InfoSec and Compliance – With 20 years of blogging experience, DISC InfoSec blog is dedicated to providing trusted insights and practical solutions for professionals and organizations navigating the evolving cybersecurity landscape. From cutting-edge threats to compliance strategies, this blog is your reliable resource for staying informed and secure. Dive into the content, connect with the community, and elevate your InfoSec expertise!
Data-deletion service’s patent covers removing personal information such as geolocation, biometrics, and phone records from a vehicle by using a user-computing device
â Privacy4Cars, the first privacy-tech company focused on solving the privacy and security issues posed by vehicle data to protect consumers and automotive businesses, announced today that it has secured a new patent, further expanding its patent coverage for removing privacy information from a vehicle by using a user computing device. This patent grant marks the fourth patent that the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has awarded to Privacy4Cars in the past three years and provides further evidence that the company is the leading innovator in the vehicle data privacy and security field.
Since its launch in 2018, Privacy4Cars has emerged as the industry standard across auto finance companies (including captives, national and regional banks, auto lenders, and credit unions), fleets and fleet management companies, and franchised and independent dealerships. Many of today’s top companies in the automotive space â including the three largest OEM’s captives â have adopted the data-deletion service powered by the Privacy4Cars platform, and a growing number of industry associations have begun speaking out about the need to clear personal information from cars, and tapping Privacy4Cars as a resource to educate members.
“Used vehicles are akin to large, unencrypted hard drives full of consumers’ sensitive Personal Information, including identifiers, geolocation, biometrics, and phone records,” said Andrea Amico, CEO and founder of Privacy4Cars. “This creates service, reputation, and increasingly major regulatory challenges, including the obligations companies face under the new Safeguards Rule (coming into effect on Dec. 9, 2022) and a host of existing and new state laws. At the same time, federal and local agencies are increasingly concerned about the personal information vehicles capture and store â which is driving more and more auto businesses to look for reliable solutions to simply and effectively delete data from vehicles while creating by design detailed compliance logs that prove their efforts,” he continued. “This new patent demonstrates Privacy4Cars’ commitment to meet the growing compliance and service needs of our partners. Privacy4Cars has established itself as the clear leader in the vehicle privacy space and companies increasingly recognize the superior efficiency, effectiveness, and compliance outcomes our proprietary solution offers, making Privacy4Cars the only obvious choice”.
Privacy4Cars’ newly awarded U.S. Patent No. 11,494,514 expands the scope of patent protection for the vehicle data privacy and security innovations of Privacy4Cars’ U.S. Patent No. 11,256,827, U.S. Patent No. 11,157,648 and U.S. Patent No. 11,113,415. The new patent covers the use of a user computing device to remove privacy information from a vehicle and to create feedback about the information removal activity, including deletion logs for use in legal compliance applications.
Privacy4Cars is currently available in the US, Canada, UK, EU, Middle East, India, and Australia, and plans to further expand its geographical reach to address the growing number of countries that have comprehensive privacy and data security laws. Privacy4Cars is available to consumers as a free-to-download app, and to businesses as a subscription service. Businesses can use Privacy4Cars’ stand-alone app or choose to integrate Privacy4Cars’ Software Development Kit to easily embed its patented data deletion solution as a feature inside their own apps.
For more information about Privacy4Cars, please visit: https://privacy4cars.com.ABOUT PRIVACY4CARS
Privacy4Cars is the first and only technology company focused on identifying and resolving data privacy issues across the automotive ecosystem. Our mission, Driving Privacy, means offering a suite of services to expand protections for individuals and companies alike, by focusing on privacy, safety, security, and compliance. Privacy4Cars’ patented solution helps users quickly and confidently clear vehicle users’ personal information (phone numbers, call logs, location history, garage door codes, and more) while building compliance records. For more information, please visit: https://privacy4cars.com/
A new version of ISO 27001 was published this week, introducing several significant changes in the way organisations are expected to manage information security.
The Standard was last revised almost a decade ago (although a new iteration of the supplementary standard ISO 27002 was published in February 2022), meaning that the release of ISO 27001:2022 has been much needed and highly anticipated.
Whatâs changing?
The good news for organisations is that ISO 27001:2022 doesnât drastically overhaul their compliance requirements. There are new requirements on planned changes and how your organisation should deal with them, as well as a greater focus on how you must deal with the needs and expectations of interested parties.
Annex A of ISO 27001 now refers to the updated information security controls in ISO 27002:2022, and the Standard requires organisations to document and monitor objectives.
It also aligns its terminology with that used across other ISO management system standards.
Another notable aspect of its terminology is that ISO 27002:2022 no longer refers to itself as a âcode of practiceâ. This better reflects its purpose as a reference set of information security controls.
However, the most significant changes with the 2022 version of ISO 27002 are in its structure. It is no longer divided into 14 control categories, and is instead split into four âthemesâ: organisational, people, physical and technological.
Meanwhile, although the 2022 version of ISO 27002 is significantly longer than its predecessor, the total number of controls has decreased from 114 to 93.
This is because many of its controls have been reordered and merged. Only 35 controls are unchanged, while 11 completely new requirements have been added. These are:
Threat intelligence
Information security for use of cloud services
ICT readiness for business continuity
Physical security monitoring
Configuration management
Information deletion
Data masking
Data leakage prevention
Monitoring activities
Web filtering
Secure coding
The new and amended controls are also categorised according to five types of âattributeâ: control type, operational capabilities, security domains, cybersecurity concepts and information security properties.
This change is intended to make it easier to highlight and view all controls of a certain type, such as all preventive controls, or all controls related to confidentiality.
How will this affect organisations implementing ISO 27001?
The introduction of ISO 27001:2022 wonât have an immediate effect on organisations that are currently certified to ISO 27001:2013 or are in the process of achieving certification.
For the time being, organisations should continue to follow the 2013 version of the Standard. This means, for example, that the SoA (Statement of Applicability) should refer to the controls listed in Annex A of ISO 27001:2013, while the 2022 version of the Standard should be used only as a reference.
Indeed, the reason that the updated version is being published now is to give organisations time to familiarise themselves with the new controls before embarking on an implementation project.
The controls listed in ISO 27002:2022 can be considered an alternative control set that you will have to compare with the existing Annex A â just as you would with any other alternative control set.
ISO 27002:2022 has an annex that compares its controls with the 2013 iteration of the Standard, so this should be relatively straightforward.
What next?
There is a three-year transition period for certified organisations to revise their management system to conform to a new version of a standard, so there will be plenty of time to make the necessary changes.
However, itâs never wise to put off the planning process until the last minute. Implementation will take several months, and itâs worth knowing whatâs expected of you as soon as possible.
You can begin by reading the Standard for yourself. You can purchase a digital copy of ISO 27001:2022 from our website, and we recommend comparing the updated version to the 2013 edition and your current compliance practices to determine what adjustments youâll have to make.
If youâre unsure how to proceed, our team of experts are here to help. Having led the worldâs first ISO 27001 certification project, we understand what it takes to implement the Standard.
Speak to one of our experts for more information on how we can support you.
A bug bounty hunter called David SchĂŒtz has just published a detailed report describing how he crossed swords with Google for several months over what he considered a dangerous Android security hole.
According to SchĂŒtz, he stumbled on a total Android lockscreen bypass bug entirely by accident in June 2022, under real-life conditions that could easily have happened to anyone.
In other words, it was reasonable to assume that other people might find out about the flaw without deliberately setting out to look for bugs, making its discovery and public disclosure (or private abuse) as a zero-day hole much more likely than usual.
