Aug 26 2022

7 open-source malware analysis tools you should try out

Category: MalwareDISC @ 8:39 am

There are two main types of malware analysis: static and dynamic.

Performing static analysis of a malicious binary means concentrating on analyizing its code without executing it. This type of analysis may reveal to malware analysts not only what the malware does, but also its developer’s future intentions (e.g., currently unfinished functionalities).

Dynamic analysis looks at the behavior of the malware when it’s run – usually in a virtual sandbox. This type of analysis should reveal the malware’s behavor and any detection evasion techniques it uses.

Malware analysis benefits security analysts by allowing them to, among other things:

  • Identify hidden indicators of compromise (IOCs).
  • Boost the effectiveness of IOC notifications and warnings.
  • Triage incidents according to severity.

All the malware analysis tools listed below can be freely downloaded and used.

capa: Automatically identify malware capabilities

malware analysis tools

capa detects capabilities in executable files. You run it against a PE, ELF, .NET module, or shellcode file and it tells you what it thinks the program can do. For example, it might suggest that the file is a backdoor, is capable of installing services, or relies on HTTP to communicate.

FLARE Obfuscated String Solver

malware analysis tools

The FLARE Obfuscated String Solver (FLOSS) uses advanced static analysis techniques to automatically deobfuscate strings from malware binaries. You can use it just like strings.exe to enhance basic static analysis of unknown binaries.

Ghidra Software Reverse Engineering Framework

Ghidra is a software reverse engineering (SRE) framework created and maintained by the National Security Agency Research Directorate. This framework includes a suite of full-featured, high-end software analysis tools that enable users to analyze compiled code on a variety of platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux. Capabilities include disassembly, assembly, decompilation, graphing, and scripting, along with hundreds of other features.

Malcom: Malware Communication Analyzer

Malcom is a tool designed to analyze a system’s network communication using graphical representations of network traffic, and cross-reference them with known malware sources. This comes handy when analyzing how certain malware species try to communicate with the outside world.

Mobile Security Framework (MobSF)

MobSF is an automated, all-in-one mobile application (Android/iOS/Windows) pen-testing, malware analysis, and security assessment framework capable of performing static and dynamic analysis. MobSF supports mobile app binaries (APK, XAPK, IPA & APPX) along with zipped source code and provides REST APIs for seamless integration with your CI/CD or DevSecOps pipeline. The Dynamic Analyzer helps you to perform runtime security assessment and interactive instrumented testing.

Pafish: Testing tool

Pafish is a testing tool that uses different techniques to detect virtual machines and malware analysis environments in the same way that malware families do. The project is free and open source; the code of all the anti-analysis techniques is publicly available.

Radare2: The Libre Unix-like reverse engineering framework

The radare project started as a simple command-line hexadecimal editor focused on forensics. Today, Radare2 is a featureful low-level command-line tool with support for scripting. It can edit files on local hard drives, view kernel memory, and debug programs locally or via a remote gdb server. Radare2’s wide architecture support allows you to analyze, emulate, debug, modify, and disassemble any binary.

theZoo: A live malware repository

theZoo is a repository of live malware. The project was created to offer a fast and easy way of retrieving malware samples and source code in an organized fashion in hopes of promoting malware research.

malware analysis tools

Learning Malware Analysis: Explore the concepts, tools, and techniques to analyze and investigate Windows malware

Tags: malware analysis tools, open-source malware analysis tools


Aug 25 2022

Twilio Hackers Scarf 10K Okta Credentials in Sprawling Supply Chain Attack

The “0ktapus” cyberattackers set up a well-planned spear-phishing effort that affected at least 130 orgs beyond Twilio and Cloudflare, including Digital Ocean and Mailchimp.

Okta logo on a mobile phone screen

The hackers who breached Twilio and Cloudflare earlier in August also infiltrated more than 130 other organizations in the same campaign, vacuuming up nearly 10,000 sets of Okta and two-factor authentication (2FA) credentials.

That’s according to an investigation from Group-IB, which found that several well-known organizations were among those targeted in a massive phishing campaign that it calls 0ktapus. The lures were simple, such as fake notifications that users needed to reset their passwords. They were sent via texts with links to static phishing sites mirroring the Okta authentication page of each specific organization.

“Despite using low-skill methods, [the group] was able to compromise a large number of well-known organizations,” researchers said in a blog post today. “Furthermore, once the attackers compromised an organization, they were quickly able to pivot and launch subsequent supply chain attacks, indicating that the attack was planned carefully in advance.”

Such was the case with the Twilio breach that occurred Aug. 4. The attackers were able to social-engineer several employees into handing over their Okta credentials used for single sign-on across the organization, allowing them to gain access to internal systems, applications, and customer data. The breach affected about 25 downstream organizations that use Twilio’s phone verification and other services — including Signal, which issued a statement confirming that about 1,900 users could have had their phone numbers hijacked in the incident.

The majority of the 130 companies targeted were SaaS and software companies in the US — unsurprising, given the supply chain nature of the attack.

For instance, additional victims in the campaign include email marketing firms Klaviyo and Mailchimp. In both cases, the crooks made off with names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers of their cryptocurrency-related customers, including for Mailchimp customer DigitalOcean (which subsequently dropped the provider).

In Cloudflare’s case, some employees fell for the ruse, but the attack was thwarted thanks to the physical security keys issued to every employee that are required to access all internal applications.

Lior Yaari, CEO and co-founder of Grip Security, notes that the extent and cause of the breach beyond Group IB’s findings are still unknown, so additional victims could come to light.

“Identifying all the users of a SaaS app is not always easy for a security team, especially those where users use their own logins and passwords,” he warns. “Shadow SaaS discovery is not a simple problem, but there are solutions out there that can discover and reset user passwords for shadow SaaS.”

Time to Rethink IAM?

On the whole, the success of the campaign illustrates the trouble with relying on humans to detect social engineering, and the gaps in existing identity and access management (IAM) approaches.

“The attack demonstrates how fragile IAM is today and why the industry should think about removing the burden of logins and passwords from employees who are susceptible to social engineering and sophisticated phishing attack,” Yaari says. “The best proactive remediation effort companies can make is to have users reset all their passwords, especially Okta.”

