Security News

The US Department of Education and Department of Homeland Security were urged this week to more aggressively strengthen cybersecurity protections at K-12 schools across the nation to keep up with a massive wave of attacks. For context on the impact of ransomware on US education institutions throughout 2021, ransomware attacks have disrupted education at roughly 1,000 universities, colleges, and schools since the start of the year, according to Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow.

The US Federal Trade Commission has shared guidance for small businesses on how to secure their networks from ransomware attacks by blocking threat actors' attempts to exploit vulnerabilities using social engineering or exploits targeting technology.The first step businesses are advised to take to fend off such attacks is to ensure their tech teams follow the best practices outlined by CISA in this Ransomware Guide and the Fact Sheet on Rising Ransomware Threat to Operational Technology Assets.

Cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks warned over the weekend of an ongoing hacking campaign that has already resulted in the compromise of at least nine organizations worldwide from critical sectors, including defense, healthcare, energy, technology, and education. To breach the orgs networks, the threat actors behind this cyberespionage campaign exploited a critical vulnerability in Zoho's enterprise password management solution known as ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus which allows remotely executing code on unpatched systems without authentication.

US defense contractor Electronic Warfare Associates has disclosed a data breach after threat actors hacked their email system and stole files containing personal information. As detailed in a notice to the Montana Attorney General's office, EWA discovered that a threat actor took over one of their email accounts on August 2, 2021.

In a paper titled, The Security Risk of Lacking Compiler Protection in WebAssembly, distributed via ArXiv, the technical trio say that when a C program is compiled to WASM, it may lack anti-exploit defenses that the programmer takes for granted on native architectures. "We compiled 4,469 C programs with known buffer overflow vulnerabilities to x86 code and to WebAssembly, and observed the outcome of the execution of the generated code to differ for 1,088 programs," the paper states.

98% of U.S. executives report that their organizations experienced at least one cyber event in the past year, compared to a slightly lower rate of 84% in non-U.S. executives, according to a Deloitte survey. Further, COVID-19 pandemic disruption led to increased cyber threats to U.S. executives' organizations at a considerably higher rate than non-U.S. executives experienced.

It's very rare that the defense and intelligence community is vulnerable to file-based attacks. More commercial businesses should look to the defense and intelligence community for guidance on improving security posture.

The report found that while 81% of those surveyed consider their security to be above average or exceptional, many lack basic cyber hygiene - 41% lack a password complexity requirement, one of the cheapest, easiest forms of protection, and only 55.6% have implemented multi-factor authentication. "The loss of data and resources due to ransomware attacks can be debilitating. Though organizations are taking this threat seriously, too many are failing to take basic preventative steps. This report indicates a disturbing misplaced confidence that defenses never fail or that paying a ransom after an attack will always work - they do, and it won't," said Ted Ross, CEO of SpyCloud.

Cyware revealed a research detailing the challenges affecting modern security operations teams and the negative business impact of siloed security operations. According to the study, conducted by Forrester Consulting, 71% of security leaders report their teams need access to threat intelligence, security operations data, incident response data, and vulnerability data, yet 65% of respondents find it very challenging to provide security teams with cohesive data access.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency published today an advisory with details about how the BlackMatter ransomware gang operates.The joint cybersecurity advisory from CISA, the FBI, and the NSA shares the tactics, techniques, and procedures associated with BlackMatter activity that could help organizations protect against the BlackMatter ransomware gang.