Unfortunately, it didnât get patched until November 2022, which is why heâs only disclosed it now.
A serenditious battery outage
Simply put, he found the bug because he forgot to turn off or to charge his phone before setting off on a lengthy journey, leaving the device to run low on juice unnoticed while he was on the road.
According to SchĂŒtz, he was rushing to send some messages after getting home (weâre guessing heâd been on a plane) with the tiny amount of power still left in the batteryâŠ
âŠwhen the phone died.
Weâve all been there, scrabbling for a charger or a backup battery pack to get the phone rebooted to let people know we have arrived safely, are waiting at baggage reclaim, have reached the train station, expect to get home in 45 minutes, could stop at the shops if anyone urgently needs anything, or whatever weâve got to say.
And weâve all struggled with passwords and PINs when weâre in a rush, especially if theyâre codes that we rarely use and never developed âmuscle memoryâ for typing in.
In SchĂŒtzâs case, it was the humble PIN on his SIM card that stumped him, and because SIM PINs can be as short as four digits, theyâre protected by a hardware lockout that limits you to three guesses at most. (Weâve been there, done that, locked ourselves out.)
After that, you need to enter a 10-digit âmaster PINâ known as the PUK, short for personal unblocking key, which is usually printed inside the packaging in which the SIM gets sold, which makes it largely tamper-proof.
And to protect against PUK guessing attacks, the SIM automatically fries itself after 10 wrong attempts, and needs to be replaced, which typically means fronting up to a mobile phone shop with identification.
What did I do with that packaging?
Fortunately, because he wouldnât have found the bug without it, SchĂŒtz located the original SIM packaging stashed somewhere in a cupboard, scratched off the protective strip that obscures the PUK, and typed it in.
At this point, given that he was in the process of starting up the phone after it ran out of power, he should have seen the phoneâs lockscreen demanding him to type in the phoneâs unlock codeâŠ
âŠbut, instead, he realised he was at the wrong sort of lockscreen, because it was offering him a chance to unlock the device using only his fingerprint.
Thatâs only supposed to happen if your phone locks while in regular use, and isnât supposed to happen after a power-off-and-reboot, when a full passcode reauthentication (or one of those swipe-to-unlock âpattern codesâ) should be enforced.
Is there really a âlockâ in your lockscreen?
As you probably know from the many times weâve written about lockscreen bugs over the years on Naked Security, the problem with the word âlockâ in lockscreen is that itâs simply not a good metaphor to represent just how complex the code is that manages the process of âlockingâ and âunlockingâ modern phones.
A modern mobile lockscreen is a bit like a house front door that has a decent quality deadbolt lock fittedâŠ
âŠbut also has a letterbox (mail slot), glass panels to let in light, a cat flap, a loidable spring lock that youâve learned to rely on because the deadbolt is a bit of a hassle, and an external wireless doorbell/security camera thatâs easy to steal even though it contains your Wi-Fi password in plaintext and the last 60 minutes of video footage it recorded.
Oh, and, in some cases, even a secure-looking front door will have the keys âhiddenâ under the doormat anyway, which is pretty much the situation that SchĂŒtz found himself in on his Android phone.
A map of twisty passageways
Modern phone lockscreens arenât so much about locking your phone as restricting your apps to limited modes of operation.
This typically leaves you, and your apps, with lockscreen access to a plentiful array of âspecial caseâ features, such as activating the camera without unlokcking, or popping up a curated set of notification mesaages or email subject lines where anyone could see them without the passcode.
What SchĂŒtz had come across, in a perfectly unexceptionable sequence of operations, was a fault in whatâs known in the jargon as the lockscreen state machine.
A state machine is a sort of graph, or map, of the conditions that a program can be in, along with the legal ways that the program can move from one state to another, such as a network connection switching from âlisteningâ to âconnectedâ, and then from âconnectedâ to âverifiedâ, or a phone screen switching from âlockedâ either to âunlockable with fingerprintâ or to âunlockable but only with a passcodeâ.
As you can imagine, state machines for complex tasks quickly get complicated themselves, and the map of different legal paths from one state to another can end up full of twists, and turnsâŠ
âŠand, sometimes, exotic secret passageways that no one noticed during testing.
Indeed, SchĂŒtz was able to parlay his inadvertent PUK discovery into a generic lockscreen bypass by which anyone who picked up (or stole, or otherwise had brief access to) a locked Android device could trick it into the unlocked state armed with nothing more than a new SIM card of their own and a paper clip.
In case youâre wondering, the paper clip is to eject the SIM already in the phone so that you can insert the new SIM and trick the phone into the âI need to request the PIN for this new SIM for security reasonsâ state. SchĂŒtz admits that when he went to Googleâs offices to demonstrate the hack, no one had a proper SIM ejector, so they first tried a needle, with which SchĂŒtz managed to stab himself, before succeeding with a borrowed earring. We suspect that poking the needle in point first didnât work (itâs hard to hit the ejector pin with a tiny point) so he decided to risk using it point outwards while âbeing really carefulâ, thus turning a hacking attempt into a literal hack. (Weâve been there, done that, pronged ourselves in the fingertip.)
Gaming the system with a new SIM
Given that the attacker knows both the PIN and the PUK of the new SIM, they can deliberately get the PIN wrong three times and then immediately get the PUK right, thus deliberately forcing the lockscreen state machine into the insecure condition that SchĂŒtz discovered accidentally.
With the right timing, SchĂŒtz found that he could not only land on the fingerprint unlock page when it wasnât supposed to appear, but also trick the phone into accepting the successful PUK unlock as a signal to dismiss the fingerprint screen and âvalidateâ the entire unlock process as if heâd typed in the phoneâs full lock code.
Unlock bypass!
Unfortunately, much of SchĂŒtzâs article describes the length of time that Google took to react to and to fix this vulnerability, even after the companyâs own engineers had decided that the bug was indeed repeatable and exploitable.
As SchĂŒtz himself put it:
This was the most impactful vulnerability that I have found yet, and it crossed a line for me where I really started to worry about the fix timeline and even just about keeping it as a âsecretâ myself. I might be overreacting, but I mean not so long ago the FBI was fighting with Apple for almost the same thing.
Disclosure delays
Given Googleâs attitude to bug disclosures, with its own Project Zero team notoriously firm about the need to set strict disclosure times and stickto them, you might have expected the company to stick to its 90-days-plus-14-extra-in-special-cases rules.
But, according to SchĂŒtz, Google couldnât manage it in this case.
Apparently, heâd agreed a date in October 2022 by which he planned to disclose the bug publicly, as heâs now done, which seems like plenty of time for a bug he discovered back in June 2022.
But Google missed that October deadline.
The patch for the flaw, designated bug number CVE-2022-20465, finally appeared in Androidâs November 2022 security patches, dated 2022-11-05, with Google describing the fix as: âDo not dismiss keyguard after SIM PUK unlock.â
In technical terms, the bug was whatâs known a race condition, where the part of the operating system that was watching the PUK entry process to keep track of the âis it safe to unlock the SIM now?â state ended up producing a success signal that trumped the code that was simultaneously keeping track of âis is safe to unlock the entire device?â
Still, SchĂŒtz is now significantly richer thanks to Googleâs bug bounty payout (his report makes it clear he was hoping for $100,000, but he had to settle for $70,000 in the end).
And he did hold off on disclosing the bug after the 15 October 2022 deadline, accepting that discretion is the sometimes better part of valour, saying:
I [was] too scared to actually put out the live bug and since the fix was less than a month away, it was not really worth it anyway. I decided to wait for the fix.
What to do?