The incident also points out that enterprises increasingly rely on their employees’ access to mobile endpoints to be productive in the modern distributed workforce, creating a rich, new phishing ground for attackers like the 0ktapus actors, according to Richard Melick, director of threat reporting at Zimperium.

“From phishing to network threats, malicious applications to compromised devices, it’s critical for enterprises to acknowledge that the mobile attack surface is the largest unprotected vector to their data and access,” he wrote in an emailed statement.

https://www.darkreading.com/remote-workforce/twilio-hackers-okta-credentials-sprawling-supply-chain-attack

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Tags: authentication, authorization, Identity and Access Management


Aug 25 2022

This company paid a ransom demand. Hackers leaked its data anyway

Category: Information Security,RansomwareDISC @ 8:57 am

It’s always recommended that ransomware victims don’t give in to ransom demands – and this real-life case demonstrates why.

a-man-looking-frustrated-at-his-computer-in-the-office

A victim of a ransomware attack paid to restore access to their network – but the cyber criminals didn’t hold up their end of the deal. 

The real-life incident, as detailed by cybersecurity researchers at Barracuda Networks, took place in August 2021, when hackers from BlackMatter ransomware group used a phishing email to compromise the account of a single victim at an undisclosed company.

From that initial entry point, the attackers were able to expand their access to the network by moving laterally around the infrastructure, ultimately leading to the point where they were able to install hacking tools and steal sensitive data. 

Stealing sensitive data has become a common part of ransomware attacks. Criminals leverage it as part of their extortion attempts, threatening to release it if a ransom isn’t received.  

The attackers appear to have had access to the network for at least a few weeks, seemingly going undetected before systems were encrypted and a ransom was demanded, to be paid in Bitcoin. 

Cybersecurity agencies warn that despite networks being encrypted, victims shouldn’t pay ransom demands for a decryption key because this only shows hackers that such attacks are effective.

Despite this, the unidentified organisation chose to pay the ransom after negotiating the payment down from half the original demand. But even though the company gave in to the extortion demands, the BlackMatter group still leaked the data a few weeks later – providing a lesson in why you should never trust cyber criminals. 

Cybersecurity responders from Barracuda helped the victim isolate the infected systems, bring them back online, and restore them from backups.

Following an audit of the network, multi-factor authentication (MFA) was applied to accounts, suggesting that a lack of MFA was what helped the attackers gain and maintain access to accounts in the first place. 

A few months after the incident, BlackMatter announced it was shutting down, with the recommendation that those using the ransomware-as-a-service scheme should switch to LockBit. 

According to Barracuda’s report, ransomware attacks are on the rise, with more than double the number of attacks targeting key sectors, including healthcare, education and local government. 

Researchers also warn that the number of recorded ransomware attacks against critical infrastructure has quadrupled over the course of the last year. However, the report suggests there are reasons for optimism. 

“The good news is that in our analysis of highly publicized attacks, we saw fewer victims paying the ransom and more businesses standing firm thanks to better defenses, especially in attacks on critical infrastructure,” it said. 

In addition to applying MFA, organisations can take other actions to help secure their network against ransomware and cyberattacks, including setting up network segmentation, disabling macros to prevent attackers exploiting them in phishing emails, and ensuring backups are stored offline. 

It’s also recommended that organisations apply security updates as quickly as possible to stop attackers targeting known vulnerabilities to gain access to accounts and networks. 

https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-company-paid-a-ransom-demand-hackers-leaked-its-data-anyway/

The Ransomware Threat Landscape

Ransomware Protection Playbook

Tags: Ransomware Protection Playbook, Ransomware Threat


Aug 25 2022

GAIROSCOPE attack allows to exfiltrate data from Air-Gapped systems via ultrasonic tones

Category: Data Breach,data securityDISC @ 8:31 am
GAIROSCOPE: An Israeli researcher demonstrated how to exfiltrate data from air-gapped systems using ultrasonic tones and smartphone gyroscopes.

The popular researcher Mordechai Guri from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel devise an attack technique, named GAIROSCOPE, to exfiltrate data from air-gapped systems using ultrasonic tones and smartphone gyroscopes.

The attack requires that the threat actor has in advance installed malware on the air-gapped system, as well as on a smartphone which must be located in the proximity of the system.

The malware installed in the air-gapped system generates ultrasonic tones in the resonance frequencies of the MEMS gyroscope which produce tiny mechanical oscillations within the smartphone’s gyroscope.

The frequencies are inaudible and the mechanical oscillations can be demodulated into binary information.

GAIROSCOPE air-gapped systems

The researcher pointed out that the gyroscope in smartphones is considered to be a ’safe’ sensor and can be used legitimately from mobile apps and javascript without specific permissions, unlike other components like the microphone.

The researchers added that in Android and iOS, there may be no visual indication, notification icons, or warning messages to the user that an application is using the gyroscope, like the indications in other sensitive sensors.

“Our experiments show that attackers can exfiltrate sensitive information from air-gapped computers to smartphones located a few meters away via Speakers-toGyroscope covert channel.” reads the research paper.

The malware on the air-gapped system gather sensitive data, including passwords and encryption keys, and encodes it using frequency-shift keying. In frequency-shift keying (FSK), the data are represented by a change in the frequency of a carrier wave.

Then the malware uses the device’s speakers to transmit the sounds at the inaudible frequencies.

On the receiving side, the phone receives the sounds using the device’s gyroscope and the malware running on the phone continuously samples and processes the output of the gyroscope. When the malware detects an exfiltration attempt, which is started using a specific bit sequence, it demodulates and decodes the data. The exfiltrated data can then be sent to the attacker using the phone’s internet connection.

“In the exfiltration phase, the malware encodes the data and broadcast it to the environment, using covert acoustic sound waves in the resonance frequency generated from the computer’s loudspeakers. A nearby infected smartphone ‘listens’ through the gyroscope, detects the transmission, demodulates and decodes the data, and transfers it to the attacker via the Internet (e.g., over Wi-Fi).” continues the paper. “The air-gapped workstation broadcasts data modulated on top of ultrasonic waves in the resonance frequencies that oscillates the nearby MEMS gyroscope. The application in the smartphone samples the gyroscope, demodulates the signal, and transmits the decoded data to the attacker through Wi-Fi.”

