints from Sophos Central, our cloud-based platform.

The field of cyber forensics is getting much more attention lately, mostly because of the keen debate over Russia’s hacking of U.S. political party networks. The public, media and politicians all demand “evidence” of the hacking. Fortunately, sophisticated cyber-security forensics tools are available to assist with this. We cannot pretend to know what evidence the U.S. intelligence agencies have uncovered, but at least we know that they do have the technology and the cyber security experts to get at least close to the truth (even if they won’t or can’t share it publicly).

However, when it comes to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, based on political or other motives, forensic evidence is typically much harder to come by. Tracing the origins of such attacks is difficult because the source is either a legitimate third-party server, running a service which has been leveraged by an attacker as part of a reflection/amplification attack, or is a direct flood attack from a single device, or a botnet of many devices in which the IP source addresses are easily spoofed to ones which cannot be associated with the attacker.

For this reason, it is critical to have a DDoS protection solution that not only blocks all types of DDoS attacks, but also identifies the type of attack vectors, analyzes the digital fingerprint, and gathers intelligence to prepare against emerging threats.

The Corero SecureWatch Analytics portal, part of the SmartWall Threat Defense System, does exactly that, by capturing and indexing data on all the traffic the system sees when under attack, and during peacetime, to enable detailed analysis of any security incidents. It continuously records traffic for subsequent analysis of network flows and trends, providing detailed visibility into detected threats and patterns over time.

As sophisticated threats continue to evolve, effective security analysis requires continuous visibility into the traffic flowing between the protected network and the Internet. Analysis of past events is valuable to help prepare for future threats. You don’t need merely attack mitigation, you need visibility into attacks.

You can read the original article, here.

A recent TripWire study highlights the growing problem of cyberattacks, and whether IT staff feel that their companies have the right combination of skills and technology to cope with various types of cyber threats. Top concerns were (in order of importance) ransomware, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, malicious insiders, phishing and vulnerability exploits.

According to the study, 60% of IT professionals surveyed felt that they have the right skills to defend against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and 63% felt they have the right technology to handle such attacks. That’s a slim majority of the sample; given the increasing prevalence of DDoS attacks, it’s not very reassuring to think that 40% of IT security professionals feel ill-equipped to handle a DDoS attack. One wonders how their customers would feel if they knew that.

Granted, some companies are more vulnerable to DDoS attacks than others. Internet Service Providers and Hosting Providers typically experience DDoS attacks on a daily basis, partly because they have such large surface areas for attacks, and partly because an attack on them can affect multiple downstream customers (sort of like “killing two birds with one stone.”) However, regardless of one’s profile or attack surface, every network is vulnerable to a DDoS attack.  Hackers have many motives, but essentially their goal is to either steal your sensitive data or crash your website.

DDoS attacks come in all sizes, great and small. Most companies fear the large, volumetric attacks that can crash a website or network. However, such attacks are relatively uncommon. More common are the short, sub-saturating attacks that can mask a security breach.  Because most companies possess some form of sensitive data—whether it is customer credit card information, email addresses, social security numbers, or intellectual property—most companies should be concerned about DDoS attacks because they can open the door to security breaches.

Companies face a myriad of cyber threats, but DDoS attacks are both a web availability threat and a security threat. If 40% of companies lack the skills or technology to handle a DDoS attack, that’s cause for concern, for both the companies and their customers. (A Corero survey indicates that loss of customer trust and brand reputation are consequences of DDoS attacks.)

You can read the original article, here.

Ransomware is doubtless a rising threat nowadays, putting all small, medium-sized and large businesses at risk. Our IT and security professionals at LogPoint are constantly working to help our clients withstand such attacks. When fighting ransomware, planning and forethought are crucial so you can limit the impact and quickly recover with minimal disruption. Keep in mind that ransomware variants are constantly changing, and it’s hard to thwart every attack without the help of a real power tool. After all it’s better to be safe than sorry.