Check that your Android is up to date: go to Settings > Security > Security update > Check for update.
Note that when we visited the Security update screen, having not used our Pixel phone for a while, Android boldly proclaimed Your system is up to date, showing that it had checked automatically a minute or so earlier, but still told us we were on the October 5, 2022 security update.
We forced a new update check manually and were immediately told Preparing system updateâŠ, followed by a short download, a lengthy preparatory stage, and then a reboot request.
After rebooting we haad reached the November 5, 2022 patch level.
We then went back and did one more Check for update to confirm that there were no fixes still outstanding.
Vulnerability management has always been as much art as science. However, the rapid changes in both IT networks and the external threat landscape over the last decade have made it exponentially more difficult to identify and remediate the vulnerabilities with the greatest potential impact on the enterprise.
With a record of 18,378 vulnerabilities reported by the National Vulnerability Database in 2021 and an influx of new attack techniques targeting increasingly complex and distributed environments, how can CISOs know where to start?
Why has maintaining network visibility become such a challenge?
Heavy investments into digital transformation and cloud migration have rendered significant, foundational changes to the enterprise IT environment. Gartner predicts end-user spending on public cloud services will reach almost 600 billion in 2023, up from an estimated $494.7 billion this year and $410.9 in 2021.
Long gone are the days when security teams could concern themselves only with connections to and from the data center; now they must establish effective visibility and control of a sprawling, complex network that includes multiple public clouds, SaaS services, legacy infrastructure, the home networks of remote users, etc. Corporate assets are no longer limited to servers, workstations, and a few printers; teams must now secure virtual machines on premise and in the cloud, IoT devices, mobile devices, microservices, cloud data stores, and much more â making visibility and monitoring infinitely more complex and challenging.
In many cases, security investments have not kept up with the rapid increase in network scope and complexity. In other cases, agile processes have outpaced security controls. This results in security teams struggling to achieve effective visibility and control of their networks, resulting in misconfigurations, compliance violations, unnecessary risk, and improperly prioritized vulnerabilities that provide threat actors with easy attack paths.
Adversaries are specifically targeting these blind spots and security gaps to breach the network and evade detection.
What are the most common mistakes being made in attempting to keep up with threats?
With the average cost of a data breach climbing to $4.35 million in 2022, CISOs and their teams are under extraordinary pressure to reduce cyber risk as much as possible. But many are hindered by a lack of comprehensive visibility or pressure to deliver agility beyond what can be delivered without compromising security. One of the most common issues we encounter is an inability to accurately prioritize vulnerabilities based on the actual risk they pose to the enterprise. With thousands of vulnerabilities discovered every year, determining which vulnerabilities need to be patched and which can be accepted as incremental risk is a critical process.
The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) has become a useful guidepost, providing security teams with generalized information for each vulnerability. Prioritizing the vulnerabilities with the highest CVSS score may seem like a logical and productive approach. However, every CISO should recognize that CVSS scores alone are not an accurate way to measure the risk a vulnerability poses to their individual enterprise.
To accurately measure risk, more contextual information is required. Security teams need to understand how a vulnerability relates to their specific environment. While high-profile threats like Heartbleed may seem like an obvious priority, a less public vulnerability with a lower CVSS score exposed to the Internet in the DMZ may expose the enterprise to greater actual risk.
These challenges are exacerbated by the fact that IT and security teams often lose track of assets and applications as ownership is pushed to new enterprise teams and the cloud makes it easier than ever for anyone in the enterprise to spin up new resources. As a result, many enterprises are riddled with assets that are unmonitored and remain dangerously behind on security updates.
Why context is critical
With resources like the National Vulnerability Database at their fingertips, no CISO lacks for data on vulnerabilities. In fact, most enterprises do not lack for contextual data either. Enterprise security, IT, and GRC stacks provide a continuous stream of data which can be leveraged in vulnerability management processes. However, these raw streams of data must be carefully curated and combined with vulnerability information to be turned into actionable context â and it is this in this process where many enterprises falter.
Unfortunately, most enterprises do not have the resources to patch every vulnerability. In some circumstances, there may be a business case for not patching a vulnerability immediately, or at all. Context from information sources across the enterprise enables standardized risk decisions to be made, allowing CISOs to allocate their limited resources where they will have the greatest impact on the security of the enterprise.
Making the most of limited resources with automation
There was a time when a seasoned security professional could instinctively assess the contextual risk of a threat based on their experience and familiarity with the organisationâs infrastructure. However, this approach cannot scale with the rapid expansion of the enterprise network and the growing number of vulnerabilities that must be managed. Even before the ongoing global security skills shortage, no organization had the resources to manually aggregate and correlate thousands of fragments of data to create actionable context.
In todayâs constantly evolving threat landscape, automation offers the best chance for keeping up with vulnerabilities and threats. An automated approach can pull relevant data from the security, IT, and GRC stacks and correlate it into contextualized information which can be used as the basis for automated or manual risk decisions.
Nearly a third of CISOs or IT security leaders in the United States and the United Kingdom are considering leaving their current role, according to research by BlackFog.
Of those considering leaving their current role, a third of those would do so within the next six months, according to the survey, which polled more than 500 IT security leaders.
The report also found that, among the top issues security pros have with their current role, the lack of work-life balance is the most troublesomeâcited by three in 10 survey respondents.
More than a quarter (27%) of respondents said that too much time was spent on firefighting rather than focusing on strategic issues.
Twenty percent said they felt that keeping their teamsâ skill levels in line with new frameworks and models such as zero-trust was a âserious challengeâ, while 43% of respondents said they found it difficult to keep pace with the newest innovations in the cybersecurity market.
Using Automation to Ease the Pressure
Phil Neray, vice president of cyber defense strategy at CardinalOps, a detection posture management company, said both CISOs and security operations center (SOC) personnel take pride in being cybersecurity defenders for their organizations and both groups feel the pain of information overload and constantly being on call to respond to the latest emergencies.
âWhat needs to change? The CISOâs peers in the business need to understand that cybersecurity risk is a top business risk, not just an IT issue, and they need to allocate higher budgets to support a higher level of staffing in the SOC,â he said.
In addition, Neray said by investing in more automation for the SOC, CISOs and their teams will be freed from performing mundane tasks.
âThis way, they can direct their human creativity and innovation toward proactive activities like threat hunting and remediating gaps in their defensive posture, rather than always being reactive,â he explained.
Darren Guccione, CEO and co-founder at Keeper Security, a provider of zero-trust and zero-knowledge cybersecurity software, added that there is âabsolutely no denyingâ that being a CISO is one of the most difficult and demanding roles in any company.
âThe board of directors and fellow business leaders must support their CISOâs priorities and needs, particularly when theyâre faced with a cyberattack or data breach,â he said. âWithout that support, talented CISOs wonât stick around as there are plenty of other job opportunities awaiting them.â
Indeed, the BlackFog report noted recruiting is a challenge globally and with stiff competition to attract the best talent, organizations need to address the well-being and work-life balance issues that have persisted across the industry.
Acknowledging CISO Burnout
Sounil Yu, CISO at JupiterOne, a provider of cybersecurity asset management and governance solutions, noted that CISOs face an uncommonly high risk of burnout due to the nature of security work.
âBurnout is more common than most realize,â he said. âAcknowledging burnout risks is an important way to be supportive and to let team members know that they are not alone.â
Yu pointed out that CISOs cannot personally shoulder the burden of mitigating burnout.
âInstead, CISOs should educate their companyâs board and fellow executive leaders on security burnout risks and collaborate with HR to improve resources such as employee resource programs, flexible working arrangements and systems of reward and recognition,â he said.