The test conducted by the researcher demonstrated that the GAIROSCOPE attack allows for a maximum data transmission rate of 8 bits/sec over a distance of up to 8 meters.

The following table shows the comparison with the existing acoustic covert channels previously devised by the researchers:

GAIROSCOPE 2

The researcher also provide countermeasures to mitigate the GAIROSCOPE attack, such as speakers elimination and blocking, ultrasonic filtering, signal jamming, signal monitoring, implementing sensors security, keping systems in restricted zones defined by a different radius, depending on the zone classification.

Tags: Air-Gapped systems, exfiltrate data


Aug 24 2022

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Aug 24 2022

Unusual Microsoft 365 Phishing Campaign Spoofs eFax Via Compromised Dynamics Voice Account

Category: PhishingDISC @ 10:19 am

In a widespread campaign, threat actors use a compromised Dynamics 365 Customer Voice business account and a link posing as a survey to steal Microsoft 365 credentials.

Tropical school of fish in Mauritius.

An elaborate and rather unusual phishing campaign is spoofing eFax notifications and using a compromised Dynamics 365 Customer Voice business account to lure victims into giving up their credentials via microsoft.com pages.

Threat actors have hit dozens of companies through the broadly disseminated campaign, which is targeting Microsoft 365 users from a diverse range of sectors — including energy, financial services, commercial real estate, food, manufacturing, and even furniture-making, researchers from the Cofense Phishing Defense Center (PDC) revealed in a blog post published Wednesday.

The campaign uses a combination of common and unusual tactics to lure users into clicking on a page that appears to lead them to a customer feedback survey for an eFax service, but instead steals their credentials.

Attackers impersonate not only eFax but also Microsoft by using content hosted on multiple microsoft.com pages in several stages of the multistage effort. The scam is one of a number of phishing campaigns that Cofense has observed since spring that use a similar tactic, says Joseph Gallop, intelligence analysis manager at Cofense.

“In April of this year, we began to see a significant volume of phishing emails using embedded ncv.microsoft.com survey links of the sort used in this campaign,” he tells Dark Reading.

Combination of Tactics

The phishing emails use a conventional lure, claiming the recipient has received a 10-page corporate eFax that demands his or her attention. But things diverge from the beaten path after that, Cofense PDC’s Nathaniel Sagibanda explained in the Wednesday post.

The recipient most likely will open the message expecting it’s related to a document that needs a signature. “However, that isn’t what we see as you read the message body,” he wrote.

Instead, the email includes what seems like an attached, unnamed PDF file that’s been delivered from a fax that does include an actual file — an unusual feature of a phishing email, according to Gallop.

“While a lot of credential phishing campaigns use links to hosted files, and some use attachments, it’s less common to see an embedded link posing as an attachment,” he wrote.

The plot thickens even further down in the message, which contains a footer indicating that it was a survey site — such as those used to provide customer feedback — that generated the message, according to the post.

Mimicking a Customer Survey

When users click the link, they are directed to a convincing imitation of an eFax solution page rendered by a Microsoft Dynamics 365 page that’s been compromised by attackers, researchers said.

This page includes a link to another page, which appears to lead to a Microsoft Customer Voice survey to provide feedback on the eFax service, but instead takes victims to a Microsoft login page that exfiltrates their credentials.

To further enhance legitimacy on this page, the threat actor went so far as to embed a video of eFax solutions for spoofed service details, instructing the user to contact “@eFaxdynamic365” with any inquiries, researchers said.

The “Submit” button at the bottom of the page also serves as additional confirmation that the threat actor used a real Microsoft Customer Voice feedback form template in the scam, they added.

The attackers then modified the template with “spurious eFax information to entice the recipient into clicking the link,” which leads to a faux Microsoft login page that sends their credentials to an external URL hosted by attackers, Sagibanda wrote.

Fooling a Trained Eye

While the original campaigns were much simpler — including only minimal information hosted on the Microsoft survey — the eFax spoofing campaign goes further to bolster the campaign’s legitimacy, Gallop says.

Its combination of multistage tactics and dual impersonation may allow messages to slip through secure email gateways as well as fool even the savviest of corporate users who’ve been trained to spot phishing scams, he notes.

“Only the users that continue to check the URL bar at each stage throughout the entire process would be certain to identify this as a phishing attempt,” Gallop says.

Indeed, a survey by cybersecurity firm Vade also released Wednesday found that brand impersonation continues to be the top tool that phishers use to dupe victims into clicking on malicious emails.

In fact, attackers took on the persona of Microsoft most often in campaigns observed in the first half of 2022, researchers found, though Facebook remains the most impersonated brand in phishing campaigns observed so far this year.

Phishing Game Remains Strong

https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/unusual-microsoft-365-phishing-efax-compromised-dynamic-voice-account

Tags: Phishing Campaign Spoofs


Aug 24 2022

Disk wiping malware knows no borders

Category: MalwareDISC @ 9:02 am

Fortinet announced the latest semiannual FortiGuard Labs Global Threat Landscape Report which revealed that ransomware threat continues to adapt with more variants enabled by Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS).

Additional highlights of the report:

  • Work-from-anywhere (WFA) endpoints remain targets for cyber adversaries to gain access to corporate networks.
  • Operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) environments are both attractive targets as cyber adversaries search for opportunities in the growing attack surface and IT/OT convergence.
  • Destructive threat trends continue to evolve, as evidenced by the spread of wiper malware as part of adversary toolkits.
  • Cyber adversaries are embracing more reconnaissance and defense evasion techniques to increase precision and destructive weaponization across the cyber-attack chain.

Derek Manky, Chief Security Strategist & VP Global Threat Intelligence at Fortinet, said: “Cyber adversaries are advancing their playbooks to thwart defense and scale their criminal affiliate networks. They are using aggressive execution strategies such as extortion or wiping data as well as focusing on reconnaissance tactics pre-attack to ensure better return on threat investment.

“To combat advanced and sophisticated attacks, organizations need integrated security solutions that can ingest real-time threat intelligence, detect threat patterns, and correlate massive amounts of data to detect anomalies and automatically initiate a coordinated response across hybrid networks.”

Ransomware threat growth and new variants show evolution of crime ecosystems

Tags: Disk wiping malware


Aug 23 2022

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Category: GDPR,Information Security,ISO 27kDISC @ 4:12 pm
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Aug 23 2022

How Many Cybersecurity Pros do we Really Need?