The queries and examples used, assumes the environment relies on an EMC backend but works for every kind of storage solution.

Objective

Acquisition of unusual data activity on storage systems within a certain period of time often indicates ransomware activities. With the help of ransomware detection, the organization receives an alarm via email each time suspicious activity is detected. There is a wide variety of suspicious activities, however, the cases when data is deleted, created, or modified in high volumes should always be a warning sign.
Dashboards

The dashboard represents the top 30 users, that showed the highest activity during the past 10 minutes:

Query: label=EMC userSid=*|rename userSid as objectSid| chart count() by objectSid order by count() DESC limit 30| process lookup (LDAP,objectSid)|fields displayName, sAMAccountName, objectSid, count()

Paths, that generate high volumes of data activity by nature (e.g.: Citrix or Xen) are excluded from the search so they cannot distort the results.

Additionally, there is a list called Whitelist which consists of reliable users. The list is auto-generated based on UserSID. Furthermore, there is an in-house scale containing “normal” data activity so the system can capture any activity deviating from that.

Users are assigned to userSIDs by matching with Active Directory. The results are stored in a table from where, data can be permanently used for further analysis.

Alarming

Query: label=EMC  -“bytesWritten”=”0” -“bytesWritten”=”0x0″  event=”0x80” flag=0x2 userSid=*| chart count() as handle by userSid, clientIP | search handle>200

The alarm is triggered and an e-mail is sent to the person in charge, whenever a suspicious data activity, effecting more than 200 files (in-house baseline) is detected. Paths and applications which are labelled as trustworthy are excluded from this rule.

While this is just scratching the surface of how we can fight ransomware at LogPoint, this use case can serve as a great starting point for further discussions about the next steps to take in order to protect your organization.

You can read the original article, here.

SophosLabs has released a malware forecast to coincide with the start of RSA Conference 2017. Typically, our research papers focus on Windows, which has traditionally been the largest battleground. While some of the report does indeed look at Microsoft-specific challenges, we decided to focus more on the increasing malware threats directed at platforms where the risks are often not as well understood, specifically Linux, MacOS and Android devices.

SophosLabs has identified four trends that gained steam in 2016 and will likely remain challenges in 2017:

1. Linux malware that exploits vulnerabilities in Internet of Things (IoT) devices
The report starts by looking at how Linux is increasingly being used to target and infect IoT devices that include everything from webcams to household appliances that connect to the internet. Default passwords, out-of-date versions of Linux and a lack of encryption will continue to make these devices ripe for abuse.

2. The pervasiveness of Android malware
Next, the report looks at the top 10 malware families targeting Android devices, the most pervasive being Andr/PornClk: more than 20% of the cases SophosLabs analyzed in 2016 were from this family. It makes money through advertisements and membership registrations, and it is persistent – taking advantage of root privilege and requesting “Device Android administrators”. It downloads Android Application Packages (APKs), drops shortcuts on home screens and collects such information as the device ID, phone number and other sensitive details.

The report also looks at ransomware SophosLabs identified as Andr/Ransom-I, which pretends to be an update for the operating system and such applications as Adobe Flash and Adult Player. When downloaded, it is used to hijack the victim’s phone. While this malware is not nearly as widespread as the others, accounting for only 1% of all samples and didn’t even make our top 10 list, it is still noteworthy because it targets devices running Android 4.3, which is still used by 10% of Android owners – roughly 140m users worldwide.

3. MacOS malware that spreads potentially unwanted applications (PUA)
The report then goes on to look at MacOS malware that is designed to drop password-stealing code, including ransomware such as OSX/KeRanger-A and a variety of badly behaved adware. Though it continues to see fewer malware and ransomware infections than Windows, MacOS saw its fair share in 2016, and we expect that trend to continue.

4. Microsoft Word Intruder malware that is now expanding its targets beyond Office
Finally, the report looks at Windows-based malware kits that have historically targeted Word but are now expanding their horizons to abuse Flash.