John Bambenek, principal threat hunter at Netenrich, a security and operations analytics SaaS company, said CISOs are facing the same burnout risk as cybersecurity professionals with one key differenceâthe CISO is the designated âthroat to chokeâ when things go awry.
âOne of the biggest changes to be made in the C-suite to improve the situation for security leaders would be focusing on freeing the CISO to work on strategic issues,â he says. âConstant firefighting burns out everyone up and down the ladder. You can handle that with line staff with job rotation, but the CISO needs to have the resources to make their life better overall.â
Bambenek added that mandatory PTO that involves someone else tending to the fires while the CISO is gone would help, too.
âPTO where you are still on call isnât PTO,â he noted. âItâs just working from home.â
He explained that organizations that are well-funded should have emerging technology labs where they can explore both new technology and new security tools to help address the challenges CISOs are facing.
âA big part of this problem is threats evolve with rapid changes in technologyâsecurity is playing catch-up behind both,â Bambenek said.Â
CrowdStrike achieved 99% detection coverage by conclusively reporting 75 of the 76 adversary techniques during the MITRE ATT&CK evaluation.
Leveraging the power of the CrowdStrike FalconŸ platform with integrated threat intelligence and patented tooling, the CrowdStrike FalconŸ Complete and CrowdStrikeŸ Falcon OverWatch™ managed threat hunting teams identified the adversary and associated tradecraft within minutes.
Closed-book evaluations such as this provide the most realistic reflection of how a security vendor would perform in a customer environment. CrowdStrikeâs combination of market-leading technology and elite human expertise led the evaluation, which is the gold standard in managed detection and response testing. Â
MITRE does not rank or rate participants; the following is CrowdStrikeâs analysis of the results provided by MITRE Engenuity.
Researchers at Zimperium zLabs recently identified a new Chrome browser botnet called âCloud9â that is intent on stealing the following information using malicious extensions:-
This method is becoming increasingly attractive for malware developers to target web browsers as they contain the most valuable information about a user.
In the course of everyday activities, we can find out a lot about ourselves through our keystrokes or session cookies. A breach of security or a violation of privacy can be caused by having access to such information.
Cloud9 botnet is a RAT that affects all Chromium-based web browsers, which are popular among consumers like Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Moreover, threat actors could exploit this RAT to remotely execute arbitrary commands.
Technical Analysis
The official Chrome web store doesnât host this malicious Chrome extension, so it cannot be downloaded from there.Â
The distribution channel of this malware relies on communities that are operated by threat actors, wherein the malware will be hidden by users of the tool before it gets delivered to the victims by the tool itself.
In terms of the Javascript files that make up the extension, there are only three. While the primary functionality of the extension can be located in a file called âcampaign.jsâ which contains most of its functionality.
According to the report, During the initialization of campaign.js, the window.navigator API is used to identify the systemâs operating system. Once the target has been identified, a Javascript file is injected into the victimâs computer system as a method to mine cryptocurrency using the resources of the victimâs computer system.
Next, for further proceedings, it injects another script known as cthulhu.js which comprises a full-chain exploit for the following flaws:-
CVE-2019-11708 (Firefox)
CVE-2019-9810 (Firefox)
CVE-2014-6332 (Internet Explorer)
CVE-2016-0189 (Internet Explorer)
CVE-2016-7200 (Edge)
As soon as the vulnerabilities are exploited, Windows malware is automatically installed on the host machine and executed. This gives attackers even more opportunities to compromise systems and carry out even more severe malware attacks.
While one of the sophisticated inclusion of this malware is âClipper,â a module that keeps scanning the clipboard of the system for copied data like:-
Passwords
Credit cards details
In addition to injecting ads into webpages silently, Cloud9 is also capable of generating revenue for its operators by generating ad impressions.
nformation Security Risks assisted Business models for banking & financial services(BFS) institutions have evolved from being a monolithic banking entity to multi-tiered service entity.
What this means to BFS companies is that they need to be more updated and relevant with regards to technology & the quality of all services provided to their clients. The most opted methodology to do that today is by means of outsourcing services to vendors & 3rd parties.
Though outsourcing is cost beneficial to companies, this approach comes with its own set of drawbacks. It is judicious to say that every outsourcing enterprise should be aware of the risks that vendors bring to the table.
Though vendors bring in a lot of operational Information Security Risks depending on the business engagement, a methodology to manage only the 3rd party Information Security Risks are discussed here.
Just to provide a sense of the impact that vendor Information Security Risks brings to organizations, below are some of the facts from surveys conducted by Big 4 consulting companies like PwC & Deloitte.
âThe Number of data breaches attributed to 3rd party vendors has increased by 22% since 2015â- Source PwC
According to Deloitte â94.3% of executives have low to moderate confidence in their third-party risks management tools & technology, and 88.6% have low to moderate confidence in the quality of the underlying Information Security Risks management processâ .
We know the problem now, how do you begin resolving it??
A perfect place to begin is with the sourcing team and /or procurement team depending on how your organization is set up. In an ideal world, these teams are expected to have an inventory of all vendors, 3rd parties & Partners of your organization.
Once we have this inventory in place, the IT vendor risk management (IT- VRM) team needs to segregate the IT vendors from the non-IT ones. This is a onetime activity. For future needs, it is recommended to have the sourcing team segregate vendors basis on their business engagement (IT vs Non-IT).
Understanding your Vendors & the Information Security Risks they carry:
One of the simplest & efficient way to understand your vendors is by having a scoping checklist, that details the vendor business with your organization, kind of data touchpoints & exchanges, kind of Information Security Risks that your organization is exposed by this outsourced business.
This information is usually available with the vendor manager representing your organization in the vendor relationships.
Below is the list of Information Security Risks pointers (not limited to) that you might want to consider asking your vendor manager.
Regulatory risk â Does this relationship affect your regulatory posture? What is the penalty associated with such regulatory non-compliance?
Reputational riskâ Does this service impact your clients & the reputation you hold with them?
Financial riskâ Any financial Information Security Risks associated with business engagement?
Information security risks â what data are shared as part of the business engagement with the vendor? how secure is the vendor with regards to protecting your organization data?
Resiliency risks â Does the vendor introduce any single point of failures to your business practices?
For understanding the level of assessment to be performed with the vendor, you will need to understand the vendorâs business operating model.
Below is an indicative list of themes that you might want to discuss with vendor manager to understand the scope of the vendor assessment.
Data attributes shared & received with the vendor, volume of data & frequency
Mode of communication/interfaces with a vendor â Mail, remote connection to vendor network, the remote connection from vendor to your internal network, data upload only, data download only, vendors are brought on-site & connect from your offices to provide services
Services provided â Data center services, Application provider, Cloud service provider, Data processing services, & many others.
Well-known cybersecurity researcher Fabian BrĂ€unlein has featured not once but twice before on Naked Security for his work in researching the pros and cons of Appleâs AirTag products.
In 2021, he dug into the protocol devised by Apple for keeping tags on tags and found that the cryprography was good, making it hard for anyone to keep tabs on you via an AirTag that you owned.
Even though the system relies on other people calling home with the current location of AirTags in their vicinity, neither they nor Apple can tell whose AirTag theyâve reported on.
But BrÀunlein figured out a way that you could, in theory at least, use this anonymous calling home feature as a sort-of free, very low-bandwidth, community-assisted data reporting service, using public keys for data signalling:
He also looked at AirTags from the opposite direction, namely how likely it is that youâd spot an AirTag that someone had deliberately hidden in your belongings, say in your rucksack, so that they could track you under cover of tracking themselves:
Indeed, the issue of âAirTag stalkingâ hit the news in June 2022 when an Indiana woman was arrested for running over and killing a man in whose car she later admitted to planting an AirTag in order to keep track of his comings and goings.