Category: Cyber career,InfoSec jobsDISC @ 9:56 am

How Many Cybersecurity Pros do we Really Need?

We take it as gospel that we have a skills gap in cybersecurity. In fact, the narrative across most of the industry is that you need tools and you need automation because there aren’t enough people to do the work.

And we believe it. But what if that’s not actually the case?

Let me play devil’s advocate for a bit here. I know of quite a few entry-level security folks that are having trouble getting jobs. Now, these are young folks, so maybe their expectations are a bit wacky in terms of compensation or perks or culture but, all the same, if we had such a severe cybersecurity skills gap, wouldn’t the market normalize the additional salary and perks to hire anyone? Is it about the bodies or getting the right bodies? Are we in a position to be picky?

Maybe that’s it. A lot of the entry-level folks aren’t very good at security. How can they be? Security is hard. You need to know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff, and it’s not the kind of knowledge you really get in a classroom. To be clear, a cybersecurity curriculum provides a great foundation for security professionals, but you don’t really learn until you are screwing it up for real in a live-fire environment.

What if everyone likes to bitch about how we can’t find enough people because they want to cover their asses regarding the reality that most security teams don’t perform very well? Is the industry just diverting attention away from our abysmal outcomes by blaming it on the lack of people? Is this security’s Wizard of Oz moment?

Let’s talk about the folks that should have the most acute problem: The MSSPs or MDR (managed detection and response) companies. These companies can’t grow without people, and they’ve raised capital at valuations that promise that they’ll be growing quickly for many years. How are they addressing this problem?

MDR companies are growing their staff internally. They invest in automation, threat intelligence and supporting technologies that help entry-level security practitioners to become productive faster. They send these n00bs to training and they put guardrails around them to make sure they don’t screw up (too badly).

Maybe that’s the answer. There are enough practitioners, but they don’t have the right skills. The raw materials are available, but we may not want to make the commitment to develop them into workable security staff. So your choice breaks down to either bitching about not having enough staff or getting to work developing your junior staffers.

Now, I may be wrong—t wouldn’t be the first time and it won’t be the last. We may not have enough practitioners to get the work done, but I think we’re focusing too much on what we can’t do and not enough on what we can by making an investment in our people.

Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments.

https://securityboulevard.com/author/mike-rothman/

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Cybersecurity Career Master Plan: Proven techniques and effective tips to help you advance in your cybersecurity career

Tags: Cyber career, cyber security career, InfoSec jobs


Aug 23 2022

Laptop denial-of-service via music: the 1980s R&B song with a CVE!

Category: DDoSDISC @ 8:12 am

You’ve probably heard the old joke: â€œHumour in the public service? It’s no laughing matter!”

But the thing with downbeat, blanket judgements of this sort is that it only takes a single counter-example to disprove them.

Something cannot universally be true if it is ever false, even for a single moment.

So, wouldn’t it be nice if the public service could be upbeat once in a while



as upbeat, in fact, as the catchy Janet Jackson dance number Rhythm Nation, released in 1989 (yes, it really was that long ago)?

This was the era of shoulder pads, MTV, big-budget dance videos, and the sort of in-your-ears-and-in-your-face lyrical musicality that even YouTube’s contemporary auto-transcription system renders at times simply as:

  Bass, bass, bass, bass
  â™Ș (Upbeat R&B Music) â™Ș
  Dance beat, dance beat

Well, as Microsoft superblogger Raymond Chen pointed out last week, this very song was apparently implicated in an astonishing system crash vulnerability in the early 2000s.

According to Chen, a major laptop maker of the day (he didn’t say which one) complained that Windows was prone to crashing when certain music was played through the laptop speaker.

The crashes, it seems were not limited to the laptop playing the song, but could also be provoked on nearby laptops that were exposed to the “vulnerability-triggering” music, and even on laptops from other vendors.

Resonance considered harmful

Apparently, the ultimate conclusion was that Rhythm Nation just happened to include beats of the right pitch, repeated at the right rate, that provoked a phenomenon known as resonance in the laptop disk drives of the day.

Loosely speaking, this resonance caused the natural vibrations in the hard disk devices (which really did contain hard disks back then, made of steel or glass and spinning at 5400rpm) to be amplified and exaggerated to the point that they would crash, bringing down Windows XP along with them.

Resonance, as you may know, is the name given to the phenomenon by which singers can shatter wine glasses by producing the right note for long enough to vibrate the glass to pieces.

Once they’ve locked the frequency of the note they’re singing onto the natural frequency at which the glass like to vibrate, their singing continually boosts the amplitude of the vibration until it’s too much for the glass to take.

It’s also what lets you quickly build up height and momentum on a swing.

If you time your kicks or thrusts randomly, sometimes they boost your motion by acting in harmony with the swing, but at other times they work against the swing and slow you down instead, leaving you joggling around unsatifactorily.

But if you time your energy input so it always exactly matches the frequency of the swing, you consistently increase the amout of energy in the system, and thus your swings increase in amplitude, and you gain height rapidly.

A skilled swingineer (on a properly designed, well-mounted, “solid-arm” swing, where the seat isn’t connected to the pivot by flexible ropes or chains – don’t try this at the park!) can send a swing right over the top in a 360-degree arc with just a few pumps



and by deliberately timing their pumps out-of-sequence so as to counteract the swing’s motion, can bring it to a complete stop again just as quickly.

Proof-of-concept

Tags: cve


Aug 22 2022

What are the differences between the 2013 and 2022 editions of ISO/IEC 27002?

Category: Information Security,ISO 27kDISC @ 3:48 pm

What are the differences between the 2013 and 2022 editions of ISO/IEC 27002

Tags: ISO 27002 2022, ISO 27002 revision


Aug 22 2022

Hiding a phishing attack behind the AWS cloud

Category: Information SecurityDISC @ 2:47 pm

Scammers are using cloud services to create and host web pages that can be used to lure victims into handing over their credentials

AWS Cloud Services in Finland - FiareConsulting.com

Criminals are slipping phishing emails past automated security scanners inside Amazon Web Services (AWS) to establish a launching pad for attacks.

