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Cyber News Rundown: COVID-related Attacks Target Canadian Companies

Reading Time: ~ 2 min.

New Jersey Hospital Pays Massive Ransom

Officials have decided to pay roughly $670,000 in ransom following a ransomware attack on the University Hospital in New Jersey. The hospital was likely forced into this decision after being unable to restore from backups the 240GB of data stolen in the attack on their systems. It’s not entirely clear what information was stolen, but given the haste of payment it was likely highly sensitive patient data.

COVID-Related Cyberattacks Target Canadian Companies

A recent survey revealed that over 25% of all Canadian business organizations had been targeted by a COVID-19-themed cyberattack since the beginning of the year. Most of the organizations surveyed also reported seeing a significant rise in overall cyberattacks since the pandemic began. Worrisome findings also revealed that 38% of organizations surveyed were unsure if they had fallen victim to any type of cyberattack, which could mean the amount of customer information for sale on black markets could be significantly higher.

Boom! Mobile Website Compromised

Customer data has been compromised for users of the Boom! Mobile website, which was infiltrated by malicious JavaScript. It’s still unclear how the unauthorized code got onto the site or how long was active. Officials for the mobile company have confirmed they do not store payment card data and that no Boom! Mobile accounts were compromised.

Major Ransomware Attacks Increase Through Q3

Researchers have reported a massive increase in ransomware attacks in Q3 of 2020, with the Maze group being responsible for 12% of all attacks. They also reported that Ryuk ransomware variants were responsible for an average of 20 attacks per week. With the ongoing neglect of cybersecurity in major corporations, ransomware attacks will likely continue as long as their authors find them profitable.

Chicago Food Delivery Service Stricken with Data Breach

Nearly 800,000 customer records were compromised following a data breach at ChowBus, a Chicago-based food delivery service. With roughly 440,000 unique email addresses exposed, many individuals are now more susceptible to additional phishing attacks or identity theft. Fortunately, however, ChowBus does not store payment card information on its site.

The post Cyber News Rundown: COVID-related Attacks Target Canadian Companies appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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It’s Time to Talk Seriously About Deepfakes and Misinformation

Reading Time: ~ 4 min.

Like many of the technologies we discuss on this blog—think phishing scams or chatbots—deepfakes aren’t necessarily new. They’re just getting a whole lot better. And that has scary implications for both private citizens and businesses alike.

The term “deepfakes,” coined by a Reddit user in 2017, was initially most often associated with pornography. A once highly trafficked and now banned subreddit was largely responsible for developing deepfakes into easily created and highly believable adult videos.

“This is no longer rocket science,” an AI researcher told Vice’s Motherboard in an early story on the problem of AI-assisted deepfakes being used to splice celebrities into pornographic videos.

The increasing ease with which deepfakes can be created also troubles Kelvin Murray, a senior threat researcher at Webroot.

“The advancements in getting machines to recognize and mimic faces, voices, accents, speech patterns and even music are accelerating at an alarming rate,” he says. “Deepfakes started out as a subreddit, but now there are tools that allow you to manipulate faces available right there on your smartphone.”

While creating deepfakes used to require good hardware and a sophisticated skillset, app stores are now overflowing with options creating them. In terms of technology, they’re simply a specific application of machine learning technology, says Murray.

“The basics of any AI system is that if you throw enough information at it, itcan pick it up. It can mimic it. So, if you give it enough video, it can mimic a person’s face. If you give it enough recordings of a person, it can mimic that person’s voice.”

There are several ways deepfakes threaten to redefine the way we live and conduct business online.

Deepfakes as a threat to privacy

A stolen credit card can be cancelled. A stolen identity, especially when it’s a mimicked personal attribute, is much more difficult to recover. The hack of a firm dedicated to developing facial recognition technology, for instance, could be a devastating source of deepfakes.

“So many apps, sites and platforms host so many videos and recordings today. What happens when they get hacked? Will the breach of a social media platform allow a hacker to impersonate you,” asks Murray.

Businesses must be especially careful about the data they collect from customers or users, asking both if it’s necessary to collect and if it can be stored safely afterwards. If personal data must be collected, security must be a top priority, and not only for ethical reasons. Governments are starting to enact some strict regulations and doling out some stiff fines for data breaches.

Ultimately, Murray thinks those governments may need to weigh in more heavily on the threat of deepfakes as they become even more indistinguishable from reality.

“We’re not going to stop this technology. It’s here. But people need to have the discussion about where we’re heading. In the same way GDPR was created to protect people’s data, we’re going to need to have a similar conversation about deepfakes leading to a different kind of identity theft.”