The full report, in PDF form, can be downloaded from here.

You can read the original article, here.

Sophos, a global leader in network and endpoint security, today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Invincea, a visionary provider of next-generation malware protection. Invincea’s endpoint security portfolio is designed to detect and prevent unknown malware and sophisticated attacks via its patented deep learning neural-network algorithms. It has been consistently ranked as among the best performing machine learning, signature-less next-generation endpoint technologies in third-party testing and rated highly both for high detection and low false-positive rates.

Headquartered in Fairfax, Va., Invincea was founded by chief executive officer Anup Ghosh to address the rapidly growing zero-day security threat from nation states, cyber criminals and rogue actors. Invincea’s flagship product X by Invincea uses deep learning neural networks and behavioral monitoring to detect previously unseen malware and stops attacks before damage occurs. With a focus on the U.S. government, healthcare and financial services sectors, Invincea has been deployed in some of the most targeted networks in the world.

“By adding Invincea to our portfolio, Sophos is executing on its vision to assemble the most powerful technologies to provide the very best, cutting-edge defenses for our customers,” commented Kris Hagerman, chief executive officer at Sophos. “Invincea is leading the market in machine learning-based threat detection with the combination of superior detection rates and minimal false positives. Invincea will strengthen Sophos’ leading next-gen endpoint protection with complementary predictive defenses that we believe will become increasingly important to the future of endpoint protection and allow us to take full advantage of this significant new growth opportunity. We are proud to welcome the Invincea team to Sophos and look forward to introducing the benefits of this advanced technology to our customers and partners worldwide.”

Sophos is recognized as a leader in endpoint protection today with an expanding set of next-generation technologies such as the signature-less anti-malware, anti-exploit and anti-ransomware technology in Intercept X and the behavior-based analytics, Malicious Traffic Detection and Application Reputation in Sophos Endpoint Protection. The Invincea machine learning malware detection and prevention technology will be fully integrated into the Sophos endpoint protection portfolio, further strengthening Sophos’ leadership in this fast-growing market. The availability of Invincea technology through the Sophos Central security management platform will further enhance the Sophos synchronized security portfolio and real-time intelligence sharing.

“We started Invincea with the vision of using non-signature based technologies, including machine learning, in innovative ways to protect organizations against the most advanced forms of cyber-attack,” commented Anup Ghosh, founder and chief executive officer at Invincea. “X by Invincea represents a new generation in antivirus technology based on deep learning and behavioral monitoring. Joining forces with Sophos presents the perfect opportunity to take our proven, advanced technology to a global audience and make it part of a comprehensive synchronized security system. Sophos is leading the industry in adopting and bringing to market this disruptive new vision for complete, advanced, and integrated security, and we are delighted to join the team and help make it happen.”

Norm Laudermilch, chief operating officer and head of product development at Invincea added, “Invincea set out to disrupt the traditional approach to antivirus, and even now no single technology is enough to fully protect customers. I share the Sophos vision for bringing together a powerful ensemble of next-gen technologies to dramatically improve the overall effectiveness of endpoint protection. Along with our world-class technical team at Invincea, I’m looking forward to joining Sophos and helping deliver on this ambitious and exciting vision.”

The Invincea endpoint security portfolio including X by Invincea will continue to be supported and sold by Invincea and available via Invincea’s network of registered partners. Sophos has agreed to acquire Invincea from its current shareholders for a cash consideration of $100 million with a $20 million earn-out. Sophos will retain the company’s office in Fairfax. Invincea CEO Anup Ghosh and COO Norm Laudermilch will join Sophos in key leadership positions.

You can read the original article, here.

In 2013, organizations worldwide started to take insider threats seriously, thanks to a man named Edward Snowden. Yet, his is just one of many cases of authorized insiders who have caused damage – both intentionally and accidentally – to the organizations that trusted them.  From the Sage Group incident in the UK to the case of Harold Martin to, most recently, the IT admin who allegedly held a university’s email system hostage in exchange for $200,000, insider threats are a constant in today’s world.  What’s worse, these examples don’t even begin to touch on the 50 percent of breaches each year that are caused by inadvertent human error.