Scammers have latched onto the ability for people to use an AWS service to build and host web pages using WordPress or their own custom code. From there they can send phishing messages carrying the AWS name into corporate emails systems to both get past scanners that typically would block suspicious messages and to add greater legitimacy to fool victims, according to email security vendor Avanan.

In a report this week, researchers with Avanan – acquired last year by cybersecurity company Check Point – outlined a phishing campaign that uses AWS and unusual syntax construction in the messages to get past scanners.

“Email services that use static Allow or Block Lists to determine if email content is safe or not are not immune to these attacks,” they wrote. “Essentially, these services will determine whether a website is safe or not. Amazon Web Services will always be marked as safe. It’s too big and too prevalent to block.”

Piggybacking on well-known brand names for phishing campaigns isn’t unusual. Avanan this year has documented such efforts leveraging QuickBooks, PayPal, and Google Docs to ensure messages land in an inbox.

Now the public cloud is a vehicle and using AWS makes sense. It is the largest public cloud player, owning a third of a global cloud infrastructure market that generated almost $55 billion in the second quarter, according to Synergy Research Group. Combined, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud account for 65 percent of the space.

“Attacks using public cloud is becoming my common for many reasons, in part because infrastructure is so transient, reputational systems cannot help. We can block bulletproof hosting providers but we can’t just block AWS,” John Bambenek, principal threat hunter at Netenrich, told The Register. “These services are cheap, easy to use, and can spin up and down services quickly. Public clouds are usually whitelisted, so IP reputation doesn’t work, and people are getting more and more used to services in public clouds so they don’t look as suspect.”

The trend will only grow, according to Davis McCarthy, principal security researcher at Valtix.

“As the enterprise embraces the multiple clouds, cybercriminals will have more options to choose from and abuse,” McCarthy told The Register. “Benefiting from the lack of visibility and the disjointed topology, attack surfaces will be difficult to fingerprint. Organizations will need to standardize on security across clouds and have the ability to consolidate visibility to ensure prevention and detection processes are implemented efficiently.”

Cybercriminals are “creating phishing pages on AWS using the site’s legitimacy to steal credentials,” Avanan researchers wrote. “Sending a link to this page via email is a way to bypass scanners and get users to hand over credentials.”

They pointed to a campaign where the cybercriminal sent a phishing message created and hosted on AWS telling recipients that their password was about to expire. The email came with a Microsoft logo and told the user to click on a button to either keep or change the password.

The use of AWS’ name isn’t the only tactic for getting past the scanners, according to the researchers. They also use unusual content in the email’s text to confuse scanners, they wrote. When the message in the example was opened, the text wasn’t related to the attack. Instead, it was written in Spanish that when translated talks about a price quote for an “earthquake monitoring system.”

When the user clicks on button, they’re taken to a fake password reset page that includes the domain name of the victim’s company and most of the fields populated. The user is asked only to type in their password. If that’s done, the scammers can steal the credentials.

“With an easy way into the inbox, plus a low lift from end-users, this type of attack can be quite successful for hackers,” the researchers wrote, who added that they notified Amazon of what they found.

Avanan researchers wrote that enterprise users need to hover over links to see the destination URL before clicking on it and look at the email content before clicking on it. Hank Schless, senior manager of security solutions at Lookout, told The Register that Secure web gateways (SWGs) can help identify risk behavior on the network beyond what typical scanners do. If part of a larger cloud security platform, administrators can implement more data protection tools to identify risk behavior, even if it’s coming from a legitimate source.

Automation also is key given the lack of in-house skills to run continuous monitoring, according to Ryan McCurdy, vice president of marketing at Bolster.

“Moreover, they do not have the relationships nor access to perform the takedowns, such as asking an internet service provider to take down a fake website, let alone have the access to underground forums and chat rooms, which is not something that can be acquired overnight,” McCurdy told The Register. “It’s critical that companies take a platform approach and leverage automation to detect, analyze, and take down fraudulent sites and content across the web, social media, app stores, and the dark web.” 

https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/22/aws_cloud_phishing/

AWS Security


Aug 22 2022

Escanor Malware delivered in Weaponized Microsoft Office Documents

Category: MalwareDISC @ 8:31 am

Researchers spotted a new RAT (Remote Administration Tool) advertised in Dark Web and Telegram called Escanor

Resecurity, a Los Angeles-based cybersecurity company protecting Fortune 500 worldwide, identified a new RAT (Remote Administration Tool) advertised in Dark Web and Telegram called Escanor. The threat actors offer Android-based and PC-based versions of RAT, along with HVNC module and exploit builder to weaponize Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF documents to deliver malicious code.

The tool has been released for sale on January 26th this year initially as a compact HVNC implant allowing to set up a silent remote connection to the victim’s computer, and later transformed into a full-scale commercial RAT with a rich feature-set. Escanor has built a credible reputation in Dark Web, and attracted over 28,000 subscribers on the Telegram channel. In the past, the actor with exactly the same moniker released ‘cracked’ versions of other Dark Web tools, including Venom RAT, 888 RAT and Pandora HVNC which were likely used to enrich further functionality of Escanor.    

Escanor Malware

The mobile version of Escanor (also known as “Esca RAT”) is actively used by cybercriminals to attack online-banking customers by interception of OTP codes. The tool can be used to collect GPS coordinates of the victim, monitor key strokes, activate hidden cameras, and browse files on the remote mobile devices to steal data.

“Fraudsters monitor the location of the victim, and leverage Esca RAT to steal credentials to online-banking platforms and perform unauthorized access to compromised account from the same device and IP – in such case fraud prevention teams are not able to detect it and react timely” – said Ali Saifeldin, a malware analyst with Resecurity, Inc. who investigated several recent online-banking theft cases.  

The majority of samples detected recently have been delivered using Escanor Exploit Builder. The actors are using decoy documents imitating invoices and notifications from popular online-services.

Notably, the domain name ‘

’ has been previously identified in connection to AridViper (APT-C-23 / GnatSpy) infrastructure. APT-C-23 as a group was active within the Middle Eastern region, known in particular to target Israeli military assets. After the report has been released by Qihoo 360, the Escanor RAT actor has released a video detailing how the tool may be used to bypass AV detection.

The majority of victims infected by Escanor have been identified in the U.S., Canada, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Mexico, and Singapore with some infections in South-East Asia. 