In that tragic case, which took place outside a bar, she could probably have guessed were he was anyway, but law enforcement staff were nevertheless obliged to bring the AirTag into their investigations.
When security scans reveal more than they should
Now, BrÀunlein is back with another worthwhile warning, this time about the danger of cloud-based security lookup services that give you a free (or paid) opinion about cybersecurity data you may have collected.
Many Naked Security readers will be familiar with services such as Googleâs Virus Total, where you can upload suspicious files to see what static virus scanning tools (including Sophos, as it happens) make of it.
Sadly, lots of people use Virus Total to gauge how good a security product might be at blocking a threat in real life when its primary purpose is to disambiguate threat naming, to provide a simple and reliable way for people to share suspicious files, and to assist with prompt and secure sample sharing across the industry. (You only have to upload the file once.)
This new report by BrÀunlein looks at a similar sort of public service, this time urlscan.io, which aims to provide a public query-and-reporting tool for suspicious URLs.
The idea is simple⊠anyone whoâs worried about a URL they just received, for example in what they think is a phishing email, can submit the domain name or URL, either manually via the website, or automatically via a web-based interface, and get back a bunch of data about it.
Like this, checking to see what the site (and the community at large) think of the URLÂ http://example.com/whatalotoftextthisis:
You can probably see where Fabian BrÀunlein went with this if you realise that you, or indeed anyone else with the time to keep an eye on things, may be able to retrieve the URL you just looked up.
Recently, the Forgepoint team announced a new alliance with global banking leader Santander to increase cyber investment worldwide, specifically in Europe, Israel, and Latin America. Santander will also be the primary investor in Forgepointâs next fund, slated for 2023, with a nearly $300 million goal.
When you look at todayâs cybersecurity industry landscape, what drives innovation?
Innovation is always driven by a need. What does the market need right now? What do customers need? How can the ecosystem adapt to serve those needs? Innovation provides solutions that expedite answers to problems, and successful businesses are built when they do this.
Todayâs rapidly changing macro environment combined with the demands of an evolving threat landscape makes this the perfect time for company building. Now, businesses that did not satisfy needs will no longer survive, while those that do will thrive.
The cybersecurity market is prone to mergers and acquisitions. How will this impact the future of the market?
While we may see a wave of consolidation, which is expected given the amount of venture financing committed to cybersecurity in the last few years, organizations now face the decision to either raise more funding in a challenging environment as valuations normalize or seek an acquisition, as growth investors shift away due to market conditions.
Public and larger private companies will continue to buy startups that are innovative and leading-edge, filling gaps in their current offerings to offer wider, more integrated solutions. These companies provide new capabilities that address new threats and give them access to high-growth market segments while helping them stay relevant.
Ultimately, M&A activity will have a positive impact on the industry because large enterprise customers benefit from integrated solutions that reduce the total cost of ownership of these solutions. Customers also benefit from these integrated services as they help meet critical enterprise needs and ease the strain caused by the global shortage of cybersecurity professionals.
Company founders spend a lot of time preparing their pitch, but it can take a long time to get VC, even with massively successful products. What advice would you give to those getting ready to talk to VCs?
I advise founders to take a long-term mindset and remember that fundraising is a people-driven industry. While initial timelines may achieve certain funding goals, securing funding means building real relationships and creating a network of trusted partners. Taking the time to do this well will have an immediate impact upon your success.
In a competitive fundraising environment, VCs have to make quick decisions. To do that, we depend on both our own experience, as well as the experiences of our network and our close connections who we can rely on to provide strong counsel. An introduction to a startup from a trusted friend with relevant expertise and background is one of the most productive relationship builders â for both sides.
These trusted relationships will open the right doors for founders, then itâs all about how you tell your story to the VC. The clarity and direction of your thinking can tell a lot about the companyâs market position and opportunity youâre out to tackle, as well as your future priorities. Here, introspection and self-awareness shine.
Having a people-driven mindset is helpful because it has multiple natural side benefits. Networking requires us to build relationships with individuals beyond the short-term, casting a net that can include VCs as well as future startup customers or potential hires. Networking with VCs may also suggest you meet with others and while these introductions may not be directly about fundraising, they can help you get exposure to potential customers, team members, and advisors for input on your tech, business, and model. This leads to opportunities to learn and refine your approach from diverse perspectives.
What do you value most in an entrepreneur you want to invest in?
The traits that I find most important in entrepreneurs are subject matter expertise and the know-how to execute. Prior experience as an entrepreneur with a track record of building commercial offerings successfully commercialized and adopted by customers will allow for deep domain knowledge of the sector that theyâre working in, which is very important when scaling organizations. In my experience, serial entrepreneurs typically have a leg up compared to first-timers.
That being said, all of this doesnât matter if an entrepreneur doesnât know how to lead. The ability to recruit and retain high quality talent, and then continuing to work with them to grow as the organization expands is a very important trait that is paramount to the success of any organization.
What advice would you give to European and Israeli companies trying to get funding in the US?
Forgepoint partners with emerging companies from Croatia to Mexico, Madrid to Tel Aviv, and has been actively tracking thousands of companies worldwide. It is abundantly clear that the cyber ecosystems across Europe, Latin America and Israel have an incredibly rich talent pool, strong demand signal and robust capital accessibility â and that cybersecurity is a growing, global problem.
While the current macro environment is challenging, organizations looking to get funding in the US will succeed if their product and complete offering solve a demonstrated need in the market. When it comes down to it, itâs all about five fundamentals:
Large market opportunity
Differentiated offerings that are hard to replicate
Sound go-to-market strategy
Ensuring the right team is in place
Product market fit as demonstrated by early customer traction
Israeli and European companies trying to get funding in the US should be able to clearly speak to these fundamentals, demonstrating how theyâll incorporate the US into their go-to-market and growth plans as they partner with investors, form channel alliances, and further develop their businesses. Thinking this through can be enormously helpful in identifying which VCs to approach â which will bring value and help augment your business.
Researchers from Positive Security uncovered a website scanner called âUrlscanâ that unintentionally leaking sensitive URLs and data due to misconfiguration.
It appears that a third party accidentally leaked the GitHub Pages URLs, and this incident happened while a metadata analysis was being conducted.
âThis information could be used by spammers to collect email addresses and other personal information,â BrĂ€unlein, Co Founder Positive security said. âIt could be used by cyber criminals to take over accounts and run believable phishing campaigns.â
The URLscan.io service is described as a sandbox for the web and has been referred to as a web scanner. Several security solutions integrate with its API in order to make their solutions more secure and feature-rich.
The idea behind it is to allow users to identify possible malicious websites with ease and confidence using a simple, straightforward tool. A wide range of open-source projects and enterprise customers are supported by the engine.
Sensitive data can be mined
It was discovered that users who enabled Github Pages as a hosting method for a private repository leaked the name of the repository. There does not seem to have been any public official acknowledgment of this breach as of yet.
There is a possibility that an anonymous user could easily search for and retrieve a vast amount and variety of sensitive data within the API integration.
This is because the API is equipped with several varieties of security tools that run scans on incoming emails and conduct Urlscans on every link that is received.