Today, CyberArk announced a new capability that helps organizations automatically detect and quickly respond to insider threats. The solution automatically records and analyzes all privileged users’ sessions to instantly identify high-risk activity and alert security teams to a potential incident before it’s too late. By automating this process and detecting threats faster, organizations can gain an opportunity to disrupt inside attackers – and careless users – before these incidents turn into costly, reportable breaches. Here’s how you can use this new capability to improve your insider threat detection, investigation and response processes:

Identify and define risks. Define the activities that are particularly high-risk in your organization, and customize your solution to alert you when these activities occur. The activities considered “high-risk” will likely differ from organization to organization, but if you’re not quite sure where to start, check out these recommendations as a starting point.

Track everything. When your privileged users access high-value systems, record everything they do. By tracking each and every action they take during privileged sessions, you’ll have a data stream that can be automatically analyzed. If something suspicious occurs, you’ll have a full video recording to review exactly what happened.

Automate threat detection. You don’t have the time to manually sift through session recordings to look for suspicious behavior – nor should you. Automate the review of privileged user sessions to detect high-risk activity as soon as it occurs.

Respond quickly. With the automated review of user activity, you can be alerted to potential insider attacks immediately. Once you see the alert, you can investigate the situation, watch the suspicious session if it’s still in-progress, and terminate the session to stop any further damage from occurring.

Prioritize audit review. Enable your auditors to be more effective. By applying risk indexes to recorded sessions, auditors can easily prioritize sessions for review, complete audits faster and deliver greater value to the business.

When it comes to threat detection, there is a lot of data you can analyze, but to protect your organization’s most sensitive assets, you need to focus on what matters most. By proactively analyzing privileged user activity on high-value assets, you can focus your efforts on your most sensitive users and information to gain prioritized, actionable alerts that can help you quickly detect and respond to attackers inside your network.

Read this eBook to learn who your insiders really are, and watch this whiteboard video to learn more about how the solution works.

You can read the original article, here.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have been around since the early 2000’s, and the technology solutions for mitigating such attacks have evolved dramatically over the past few years. Hackers are more sophisticated, and the attacks are increasing, so the old solutions— which never worked perfectly—are even less effective in today’s cyber threat landscape.

Therefore, it’s surprising to see occasional articles that still recommend outdated approaches, such as remote black holing (also called null routing) to stop unwanted traffic. Hosting service providers sometimes try to block bad traffic by injecting a null route with the IP address of the original DDoS victim into their routing infrastructure, to block all DDoS traffic to the victim.

The problem with this approach is that it cannot tell the difference between bad traffic and good traffic; so it not only blocks all DDoS traffic, but it also blocks all good traffic, so it actually supports the DDoS attack against the original victim. If the upstream ISP null routes all good traffic-and-DDoS traffic into the ‘black hole’ it effectively takes the victim offline. This method of defense is simply not acceptable. Furthermore, because most DDoS attacks are highly spoofed, trying to null route on the source IP addresses is nearly impossible.

Modern DDoS mitigation technology effectively detects and blocks DDoS attacks at a granular level, even the low-threshold, sub-saturating attacks that escape human detention. Why block all traffic, when you can simply block the bad traffic, in real time? You can deploy an automated DDoS protection appliance at the network perimeter, and have always on, automatic detection and blocking of DDoS attacks so they never enter your network.

You can read the original article, here.

When most people hear about an “insider threat,” they often assume it’s a malicious employee who is either out to prove a point or trying to selfishly make a buck. Yet, as one startup learned last week, the real “insider threat” is often a well-intentioned person who, in the course of simply trying to do his or her job, accidentally causes something to go wrong.