The original post with additional details is available on the ReSecurity website:

https://resecurity.com/blog/article/escanor-malware-delivered-in-weaponized-microsoft-office-documents

Tags: Weaponized Microsoft Office Documents


Aug 21 2022

Google says it stopped the largest DDoS attack ever recorded in June

Category: DDoSDISC @ 1:11 pm
Google says it stopped the largest DDoS attack ever recorded in June

One of Google’s customers was targeted with the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack ever recorded, according to a report the company released this week.

Attributed to Google Cloud Armor Senior Product Manager Emil Kiner and Technical Lead Satya Konduru, the report details the June 1 incident, in which a Google customer was hit with a series of HTTPS DDoS attacks, peaking at 46 million requests per second. 

To put it in perspective, they compared the attack to “receiving all the daily requests to Wikipedia (one of the top 10 trafficked websites in the world) in just 10 seconds.”

“This is the largest Layer 7 DDoS reported to date — at least 76% larger than the previously reported record,” they wrote.

In June, Cloudflare announced it had stopped the largest HTTPS distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack ever recorded at 26 million requests per second, surpassing a then-record attack of 17.2 million requests, which at the time was almost three times larger than any previous volumetric DDoS attack ever reported in the public domain.

Both Cloudflare and Google have expressed concerns about the evolution of DDoS attacks in recent years as they grow in frequency and exponentially in size.

“Today’s internet-facing workloads are at constant risk of attack with impacts ranging from degraded performance and user experience for legitimate users, to increased operating and hosting costs, to full unavailability of mission critical workloads,” Kiner and Konduru explained. 

The engineers said the attack started at 9:45 a.m. PST on June 1 and featured more than 10,000 requests per second. Within eight minutes, it grew to 100,000 requests per second. According to the report, Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection detected the attack and issued a “recommended rule” to block the incoming traffic, which the target’s security team put into place.

Two minutes later, the attack grew to its peak of 46 million requests per second before ending a little over an hour later.

“Presumably the attacker likely determined they were not having the desired impact while incurring significant expenses to execute the attack,” they wrote.

The hackers behind the attack used more than 5,000 source IPs from 132 countries to launch the attack, with the top 4 countries – Brazil, India, Russia and Indonesia – contributing about 31% of the total attack traffic.

https://

/google-says-it-stopped-the-largest-ddos-attack-ever-recorded-in-june/

DDoS Protection

Tags: ddos, DDoS Protection


Aug 18 2022

Hacker tournament brings together world’s best in Las Vegas

Category: Hacking,Information SecurityDISC @ 10:33 am
DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas

(Reuters) – A team of hackers from two North American universities won the “Capture the Flag” championship, a contest seen as the “Olympics of hacking,” which draws together some of the world’s best in the field.

In the carpeted ballroom of one of the largest casinos in Las Vegas, the few dozen hackers competing in the challenge sat hunched over laptops from Friday through Sunday during the DEF CON security conference that hosts the event.

The winning team, called Maple Mallard Magistrates, included participants from Carnegie Mellon University, its alumni, and the University of British Columbia.

The contest involves breaking into custom-built software designed by the tournament organizers. Participants must not only find bugs in the program but also defend themselves from hacks coming from other competitors.

The hackers, mostly young men and women, included visitors from China, India, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Some worked for their respective governments, some for private firms and others were college students.

While their countries may be engaged in cyber espionage against one another, the DEF CON CTF contest allows elite hackers to come together in the spirit of sport.

The reward is not money, but prestige. “No other competition has the clout of this one,” said Giovanni Vigna, a participant who teaches at the University of California in Santa Barbara. “And everybody leaves politics at home.”

“You will easily find a participant here going to another who may be from a so-called enemy nation to say ‘you did an amazing job, an incredible hack.'”

The game has taken on new meaning in recent years as cybersecurity has been elevated as a national security priority by the United States, its allies and rivals. Over the last 10 years, the cybersecurity industry has boomed in value as hacking technology has evolved.

Winning the title is a lifelong badge of honor, said Aaditya Purani, a participant who works as an engineer at electric car maker Tesla Inc (TSLA.O).

This year’s contest was broadcast for the first time on YouTube, with accompanying live commentary in the style of televised sports.

DEF CON itself, which began as a meetup of a few hundred hackers in the late 1990s, was organized across four casinos this year and drew a crowd of more than 30,000, according to organizing staff.

On Saturday afternoon, participants at the “Capture the Flag” contest sat typing into their laptops as conference attendees streamed in and out of the room to watch. Some participants took their meals at the tables, munching on hamburgers and fries with their eyes fixed on screens.

Seungbeom Han, a systems engineer at Samsung Electronics, who was part of a South Korean team, said it was his first time at the contest and it had been an honor to qualify.

The competition was intense and sitting for eight hours a day at the chairs was not easy. They did take bathroom breaks, he said with a laugh, “but they are a waste of time.”

Reporting by Zeba Siddiqui in Las Vegas Editing by Matthew Lewis

https://www.reuters.com/technology/hacker-tournament-brings-together-worlds-best-las-vegas-2022-08-17/

The Hacker Quarterly

Tags: Hacker tournament, Las Vegas, The Hacker Quarterly


Aug 18 2022

PoC exploit code for critical Realtek RCE flaw released online

Category: Security vulnerabilitiesDISC @ 8:14 am
Realtek

Exploit code for a critical vulnerability affecting networking devices using Realtek RTL819x system on a chip released online.

The PoC exploit code for a critical stack-based buffer overflow issue, tracked as 

 (CVSS 9.8), affecting networking devices using Realtek’s RTL819x system on a chip was released online. The issue resides in the Realtek’s SDK for the open-source eCos operating system, it was discovered by researchers from cybersecurity firm Faraday Security

“On Realtek eCos SDK-based routers, the ‘SIP ALG’ module is vulnerable to buffer overflow. The root cause of the vulnerability is insufficient validation on the received buffer, and unsafe calls to strcpy. The ‘SIP ALG’ module calls strcpy to copy some contents of SIP packets to a predefined fixed buffer and does not check the length of the copied contents.” reads the advisory published by Realtek, which published the issue in March 2022. “A remote attacker can exploit the vulnerability through a WAN interface by crafting arguments in SDP data or the SIP header to make a specific SIP packet, and the successful exploitation would cause a crash or achieve the remote code execution.”