Several types of information are provided with each scan result that is returned by the service, including:-
Password reset links
Unsubscribe links
Account creation URLs
API keys
Information about Telegram bots
DocuSign signing requests
Amazon gift delivery links
Shared Google Drive links
Dropbox file transfers
Invite links to SharePoint
Invite links to Discord
Government Zoom invites
PayPal invoices
Paypal money claim requests
Links to Cisco Webex meeting recordings
Package tracking links
It has been noted that some API integrations use generic Python requests that use the python-requests/2.X.Y module. This would lead to scans being mistakenly submitted as public if user agents ignored account visibility settings.
Some of the biggest barriers to cloud adoption are security concerns: data loss or leakage, and the associated legal and regulatory concerns with storing and processing data off-premises.
In the last 18 months, 79% of companies have experienced at least one cloud data breach; even more alarmingly, 43% have reported 10 or more breaches in that time. Despite the clear advantages of cloud infrastructure, one of the main challenges that often gets overlooked is the need to: (1) trust that the infrastructure will be secure enough against threats and (2) that the chosen cloud provider wonât purposefully or inadvertently access the data processing on their infrastructure. When dealing with highly sensitive/confidential data (such as banking information or healthcare patient data), this becomes a major concern and a barrier to further cloud adoption.
Traditional approaches for protecting data have relied upon implementing access controls and policies and encrypting data at rest and in transit, but none are able to prevent the threat in its entirety because a fundamental challenge remains: keeping data encrypted when in use, while it is being processed. Confidential computing â projected to be a $54B market by 2026 â is emerging as a way to remove the need for trusting infrastructure and service providers by keeping data protected/encrypted even when in use.
Confidential computing technology uses hardware-based techniques to create isolated environments called enclaves (also known as Trusted Execution Environments or TEEs).
Code and data within enclaves are inaccessible by other applications, users, or processes colocated on the system. The enclave keeps the data encrypted even when in use â while in memory and during computation. With a secure enclave environment, multiple parties can collaborate on analytics and AI use cases without compromising the confidentiality of their individual data and exposing it to other parties.
According to a recent survey, using secure enclaves in the enterprise setting is attractive for implementing safeguards for the following scenarios:
Protect against insider threats. Data in the cloud is accessible to the database administrators of the cloud applications or infrastructure via direct access to the database, application logs, and device memory
Prevent platform software (i.e., a platform hypervisor) from accessing data
Protect data from adjacent workloads in a multitenant/user environment
Protect the integrity of crowdsourced ML models
Confidential data sharing and multi-party collaboration
If these scenarios apply to you and your business, but youâre unsure what youâll need to know to get started, here are five questions to ask your CISO:
1. Will I need to deploy specialized hardware to keep our data protected?
Confidential computing technology is now available on all major cloud providers. This obviates the need to procure and maintain specialized hardware yourselves. Even though confidential computing and secure enclaves are still in the âemerging technology bucket,â organizations can easily adopt confidential computing through cloud vendors and ISVs. The cloud providers see the benefit of secure enclaves and their future potential as a transformative technology, and so have bought in.
2. Will we need to rewrite applications to use secure enclaves?
Some confidential computing technologies, such as Intel SGX, require application modifications before they can run within enclaves. Other technologies, such as Confidential VMs, provide more flexibility and can run unmodified applications.
But, from a security perspective, this has the downside of having to trust the entire software stack within the VM. So, depending on the use case and requirements, one technology may be preferable over the other. In addition, proper adoption of confidential computing requires orchestrating management of the other constituent technologies, such as remote attestation.
The enclave adoption process can be complex and engineering teams will have to take time to build these capabilities to get their applications up and running. While bandwidth may be tight at times, the ROI is worth it in the long run. A growing ISV ecosystem can also help in the seamless adoption of confidential computing for a rich variety of use cases.
3. Can I use secure enclaves to improve data collaboration with other teams?
Before data can be shared with other teams, organizations typically need to follow a cumbersome governance process to restrict access to sensitive data, eliminate data sets or mask specific data fields, and prevent any level of data sharing.
Integrating secure enclaves provides an opportunity for organizations to increase both productivity and security measures. Multiple data owners can individually encrypt their entire data (including PII), pool it together, and analyze the collective data set within enclaves. Done effectively, multi-party collaboration can drive faster business results by enabling new and higher-quality insights.
4. Will I need to add additional security expertise to the team?
Implementing confidential computing workflows can be difficult to do directly without using existing tools and software. One needs to make sure that confidential data is protected throughout its lifecycle. This can have a variety of moving parts â from integrating with existing key management systems to managing secure enclave infrastructure, rewriting applications, deploying code securely and verifiably to the enclaves, and keeping confidential data encrypted in storage and in transit in/out of the enclaves. However, there is a rich emerging ISV ecosystem of software that alleviates the complexities of confidential computing for a rich variety of use cases, making it easy to use and adopt by non-experts.
5. Will I need to lock myself into a single cloud?
The top CPU vendors all introduced secure enclave and confidential computing solutions in recent years. These were adopted by the leading cloud vendors, some of which now offer solutions based on the same underlying technology. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, for example, offer solutions based on AMDâs SEV technology. As software solutions running on top of these cloud platforms evolve, application vendors will introduce cross-platform solutions powered by the common hardware layers.
Conclusion
Businesses considering adopting cloud technology can better do so with secure enclaves. By asking your CISO these five questions, businesses can move into the future, understand what implementing secure enclaves will look like, better secure their data, and create a more efficient analytics process.
This ongoing shift to the cloud will increase efficiency for companies and reduce human error â especially knowing 57% of businesses will move their workloads to the cloud before the end of the year. When secure enclaves are implemented properly, the crucial component of ensuring security is not sacrificed. All businesses working with data should consider integrating confidential computing into their models to allow for analytics and AI on encrypted data.
Healthcare organizations are increasingly using apps for telehealth and beyond. These apps have a significant impact on how they operate. They also have access to lots of sensitive information, such as EMR.
As a result, we have seen an uptick in healthcare application threats globally. The top threat risks in healthcare industry includes ransomware, DDoS and automated attacks.
Healthcare data breaches are the costliest across the globe. They cost healthcare organizations USD 9.23 million on average. The figure is more than twice the pan-industry average of USD 4.24 million.  Managing AppSec risks is crucial to healthcare organizations.
How to Reduce Risks of Healthcare Application Threats?
Ongoing Risk Assessments
This is the first, most critical step in risk management in healthcare. It lays the foundation for a robust AppSec program. Risk assessments help you identify, analyze and rank your appsâ risks.
Risk assessments involve the following:
Identifying app vulnerabilities
Evaluating the exploitability of each vulnerability
Identifying application threats
Analysing attack probability
Analysing the potential impact of application threats on mission-critical assets
Allocating resources based on the criticality of risks
Defining ways to keep risks within tolerance levels
This way, you can ensure your mission-critical assets are always available and secure.
Compliance frameworks like HIPAA mandate that these assessments be done once a year. But that isnât enough. You need to keep assessing and managing risks regularly. Only then can you harden your app security posture.
Establish and Update Security Policies
Clearly defined app security policies are critical to averting application threat risks. These policies should incorporate security, industry, legal and regulatory best practices. The AppSec policies should define security strategies, processes, tools, and procedures. They should define the following:
Incident response and disaster recovery plans
Role-based, strict access controls
Zero trust authentication and password policies
Backup and storage
Data privacy and security policies
AppSec should define processes for users to report suspicious activities. AppSec policies should include proper communication plans too.
Further, you must regularly update these security policies. The policies should reflect the latest best practices and the latest risk posture.
Identify and Secure Threat Entry Points
How do application threats become successful attacks? Attackers keep looking for exploitable entry points. These entry points are vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and security gaps. They exploit entry points that arenât secure when they find them. They can then
Introduce malware
Create backdoors
Steal data
Make services unavailable to patients/ employees
So, you need to be proactive in finding and securing entry points. And do so before attackers find them. To this end, you must put in place a vulnerability management program.