Human error is a prevalent cause of accidents, which means IT and security teams should prepare accordingly to limit the resulting damage.  Here are a few steps organizations can take to limit the impact of accidental insider damage:

Control executables. Even the most security-aware users fall victim to spear-phishing attacks. By controlling what’s allowed to execute on your systems, you can block attackers’ malware from taking over devices and unknowingly exploiting legitimate user privileges.

Get rid of unnecessary privileges. In the case of GitLab, the team member who accidentally deleted a production database was, in fact, authorized to do so. Yet, too often that’s not the case. According to one recent survey, 91 percent of insiders have access to systems that they shouldn’t. If you can’t access it, you can’t break it.

Monitor user activity. Something about being watched by an authority figure encourages people to think twice about their actions. By recording all activity as users access sensitive IT systems, you can encourage your most privileged users to double check their work and discourage any foul play. This means fewer mistakes, fewer malicious actions and less damage to clean up.

Backup. Then backup some more. If IT teams learned one thing in 2016 (or “The Year of Ransomware” if you read the news), it’s that backing up sensitive data is an imperative. Whether an IT admin accidentally deletes an entire database or a cybercrime ring takes your servers hostage, backups are extremely handy. Just ask any of the companies who learned this lesson the hard way.

You can’t predict which users are accidentally going to damage your systems or fall victim to well- disguised attackers, but you can predict that these things will happen – and more than once. However, with some preparation, you can make sure that when these incidents occur the repercussions are minimal.

You can read the original article, here.

After posting an unprecedented and unbroken streak of perfect test scores in AV-TEST’s comparative test of Android security apps, Sophos Mobile Security added the AV-TEST Best Android Security Award 2016 to the AV-TEST Best Protection Award 2015 from last year.

For 14 consecutive tests, spanning all the way back to September 2014, Sophos Mobile Security has achieved a perfect 100% av-test-best-android-security-award-2016-sophosprotection score in AV-TEST’s comprehensive comparison of the top Android security and antivirus apps. To put this into perspective: Sophos Mobile Security has detected and blocked every single piece of malware that AV-TEST has attempted to throw at it, for more than two years.

In addition to getting a perfect protection score, the app also impressed AV-TEST with its features and usability: “The Android protection from Sophos offers superb malware detection, combined with well-devised security features,” said Andreas Marx, CEO of AV-TEST GmbH.

“Top scores, not only in the test category of protection, but also in terms of usability and a good selection of useful security functions, are among the impressive features offered by Sophos,” commented AV-TEST. The award validates SophosLabs’ efforts to increase testing accuracy this past year. Accuracy was already sharp, but the lab thought it could do better, said Onur Komili, third-party testing manager for infrastructure at Sophos.

“After falling just short of winning the top award in 2015 we knew we could do better, which is exactly what we did,” he said. “It’s been over two years since we last registered a false negative in the AV-Test Android Protection tests and we’re the only vendor who can make that claim. Through a lot of hard work and dedication across all of the team in SophosLabs we managed to close the gap and earned the Best Android Security Award in 2016. We’re very proud to have won this award for the first time and hope to earn many more in the years to come”.

Visit the AV-TEST website to read more about the award and check out the most recent test results. Learn more about the best mobile security product in 2016 and download Sophos Mobile Security for free here.

You can read the original article, here.

We’re excited to share that Sophos has been named a leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms.

We believe our leader placement confirms the quality of Sophos endpoint products and recognizes our ongoing technology innovation, exemplified by Sophos Intercept X.

Intercept X delivers powerful anti-exploit and anti-ransomware capabilities, together with advanced clean-up and root cause analysis tools.

It works both with Sophos Central-managed endpoint protection and also antivirus solutions from other vendors, enhancing protection against advanced, zero-day attacks.

Download the report today to learn more and see why Sophos is positioned as a leader.

Not long ago, and after being recognized by Gartner as a leader in seven consecutive Magic Quadrants for Mobile Data Protection, continued the success by being one of the vendors with the most comprehensive solution in the Gartner report, Market Guide for Information-Centric Endpoint and Mobile Protection.