Millions of devices, including routers and access points, are exposed to hacking.

The experts (Octavio Gianatiempo, Octavio Galland, Emilio Couto, Javier Aguinaga) disclosed technical details of the flaw at the DEFCON hacker conference last week.

A remote attacker can exploit the flaw to execute arbitrary code without authentication by sending to the vulnerable devices specially crafted SIP packets with malicious SDP data.

The issue is very dangerous because the exploitation doesn’t require user interaction.

The PoC code developed by the experts works against Nexxt Nebula 300 Plus routers.

“This repository contains the materials for the talk “Exploring the hidden attack surface of OEM IoT devices: pwning thousands of routers with a vulnerability in Realtek’s SDK for eCos OS.”, which was presented at DEFCON30.” reads the description provided with the exploit code on GitHub.

The repo includes:

  • analysis: Automated firmware analysis to detect the presence of CVE-2022-27255 (Run analyse_firmware.py).
  • exploits_nexxt: PoC and exploit code. The PoC should work on every affected router, however the exploit code is specific for the Nexxt Nebula 300 Plus router.
  • ghidra_scripts: Vulnerable function call searching script and CVE-2022-27255 detection script.
  • DEFCON: Slide deck & poc video.

Johannes Ullrich, Dean of Research at SANS shared a Snort rule that can be used to detect PoC exploit attempt.

“The rule looks for “INVITE” messages that contain the string “m=audio “. It triggers if there are more than 128 bytes following the string (128 bytes is the size of the buffer allocated by the Realtek SDK) and if none of those bytes is a carriage return. The rule may even work sufficiently well without the last content match. Let me know if you see any errors or improvements.” wrote the expert.

Slides for the DEFCON presentation along with exploits, and a detection script for 

 are available in this GitHub repository.

Tags: critical vulnerability, exploit code


Aug 17 2022

ITGP comprehensive set of Toolkits

Category: Security ToolsDISC @ 10:01 am

When it comes to protecting your data, you’re in safe hands. IT Governance is at the forefront of cyber security and data protection. Learn more about IT Governance Publishing’s range of toolkits.

InfoSec Playbooks

Tags: InfoSec playbooks, toolkits


Aug 17 2022

Chrome browser gets 11 security fixes with 1 zero-day – update now!

Category: Web Security,Zero dayDISC @ 8:37 am

The latest update to Google’s Chrome browser is out, bumping the four-part version number to 104.0.5112.101 (Mac and Linux), or to 104.0.5112.102 (Windows).

According to Google, the new version includes 11 security fixes, one of which is annotated with the remark that â€œan exploit [for this vulnerability] exists in the wild”, making it a zero-day hole.

The name zero-day is a reminder that there were zero days on which even the most well-informed and proactive user or sysadmin could have been patched ahead of the Bad Guys.

Update details

Details about the updates are scant, given that Google, in common with many other vendors these days, restricts access to bug details â€œuntil a majority of users are updated with a fix”.

But Google’s release bulletin explicitly enumerates 10 of the 11 bugs, as follows:

  • CVE-2022-2852: Use after free in FedCM.
  • CVE-2022-2854: Use after free in SwiftShader.
  • CVE-2022-2855: Use after free in ANGLE.
  • CVE-2022-2857: Use after free in Blink.
  • CVE-2022-2858: Use after free in Sign-In Flow.
  • CVE-2022-2853: Heap buffer overflow in Downloads.
  • CVE-2022-2856: Insufficient validation of untrusted input in Intents. (Zero-day.)
  • CVE-2022-2859: Use after free in Chrome OS Shell.
  • CVE-2022-2860: Insufficient policy enforcement in Cookies.
  • CVE-2022-2861: Inappropriate implementation in Extensions API.

As you can see, seven of these bugs were caused by memory mismanagement.

use-after-free vulnerability means that one part of Chrome handed back a memory block that it wasn’t planning to use any more, so that it could be reallocated for use elsewhere in the software



only to carry on using that memory anyway, thus potentially causing one part of Chrome to rely on data it thought it could trust, without realising that another part of the software might still be tampering with that data.

Often, bugs of this sort will cause the software to crash completely, by messing up calculations or memory access in an unrecoverable way.

Sometimes, however, use-after-free bugs can be triggered deliberately in order to misdirect the software so that it misbehaves (for example by skipping a security check, or trusting the wrong block of input data) and provokes unauthorised behaviour.

heap buffer overflow means asking for a block of memory, but writing out more data than will fit safely into it.

This overflows the officially-allocated buffer and overwrites data in the next block of memory along, even though that memory might already be in use by some other part of the program.

Buffer overflows therefore typically produce similar side-effects to use-after-free bugs: mostly, the vulnerable program will crash; sometimes, however, the program can be tricked into running untrusted code without warning.

The zero-day hole

The zero-day bug CVE-2022-2856 is presented with no more detail than you see above: â€œInsufficient validation of untrusted input in Intents.”

A Chrome Intent is a mechanism for triggering apps directly from a web page, in which data on the web page is fed into an external app that’s launched to process that data.

Google hasn’t provided any details of which apps, or what sort of data, could be maliciously manipulated by this bug



but the danger seems rather obvious if the known exploit involves silently feeding a local app with the sort of risky data that would normally be blocked on security grounds.

What to do?

Chrome will probably update itself, but we always recommend checking anyway.

On Windows and Mac, use More > Help > About Google Chrome > Update Google Chrome.

There’s a separate release bulletin for Chrome for iOS, which goes to version 104.0.5112.99, but no bulletin yet [2022-08-17T12:00Z] that mentions Chrome for Android.

On iOS, check that your App Store apps are up-to-date. (Use the App Store app itself to do this.)

You can watch for any forthcoming update announcement about Android on Google’s Chrome Releases blog

The open-source Chromium variant of the proprietary Chrome browser is also currently at version 104.0.5112.101.

Microsoft Edge security notes, however, currently [2022-08-17T12:00Z] say:

August 16, 2022

Microsoft is aware of the recent exploit existing in the wild. We are actively working on releasing a security patch as reported by the Chromium team.