Inventory all your healthcare app-related assets. This process should be automated. It should automatically identify all endpoints, APIs, components, third-party services, etc. Make sure to include all assets for crawling by your scanning and next-gen WAF tools.
Deploy an automated scanner to keep identifying known flaws. This way, you can prevent the inaccuracies and inefficiencies of manual scanning. Perform pen-testing and security audits regularly to identify
Unknown vulnerabilities
Logical flaws
Zero-day application threats
Understand the exploitability of flaws
Strength of security defenses
You can rank these flaws based on the level of risks involved. Then, you can remediate through permanent fixes or instant virtual patching. Leverage fully managed security solutions to manage your vulnerabilities better.
Centralized Visibility into Security Posture
You must have real-time visibility into your app security posture. This will help you take immediate action to prevent application threats.
Ensure Your Vendors Prioritize Security
You may use several third-party apps, APIs, and services. It is key that you carefully vet vendors before onboarding services. Why? Your apps will be at risk if they donât take security seriously. Make sure they take steps to monitor and avert application threats.
You must also ensure vendors are compliant. To this end, you should keep monitoring and auditing them.
Keep Educating All Users
Human errors are top vulnerabilities enabling cyber attacks in healthcare. That is why continuous education of all users is a must. Users include patients/ customers, employees, and partners who use your apps.
All users must know the app security dos and donâts. They should know what to click and what not to. They must be able to make smart decisions. They must know whom to report to or what action to take when observing unusual activities.
Invest in Reliable Security Solutions
Invest in reliable, fully managed security solutions like AppTrana. AppTrana includes comprehensive security solutions backed by industry expertise in managing your healthcare security risks.
The Way Forward Cyber-attacks on healthcare are becoming more lethal, complex, and severe. Take proactive action to minimize your application threat risk.
CISOs are working overtime and canât always switch off from work, according to a recent Tessian report.
Recent headlines have shown that security stakes have never been higher, and itâs likely this high level of pressure thatâs causing 18% of security leaders to work 25 extra hours a week. Thatâs double the amount of overtime that they worked in 2021. While many are hopping on the âquiet-quittingâ trend, CISOs have the opposite problem.
In this Help Net Security video, Josh Yavor, CISO at Tessian, offers a personal perspective on dealing with burnout as a CISO.
A security flaw in the Galaxy Store allows attackers to trigger remote code execution on affected smartphones.
 The now patched vulnerability, which affects Galaxy Store version 4.5.32.4, relates to a cross-site scripting (XSS) bug that occurs when handling certain deep links. An independent security researcher has been credited with reporting the issue.
Vulnerability Details
The now-patched vulnerability is related to a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw that occurs when handling specific deep links and it affects Galaxy Store version 4.5.32.4. The problem was first reported by an independent security researcher.
Particularly, deeplink can be called from another application or from a browser. The store receives appropriate deeplinks, it will process and show them in a webview.
In this case, by failing to secure the deeplink, the attacker is able to run JS code in the Galaxy Store applicationâs webview context whenever a user hits a link from a website that contains the deeplink.
The expert focuses on deep links configured for Samsungâs Marketing & Content Service (MCS).
Although the Samsung MCS Direct Page website was extracting the argument from the url and displaying it on the website, it did not encrypt, which resulted in an XSS problem.
âWe can see the website is processing the abc, def parameters and displaying as above without encoding, the url is passed directly to href this is very dangerous and will cause XSS.â reads the advisory published by SSD Secure Disclosure.
Experts observed two functions âdownloadAppâ and âopenAppâ here these two functions will get the app id and download them from the store or open them.
This indicates that these two functions can be called using JS code. In this case, an attacker has the ability to execute arbitrary code by injecting it into the MCS website.
âTo be able to successfully exploit the victimâs server, it is necessary to have HTTPS and CORS bypass of Chrome,â advisory published by SSD Secure Disclosure
Affected Products and Patch Available
The vulnerability impacts Galaxy Store version 4.5.32.4.
Therefore, Samsung has issued patches that are now in wide circulation for all Samsung devices.
33N Ventures is fundraising âŹ150 million for investing in cybersecurity and infrastructure software companies across Europe, Israel, and the US. The fund will mostly target investments at Series A and B, with an average ticket size of around âŹ10 million, and has an investment capacity of âŹ20 million already committed by Alantra and its strategic partners.
Co-founders and managing partners Carlos Alberto Silva and Carlos Moreira da Silva have made more than 20 investments in cybersecurity and infrastructure software over the past 10 years, across Europe, Israel and the US â including most notably Arctic Wolf.
In this Help Net Security interview, they discuss the cybersecurity investment landscape in Europe, the strategies for finding the right companies, and more.
Company founders usually think mainly about California and Tel Aviv when discussing infosec investments. Whatâs your impression of the current cybersecurity VC landscape in Europe?
Carlos Alberto Silva: Thereâs no doubt that the US and Israeli startup ecosystems get more attention when it comes to cybersecurity. But thatâs not to say there havenât been success stories in Europe. Take IriusRisk, for example: the automated threat modeling platform raised a $28.7M Series B round just a few weeks ago.
By rights, Europe should be a world leader in this space. Talent is abundant here, and there is a very large addressable market. The challenge for companies in Europe is that, unlike their peers in the US and Israel, they often donât get the specialized support they need to compete.
While there are a few specialized funds in Europe, most focus naturally only on one country or region and tend to invest in very early-stage companies. As a result, most entrepreneurs face the choice of working with a US investor (that lacks on-the-ground local knowledge) or working with a generalist fund that may not be able to open the right doors for them.
Thatâs why weâve decided to create a fund with a truly pan-European focus. Thereâs such a large opportunity here for firms that are underserved by the current market. Weâll still be investing in some companies in the US and Israel â simply put, there are some amazing opportunities that we just donât want to miss out on â but weâre most excited about capitalising on this relatively untapped opportunity in Europe.
What sort of challenges and opportunities are you currently facing? Whatâs your main focus?
Carlos Alberto Silva: Given that we only launched the fund last week, weâve not run into too many challenges yet! That being said, of course, the economic climate is not the best. This is a challenge that every venture capital fund and company must face.
Cybersecurity as a whole is also well insulated from the economic downturn. Thatâs because strong cybersecurity is not a ânice-to-haveâ â but critical. Thatâs not going to change â from digital transformation to national security, cyber will continue being a top priority for governments, institutions, companies, and investors across the globe, and the market is expected to reach $162 billion in 2022, with robust annual double-digit growth forecast for the coming years â and so the companies weâll be looking at have some in-built resilience.
How can you find the right balance between locating promising new businesses and researching potential investments?
Carlos Moreira da Silva: This is not generally something we struggle with. This is probably because we follow a thesis-driven approach that means we spend a lot of time looking at which spaces we want to cover before making any investment decisions.
Of course, we stay up to date with the industry, look at all publicly available sources, and attend the most relevant cybersecurity events across Europe, Israel, and the US. This is all fairly common sense.
But we do rely heavily on our proprietary network of close VCs and advisors. Our network is always totally invaluable when we are looking to identify the best leads for future investments. Our strategic advisors â including leading entrepreneurs, experts, and cybersecurity decision-makers such Brian NeSmith (Arctic Wolf), Eyal Hayardeny (Reblaze), Nuno SebastiĂŁo (Feedzai), and Pierre Polette (Hackuity) â all founders of companies weâve invested in in the past â possess an incredible depth and breadth of sector-specific knowledge and experience that, added to our own, really helps us identify and support the founders and companies with the biggest breakthrough and scaling potential.