You can read the original article, here.

Our mission at Sophos is to provide the best security solutions on the market and to make them easier to understand, deploy and manage than any of our competitors’ offerings.

From our continuous assessment of the threat landscape, two things are abundantly clear: first, that email is one of the most problematic sources of infection; and second, it’s the ordinary, well-meaning people who often let poisonous emails into their organizations.

It’s easy to be tricked into clicking on a malicious email. So wouldn’t it be great to create a culture where the first instinct of each user was to think twice — even if just for a moment — before clicking on links, downloading attachments or running software that arrived via email? Think of how many threats could be neutralized before they even have a chance to make their way on to corporate networks.

So we’re excited to be able to help create that culture by announcing Sophos Phish Threat, a phishing attack simulator that’s powerful, thoughtful and very easy to use. You’ll be up and running in minutes, with campaigns to help your users learn to spot phishing links, dangerous attachments, and bogus scripts meant to cripple your organization before they have a chance to do harm.

Simply choose a campaign type, select one or more training modules, pick a simulated phishing message, and decide which users to test. Then sit back as the results roll in: top-notch reporting tells you how many messages have been sent out, who’s clicked, and, of those, who’s gone through the required modules. It couldn’t be easier.

Sophos Phish Threat is the outcome of our worldwide hunt for the right technology to offer. That hunt led us to Silent Break Security and its Phish Threat application.

The simulator was developed by Brady Bloxham, the founder of the company, whose pedigree as a former National Security Agency analyst helped convince us that it’s a perfect fit alongside our other best-of-breed solutions in the Sophos Central Admin management console. Brady’s product and team are the perfect addition to the Sophos family and we’re delighted to have them join us.

Sophos Phish Threat is available today in North America and will be available soon in other regions. Give it a try for free and let us know what you think!

You can read the original article, here.

In recent weeks, the UK retail bank Lloyds was hit with a denial of service attack, which reportedly lasted for two days and attempted to block access to 20 million accounts. The attack was part of a broader DDoS campaign against an unspecified number of UK banks that only affected services at Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland. Availability of services was affected but no customers suffered any financial loss.  The attack has attracted significant media attention, being such a high-profile attack with far-reaching potential consequences.

Motive Behind DDoS Attacks on UK Banks

It has also now emerged that the attack was launched as part of a DDoS extortion strategy, which involved a hacker demanding around £75,000 ransom from the bank. An anonymous hacker reportedly told Motherboard that they contacted Lloyds on 11 January by email, informing the bank about security vulnerabilities, and demanded that they pay a ‘consultation fee’ in bitcoins to avoid being attacked. This element of the attack highlights important concerns regarding the evolution of ransom-related DDoS attacks and the threat they pose to businesses.

Increase in DDoS Attacks for Ransom

For some time now, attackers have been using DDoS attacks as part of a wider campaign of cyber threats and techniques, and the trend of ransom-related DDoS has been growing. In a 2016 study, we found that 80 percent of European IT security professionals expect their business to be threatened with a DDoS ransom attack during the next 12 months.

DDoS extortion campaigns are a common tool in the cyber-threat arsenal, and one of the easiest ways for an attacker to turn a quick profit. When service availability is threatened, the victim company needs to consider the potential loss in downtime, revenues and brand damage. When faced with these costly implications, you can understand why some organizations choose to pay the ransom in hopes of circumventing the attack. But in most cases, this is futile: the promise of withholding attacks after the payout is empty.

Corero’s research, which polled over 100 security professionals at the Infosecurity Europe conference in London, highlights the growing threat of cyber extortion attempts targeting businesses in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. In May 2016, the City of London Police warned of a new wave of ransom driven DDoS attacks orchestrated by Lizard Squad, in which UK businesses were told that they would be targeted by a DDoS attack if they refused to pay five bitcoins, equivalent to just over £1,500. Corero’s Security Operations Center also recorded a sharp increase in hackers targeting their customers with such demands at the end of 2015.