You can keep your eye out for an Edge update on Microsoft’s official Edge Security Updates page.

Web Security for Developers: Real Threats, Practical Defense

Tags: Chrome browser


Aug 16 2022

Clop Ransomware Gang Breaches Water Utility, Just Not the Right One

South Staffordshire in the UK has acknowledged it was targeted in a cyberattack, but Clop ransomware appears to be shaking down the wrong water company.

Uk man hole cover

South Staffordshire plc, a UK water-supply company, has acknowledged it was the victim of a cyberattack. Around the same time, the Clop ransomware group started threatening Thames Water that it would release data it has stolen from the utility unless Thames Water paid up.

The problem? Thames Water wasn’t breached. 

Apparently, Clop got its UK water companies confused. 

South Staffordshire serves about 1.6 million customers and recently reported that it was targeted in a cyberattack and was “experiencing a disruption to out corporate IT network and our teams are working to resolve this as quickly as possible.” It added there has been no disruption on service. 

“This incident has not affected our ability to supply safe water, and we can confirm we are still supplying safe water to all of our Cambridge Water and South Staffs Water customers,” the water company said. 

Meanwhile, Thames Water, the UK’s largest water supplier to more than 15 million people, was forced to deny it was breached by Clop ransomware attackers, who threatened they now had the ability to tamper with the water supply, according to reports. 

“As providers of critical national infrastructure, we take the security of our networks and systems very seriously and are focused on protecting them, so that we can continue to provide resilient services to our customers and the environment,” the larger water company told the UK Mirror

While Clop seems to have its records all wrong, both water utilities mounted capable responses to the ransomware group’s attack on critical infrastructure, according to Edward Liebig, global director of cyber ecosystem at Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence. 

“I’m impressed by South Staffordshire Water’s ability to defend against the cyberattack in the IT systems and buffer the OT systems from impact,” Liebeg said. “And had Thames Water not done an investigation of the ‘proof of compromise,’ they may very well have decided to negotiate further. In both instances, each organization did their due diligence.”

https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/clop-ransomware-gang-breaches-water-utility

Ransomware Protection Playbook

Tags: ransomware attacks, Ransomware Protection Playbook


Aug 16 2022

Organisations Must Invest in Cyber Defences Before It’s Too Late

Category: Cyber maturity,Information SecurityDISC @ 8:22 am

We’ve all been feeling the effects of inflation recently. Prices rose by 8.2% in the twelve months to June 2022, with the largest increases being seen in electricity, gas and transport prices.

Meanwhile, the cost of renting commercial property continues to rise, despite the decreased demand for office space amid the uptick in remote work.

It should be obvious why costs are on the rise; substantial disruption remains related to COVID-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has disrupted supply chains and interest rates have been raised several times this year.

The Bank of England says that the causes of rising inflation are not likely to last, but it has warned that the prices of certain things may never come down.

Clearly, then, rising costs are not simply a temporary issue that we must get through. We must instead carefully plan for how we will deal with increased costs on a permanent basis.

One apparent measure is to look at ways your organisation can cut costs. For better or worse, the most likely targets will be parts of the business that don’t contribute to a direct return on investment.

However, before you start slashing budgets, you should consider the full effects of your decisions.

Take cyber security for example. It’s already notoriously underfunded, with IT teams and other decision makers being forced to make do with limited resources.

According to a Kaspersky report, a quarter of UK companies admit underfunding cyber security even though 82% of respondents have suffered data breaches.

The risk of cyber security incidents is even higher in the summer months, when staff holidays mean that cyber security resources are even more stretched than usual.

What’s at stake?

The global cost of cyber crime is predicted to reach $10.5 trillion (ÂŁ8.8 trillion) in the next three years, more than triple the $3 trillion (ÂŁ2.5 trillion) cost in 2015.

We’ve reached record numbers of phishing attacks, with the Anti-Phishing Working Group detecting more than one million bogus emails last quarter. Meanwhile, there were more ransomware attacks in the first quarter of 2022 than there were in the whole of 2021.

These are worrying signs for organisations, and an economic downturn will only make cyber criminals more determined to make money – especially as they know their targets are focusing on cutting costs.

But it’s not just the immediate costs associated with cyber attacks and disruption that organisations should be worried about. There are also long-term effects, whether that’s lingering operational disruption, reputational damage or regulatory action.

Consider the ongoing problems that British Airways faced after it suffered a cyber attack in 2018. It took the airline more than two months to detect the breach, creating enduring difficulties and ultimately resulting in a ÂŁ20 million fine.

The ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office), which investigated the incident, found that British Airways was processing a significant amount of personal data without adequate security measures in place, and had it addressed those vulnerabilities, it would have prevented the attack.

There were several measures that British Airways could have used to mitigate or prevent the damage, including:

  • Applying access controls to applications, data and tools to ensure individuals could only access information relevant to their job;
  • Performing penetration tests to spot weaknesses; and
  • Implementing multi-factor authentication.

In addition to the fine, British Airways settled a class action from as many as 16,000 claimants. The amount of the settlement remains confidential, but the cost of the payout was estimated to be as much as ÂŁ2,000 per person.

Remarkably, the penalty and the class action represent a case of strikingly good fortune for British Airways. Had it come earlier, it would have been at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when airlines were severely affected, and were it any later, it would have come during a period of massive inflation.

It’s a lesson that other organisations must take to heart. The GDPR is being actively enforced throughout the EU and UK, so organisations must ensure compliance.

Failure to do so will result in unforeseen costs at a time when every precaution must be taken to reduce costs.

Invest today, secure tomorrow

It’s long been accepted that it’s a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ you will suffer a cyber attack. When you do, you’ll have to invest heavily in security solutions on top of having to paying remediation costs.

In times of uncertainty, you need your services to be as reliable as possible. The challenges your organisation will face in the coming months as a result of falling consumer confidence are enough to deal with without having to contend with cyber crime and its inevitable fallout.

Investing in effective cyber security measures will enable your organisation to make the most of its opportunities in straightened circumstances.

You can find out how you can bolster your organisation’s defences quickly and efficiently with IT Governance’s range of training courses.

We want to help our customers get the most from their cyber security training this August.

Book any classroom, Live Online or self-paced training course before the end of this month and automatically receive:

Tags: defense in depth


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