We spend a long time talking to prospective investee companies, ideally as early in their journey as possible, and working out where we can help them. If we can make an introduction to a potential customer, for example, we will do so even before we have made any investment. Weâve worked hard to build a reputation in the industry for being supportive of the whole industry â thatâs really important to us.
How much research does it take to identify companies you want to invest in? When it comes to cutting-edge technology, it can be complicated to distinguish between things that seem important but arenât and things that donât seem important but are.
Carlos Alberto Silva: For most first-time funds the process of identifying the right companies to invest in across such a large geographic area would be difficult. But our team has been together for many years now. We may be a first-time fund, but weâre far from a first-time team.
We know this space well and we have a strong network that reaches across the US, Europe, and Israel. In fact, much of the research you refer to has in effect already been done. We already have a list of companies that weâre interested in, and in many cases have already started the conversation.
We want to back visionary companies in emerging sectors. We want to invest in those who are the very first or one of the very first to solve a particular problem. In our view, jumping on bandwagons or entering already saturated markets will inevitably lead to meagre returns. Get in on the ground floor and youâve got a lot more room to grow into.
What advice would you give to cybersecurity startup founders looking for investors?
Carlos Moreira da Silva: Beyond the obvious â how much are they willing to invest â there are a couple of really important things for founders to look at. Firstly, look at their track record. Cybersecurity is a space where deep technical knowledge is really important. Think of it this way: if you have to explain what your company does through metaphors and hand-holding, then they probably arenât going to be much help beyond providing cash stimulus.
The second thing to look at is their network. Well-connected investors with the right contacts in cybersecurity will prove invaluable. Most venture capital investors will have a long list of contacts. You can pick that up by going to the right events and spending enough time in the space. But the investors that will provide you with real benefit are those who have a long list of friends â with deep and genuine relationships. The right introduction can be game-changing for a company, so itâs vital your investorâs network is robust.
What tips do you have for maintaining a positive rapport with company founders? What makes for a quality relationship?
Carlos Moreira da Silva: It may sound obvious, but in our experience, the most important thing for building rapport is having a solid understanding of the business. It is important to be there for the founders during the good times, but especially during the challenging times, when they really need that extra help. Of course, you must understand how the companyâs key product or service works.
But beyond that, you must understand everything from the pain points of their customers to the market for talent in their sector to the opportunities for growth. This is not stuff you can pick up overnight, and entrepreneurs are good at picking those with genuine knowledge out from the blaggers.
And, in our case, we can share our global perspective regarding the wider market environment. You can provide an enormous amount of value here.
We also think it helps that weâve been in their position before. Weâre not just investors, weâve held senior executive roles in cybersecurity companies and effectively built them from the ground up. So, we understand the nuances of the day-to-day running of a business, and that helps us build a foundation of trust â which really is essential to a successful relationship.
There is an unofficial patch from 0patch for a Zero-Day flaw in Microsoft Windows that allows bypassing the MotW (Mark-of-the-Web) protections that are built into the operating system and at moment itâs actively exploited.
By utilizing files signed with malformed signatures, this zero-day flaw is able to bypass MotW protections. Various legacy Windows versions as well as all versions that are supported by Microsoft are affected by the issue.
It has been determined by cybersecurity analysts that the Magniber ransomware was being installed on victimsâ devices with the help of stand-alone JavaScript files by threat actors.
Why does Windows 8.1 not have the behavior where a corrupt signature skips the MotW prompting? Windows 10 and newer MotW prompting is sort of intermingled with SmartScreen by default. If you turn off "Check apps and files", you'll get behavior more like earlier Windows versions. pic.twitter.com/T6k3xNKOFY
0patch released this unofficial security patch to fix this flaw since itâs a critical zero-day vulnerability and is exploited by threat actors vigorously in the wild.
Why this patch has been tagged as âUnofficialâ?
This patch is tagged as unofficial due to its release source, in short, this patch has not been released by Microsoft itself.
But, until the release of any official patch from Microsoft, users can use this security patch to keep their systems protected against threat actors exploiting this zero-day flaw.
Free Micropatch Availability
Due to this zero-day vulnerability, multiple Windows versions are affected and here below we have mentioned all the affected versions of Windows that are eligible for the free micropatches:-
Windows 11 v21H2
Windows 10 v21H2
Windows 10 v21H1
Windows 10 v20H2
Windows 10 v2004
Windows 10 v1909
Windows 10 v1903
Windows 10 v1809
Windows 10 v1803
Windows Server 2022
Windows Server 2019
The installation process for this micropatch will require an account on the 0patch website, and it can be created for free. Once done, youâll need to download its agent for your Windows device which will automatically install this patch.
During recent research, Microsoft has discovered evidence of a complex interconnected malware ecosystem that is associated with the Raspberry Robin worm.
With other malware families, there are several root links to the Raspberry Robin worm were identified. Even security experts have detected that it uses alternate infection tactics as well.
Infections like these lead to a variety of complications and here below we have listed them:-
Hands-on-keyboard attacks: When attackers are already inside your environment following a breach, a hands-on keyboard attack will occur. It is a two-sided operation; on one end itâs the cybercriminal who sits at a keyboard, while on the other side itâs your compromised network that is being accessed.
Human-operated ransomware activity:Â It occurs when cybercriminals are involved in an active attack on a victim. Using this approach, an organizationâs on-premises infrastructure is penetrated, privileges are elevated, and ransomware is deployed by the threat actors.
Compromised 1,000 Organizations
In the past 30 days, on more than 1000 organizationsâ 3000 devices, the Raspberry Robin worm has initiated payload alerts. There have been instances where the Raspberry Robin worm has been installed on the victimsâ systems with malware called FakeUpdates.
Raspberry Worm is also known as QNAP Worm, as for command-and-control, it uses the compromised QNAP storage servers. Through infected USB drives containing malicious. LNK files, Raspberry Robin spreads to other devices.
The worm will spawn a msiexec process using cmd[.]exe as soon as a USB device is attached.
In order to communicate with its C2 servers, the malware communicates with compromised Windows devices.
Raspberry Robinâs Connection
Microsoft Security Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) observed Raspberry Robin in October 2022, and itâs being used by DEV-0950, which is another actor who was also involved in the post-compromise activity.
As a result of the DEV-0950 activity, the Cobalt Strike was compromised through hands-on keyboard activity. The majority of the victims of DEV-0950 are traditionally acquired via phishing scams.
However, the operators of DEV-0950 have moved to use Raspberry Robin instead of the traditional method. The advantage of this approach is that the payloads can be delivered to existing infections and the campaigns can move to the stage of ransomware more quickly.
Mitigations
To mitigate the impact of this threat, it is also possible for defenders to apply the following mitigation measures:-
When mounting the drive, prevent autorun from being used and code from being executed.
Make sure the tamper protection setting is enabled in order to protect Microsoft Defender Antivirus from being interrupted by attacks.
It is very important to turn on cloud-delivered protection for Microsoft Defender Antivirus or your antivirus software counterpart if it supports the feature.
The USB port should be blocked from running untrusted or unsigned processes.
Scripts that may be obfuscated should be blocked from being executed.
It is imperative to block executable files from running unless they fulfill all the trusted criteria.
The local security authority subsystem of Windows should be protected against credential theft.
![Start-Up Secure: Baking Cybersecurity into Your Company from Founding to Exit by [Chris Castaldo]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Dc+XDOieL.jpg)