Even more concerning was the finding in the study that almost half of these IT security professionals (43%) thought that it was possible that their organization might pay such a ransom demand.

Effective DDoS Defense Methods

The only way for an organization to defend themselves against the DDoS threat, whether ransom-related or other, is to have an always-on, automated DDoS mitigation solution that detects and mitigates DDoS attack attempts instantaneously, even the low-threshold, short duration attacks—and stops them in their tracks. These low-level, sub-saturating DDoS attacks are often used as a precursor to ransom demands, because they are typically not detected by security teams and allow hackers to find pathways and test for vulnerabilities within a network which can later be exploited through other techniques. For this reason, full visibility across all potential network incursions is an essential part of any defense solution, as is the capability to respond in real-time in the event of an attack.

You can read the original article, here.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been in the news lately for facilitating numerous DDoS exploits across the planet. A global non-profit think tank called the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) has published a paper entitled IoT, a vision for the future. It outlines how the IoT can grow and thrive, especially given that “users’ confidence that their data is secure and private is at an all-time low.” The paper lays out some of the unique challenges posed by securing the IoT and how the network of things can become more sustainable and protect users’ privacy.It is based on an OTA framework of interlocking trust relationships that was released earlier this year.

Securing the IoT is more complex than securing ordinary endpoints. The IoT has a collection of smart devices, such as webcams and Internet-connected printers, which run internal apps (such as web and FTP servers) and cloud services, all of which have their own vulnerabilities.

As the OTA report says, “Every facet and data layer is a potential risk and each data flow must be secured.” Second, building in security for IoT is not usually first and foremost in the minds of every app developer. This is what happened with the Chinese webcam vendor that was part of the botnet exploit mentioned at the beginning of this post. These vendors are usually more interested in having an app that could easily manage the numerous cameras around the world. Not to pick on this vendor, but this is the typical scenario. Most IoT devices are designed without security or privacy needs up front.

Finally, many IoT devices aren’t easily updated when it comes to operating systems or firmware or both. Some of these devices have been in use for more than a decade without any updates. Witness how many IoT devices make use of outdated Windows XP embedded OS, or run on XP hosts. As the OTA report states, “Unfortunately, while such solutions may ship secure, no degree of patching can address design limitations against unforeseen threats decades later.” OTA convened a cross industry working group with the vision to create an IoT Trust Framework, a voluntary self-regulatory model. (You need to be an OTA member in order to download the framework.) They worked with over 100 stakeholders and focused on 31 criteria covering the connected home, office and wearable technologies.

The framework looks at device security, using privacy by design principles, including transparency and device controls, adding lifecycle support and having data portability and transferability. The framework also includes such things as readily available and clearly stated privacy policies, disclosure by the device makers about personally identifiable data collected by each device, descriptions of what data is shared by the device and with whom, and the term and duration of data retention policies.

There are other matters such as forcing default passwords to be changed on first use and using SSL and HTTPS protocols by default. All of these are worthy practices for non-IoT devices too. The OTA framework is a good start at trying to stem the tide of potential IoT security weaknesses. Hopefully it will catch on and prevent future botnet-like exploits from happening.

You can read the original article, here.

According to official data, in 2016 alone, hackers have taken over $1 Billion in the form of ransoms from users trying to retrieve their files after being infected with ransomware.

Ransomware is the most successful malware attack today. It works by locking up your files and crippling your systems until you’ve handed over money. And, one of the biggest problems in the fight against ransomware is the constantly reinvented attacks.

Cybercriminals are finding new methods of spreading the malware, evading detection and even developing ransomware that deletes itself as soon as files are encrypted so that even IT security teams are unable to uncover what variant is on the system.

Ransomware has the potential to cause massive disruption to an organization’s productivity. So it’s vital to understand how to build the best possible defense against it.