Deepfakes as a cybersecurity threat to businesses

It’s important to note the ways in which deepfakes can be used to target businesses, not just to spoof individuals.

“These business-related instances aren’t too common yet,” says Murray. “But we’re at the beginning of a wave right now in terms of AI-enabled threats against businesses.

A late 2019 attack against a U.K. energy firm could be a sign of scary things to come. Rather than video, this attack took advantage of voice-spoofing technology to pose as an executive’s manager, insisting he wire nearly $250 thousand to a “supplier” immediately. In the aftermath of the scam, the victim reported being convinced by both the accent and the rhythm of the fake speech pattern.

To safeguard against what could be a rising attack method, Murray recommends businesses understand what deepfakes are capable of and follow best practices for avoiding fraud, no matter the technology.

“Have well-defined protocol for changing account details and signing off on any invoices,” he advises “Train financial and accounting teams especially rigorously on these protocols and encourage them to pick up the phone and double-check when anything seems strange or off. In these days of increased working from home it’s also tougher for financial staff to walk up to other finance or sales colleagues and make informal double checks.”

Deepfakes and misinformation campaigns

Soon after deepfakes went mainstream, implications for politics and the weaponization of misinformation became clear, prompting the U.S. Senate to address the issue in 2018.

While initially used to humiliate or extort people, mostly women, malicious actors began to see them as a way to sway public opinion or sow chaos. Deeptrace, a company dedicated to uncovering deepfakes, has noted instances where manipulated video was used to promote social discord and scandal across the globe.

“Deepfakes further undermine our ability to believe what we read, and now even watch, on the internet,” says Murray. This leads to widespread distrust, especially on issues where understanding is crucial, like the coronavirus pandemic, where misinformation is bountiful.

To combat misinformation, Murray advises to keep in mind how much of it is out there. Always consider the source of the information you’ve received before acting on it, especially if it makes you angry or elicits some other strong emotional response.

Deepfakes will likely make the internet even more difficult to rely on as a source of information in the years to come. But reducing their impact starts with understanding how far they’ve come and what they’re capable of.

To learn more on Deepfakes and misinformation, listen to the podcast.

The post It’s Time to Talk Seriously About Deepfakes and Misinformation appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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Cyber News Rundown: Ryuk Wreaks Healthcare Havoc

Reading Time: ~ 2 min.

Ryuk Shuts Down Universal Health Services

Computer systems for all 400 Universal Health Services facilities around the globe have reportedly been shut down following an attack by the Ryuk ransomware group. Ryuk is known for targeting large organizations, but the healthcare industry has been gaining popularity among these groups due to high volumes of sensitive information and typically low levels of security. It’s unknown if the healthcare firm has paid ransoms for the encrypted data or if they are restoring systems from available backups.

Global Insurance Firm Targeted by Ransomware

The Fortune 500 insurance firm AJG was forced to take several computer systems offline over the weekend after identifying a cyber-attack. It’s still unclear which ransomware variant was responsible for the attack and officials with the firm haven’t revealed if customer or employee information was stolen. Third-party researchers confirmed multiple AJG servers, unpatched for a serious vulnerability, could have been the entry point for the attack.

French Shipping Company Knocked Offline by Ransomware

All computer systems and websites belonging to CMA CGM, a French shipping giant, were knocked offline by a crippling ransomware attack. This attack on CMA CGM makes them the fourth international shipping company to fall victim to a cyberattack, which have proven profitable, in as many years. The company has verified that the Ragnar Locker ransomware group was behind the attack, though they have not revealed the ransom asked.

Cyber Attack Forces Swatch to Disconnect Online Services

Though not confirmed by Swatch, the Swiss watchmaker was reportedly forced to take many of their systems offline after likely falling victim to a ransomware attack. While the company did not verify the type of attack, ransomware’s prevalence this year makes it a likely culprit. Swatch has announced they plan to seek legal action against the attackers.

DDoS Attacks See Substantial Rise in 2020

There were over 4.8 million DDoS attacks during the first half of 2020, a 15% rise over the same period last year. May alone saw more than 900,000 DDoS attacks, a record for most in a single month. Ninety percent of these attacks lasted for under an hour, marking another shift from previous years’ attacks. They have also increased in complexity, leaving victims and researchers with little time to defend themselves.

The post Cyber News Rundown: Ryuk Wreaks Healthcare Havoc appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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False Confidence is the Opposite of Cyber Resilience

Reading Time: ~ 4 min.