The producers of ransomware aren’t just idly waiting for their bit of malware to hit its target. They work in professional teams, constantly updating and enhancing new variants of ransomware – and if you’re caught, the consequences can be severe.

So, with ransomware making headlines for all of the wrong reasons, the pressure is on to put together a top of the line defense.  Starting from scratch can be very tough and time consuming. Sophos can make it easier for you. What you can do? Head over to the Sophos Anti-Ransomware Hub and grab your free anti-ransomware toolkit.

Put together by security experts, the kit gives you great resources to help you better understand the ransomware threat, choose the best possible protection for your organization, and get your users up to speed on best security practices.

It includes:

• Anti-ransomware IT security checklist
• Whitepaper on how to stay protected against ransomware
• Posters for your workplace
• On-demand webinar and PowerPoint deck to help educate your users

You will find more information here.

Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the backbone of the U.S. economy. According to data available in the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Small Business Profile for 2016, SMBs with fewer than 500 employees make up 99.7 percent of all U.S. companies and employ 56.8 million workers—48 percent of the U.S. workforce.

Cyber security is as important for these companies as it is for large multinationals. SMBs also have sensitive information from employees and customers, proprietary information about products, and they often are part of a global supply chain for other companies. Every business is a target, regardless of size, and none can afford to ignore the security of its IT infrastructure.

The SMB: lots of assets, limited resources

SMBs may assume they have little to interest hackers and therefore put cyber security on the back burner. We know this isn’t true. Hospitals, for example, hold sensitive health information and have networked medical devices at risk. Unfortunately, some learned the hard way with episodes of ransomware disrupting business and damaging reputations.

It is not just a company’s own information and systems that are at risk. SMBs have been the channel in high-profile breaches that compromised millions of records. The 2015 breach of a retail company in which data from 40 million customer credit card accounts were stolen and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management breach that exposed more than 20 million employee records are believed to have originated with credentials from third-party vendors. Attackers use a weak link in the supply chain to breach a larger target; they use the compromised credentials to escalate IT privileges and use privileged accounts to compromise critical systems.

Businesses today run on IT. This makes cyber security a business necessity as well as a technology requirement. A strong security program can not only protect a business’s assets, it can also give it a competitive advantage.

Although SMBs face the same cyber security challenges as large businesses, they often have fewer resources and little in-house expertise to address these challenges. This makes it important that they get the best return on their security investments by prioritizing the right things in their security programs.

The need to know

Cloud computing and hosted services can make advanced technology affordable, and SMBs often find it cost-effective to outsource many IT functions, including security. But at the end of the day, each business is still responsible for its own security. Owners and executives need to understand the basics of cyber security, know what their service providers are doing and what questions to ask of them.

Security needs will vary depending on circumstances. Each company must understand its attack surface—vulnerable areas in the IT environment that could breached to compromise systems—and the impact of each potential breach. By assessing the impact, vulnerabilities can be prioritized, so that the cyber security program focuses on the areas needed to manage risks.

The key to protecting an IT infrastructure is privileged accounts. These accounts, if compromised, can effectively turn an intruder into an insider, giving the attacker rights to move throughout the network, escalate privileges, change settings and configurations and access data. When allocating scarce cyber security resources, privileged accounts must be identified, assessed and prioritized.

A single standard for security

An SMB IT infrastructure may not be as complex as a global enterprise, but the benefits of a layered approach to cyber security applies to all. Additionally, there are documented best practices and basic cyber hygiene practices that should be followed.

Learn more about how CyberArk can help your organization protect privileged accounts.

You can read the original article, here.

SE Labs has just released its Q4 2016 testing results, and we’re pleased to report that Sophos Endpoint Protection scored high.

The results are a testament to Sophos Lab’s diligence in protecting customers against real-time malware threats that are constantly evolving.

The charts below, taken from the report, show how Sophos fared in the various SMB and Enterprise categories.

SMB category:

Enterprise category:

You can read the original article, here.