Have you ever met a person who thinks they know it all? Or maybe you’ve occasionally been that person in your own life? No shame and no shade intended – it’s great (and important) to be confident about your skills. And in cases where you know your stuff, we encourage you to keep using your knowledge to help enhance the lives and experiences of the people around you.

But there’s a big difference between being reasonably confident and having false confidence, as we saw in our recent global survey. Featured in the report COVID-19 Clicks: How Phishing Capitalized on a Global Crisis, the survey data shows that, all over the world, people are pretty confident about their ability to keep themselves and their data safe online. Unfortunately, people are also still getting phished and social engineering tactics aimed at employees are still a major way that cybercriminals successfully breach businesses. These data points strongly suggest that we aren’t all being quite as cyber-safe as we think.

Overconfidence by the Numbers

Approximately 3 in 5 people (59%) worldwide think they know enough to stay safe online.

You may think 59% doesn’t sound high enough to earn the label of “false confidence”. But there were two outliers in our survey who dragged the average down significantly (France and Japan, with only 44% and 26% confidence, respectively). If you only take the average of the five other countries surveyed (the US, UK, Australia/New Zealand, Germany and Italy), it’s a full ten percentage points higher at 69%. UK respondents had the highest level of confidence out of all seven regions surveyed with 75%.

8 in 10 people say they take steps to determine if an email message is malicious.

Yet 3 in 4 open emails and click links from unknown senders.

When so many of us claim to know what to do to stay safe online (and even say we take steps to determine the potential sketchiness of our emails), why are we still getting phished? We asked Dr. Prashanth Rajivan, assistant professor at the University of Washington and expert in human behavior and technology, for his take on the matter. He had two important points to make.

Individualism

According to Dr. Rajivan, it’s important to note that Japan had the lowest level of confidence about their cybersecurity know-how (only 26%), but the survey showed they also had the lowest rate of falling victim to phishing (16%). He pointed out that countries with more individualistic cultures seem to align with countries who ranked themselves highly on their ability to keep themselves and their data safe.

“When people adopt a less individualistic mindset and, instead, perceive themselves to have a greater responsibility to others, their average level of willingness to take risks decreases. This is especially important to note for businesses that want to have a cyber-aware culture.”

– Prashanth Rajivan, Ph.D.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Another factor Dr. Rajivan says may contribute to overconfidence in one’s ability to spot phishing attacks might be a psychological phenomenon called the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”. The Dunning-Kruger Effect refers to a cognitive bias in which people who are less skilled at a given task tend to be overconfident in their ability, i.e. we tend to overestimate our capabilities in areas where we are actually less capable.

How These Numbers Affect Businesses

Only 14% of workers feel that a company’s cyber resilience is a responsibility all employees share.

The correlations between overconfidence and individualism may also translate into a mentality that workers are not responsible for their own cybersecurity during work hours. While 63% of workers surveyed agree that a cyber resilience strategy that includes both security tools and employee education should be a top priority for any business, only 14% felt that cyber resilience was a shared responsibility for all employees.

How to Create a Cyber Aware Culture

The short answer: a strong combination of employee training and tools.

The long answer: when asked what would help them feel better prepared to avoid phishing and prevent cyberattacks, workers worldwide agreed that their employers need to invest more heavily in training and education, in addition to strong cybersecurity tools. Dr. Rajivan also agrees, stating that, if employers want to build cybersecurity awareness into their business culture, then they need to invest heavily in their people.

“By creating a feeling of personal investment in the individuals who make up a company, you encourage the employees to return that feeling of investment toward their workplace. That’s a huge part of ensuring that cybersecurity is part of the culture. Additionally, if we want to enable employees to assess risk properly, we need to cut down on uncertainty and blurring of context lines. That means both educating employees and ensuring we take steps to minimize the ways in which work and personal life get intertwined.”

– Prashanth Rajivan, Ph.D.

Additionally, he tells us, “Human behavior is shaped by past experiences, consequences and reinforcement. To see a real change in human behavior related to phishing and online risk-taking habits in general, people need frequent and varied experiences PLUS appropriate feedback that incentivizes good behavior.”

Ultimately, the importance of training can’t be emphasized enough. According to real-world data from customers using Webroot® Security Awareness Training, which provides both training courses and easy-to-run, customizable phishing simulations, consistent training can reduce click rates on phishing scams by up to 86.5%.

It’s clear a little training can go a long way. If you want to increase cyber resilience, you have to minimize dangerous false confidence. And to do that, you need to empower your workforce with the tools and training they need to confidently (and correctly) make strong, secure decisions about what they do and don’t click online.

Learn more about Security Awareness Training programs.

The post False Confidence is the Opposite of Cyber Resilience appeared first on Webroot Blog.