Compliance, seen as a burden for businesses, is being passed to overloaded IT departments — leaving organizations unsure if they're compliant at all.

INFOSEC23 – London – Compliance with data-protection requirements remains one of the cornerstones of cybersecurity and risk management, but with the fifth anniversary of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) behind us, indications point to it becoming an unreasonable burden on IT departments.

Research released this week at Infosecurity Europe by Hornetsecurity found that 80% of organizations are more concerned about compliance than they were five years ago; however, the burden to retain an appropriate level of compliance falls on the IT department in more than half (57%) of businesses.

The survey of IT leaders in around 200 organizations found that more than a third (37.5%) of organizations do not have a dedicated compliance officer, while 69% of respondents said that compliance has a "moderate" to "extreme" impact on their IT department's operations, and one in eight companies (13%) could not confirm at all that they were compliant with required controls, likely due to a lack of resources.

This does suggest that rather than being seen as a risk management enabler, compliance is perceived as a hindrance to achieve, and many simply offload it to the IT department, which may or may not be prepared to handle it.

“The fact that more than half of companies are hindering the day-to-day work of IT departments through lack of compliance staff and policies is a huge concern," Hornetsecurity CEO Daniel Hofmann said in the report.

**Is There a Negative Perception of Compliance?**

Andy Syrewicz, technical evangelist at Hornetsecurity, says he believes there is a negative perception of the compliance burden — not just at the technology level, but in most businesses as a whole. 

"Many organizations see compliance as just a ‘cost of doing business,' much like taxes," he says. "Many organizations want to do the right thing in safeguarding data regardless of the existence of regulations, but there are those in the industry that have a more flippant attitude. That said, the heavy burden of compliance is increasingly being put on IT teams — and businesses are looking for ways to deal with it."

Rowenna Fielding, director of Miss IG Geek, says the GDPR had a significant impact on business due to the introduction of the Accountability Principle, which requires organizations to be able to demonstrate —with evidence — that they are upholding data-protection principles, respecting data-subject rights, and fulfilling their governance obligations.

"This closed a gap in previous data-protection law, which had largely been treated as a box-ticking exercise up until then," she says. "However, this also made organizations realize how much 'compliance debt' they'd been carrying and required significant changes to be able to catch up with the previous 20 years as well as meet the new, more stringent standards."

Fielding adds that there are strong parallels with health and safety laws, or consumer rights regulations which exist to protect living people from being harmed or exploited in pursuit of business advantage: "It’s hardly surprising that some business decision-makers perceive safeguards as a burden rather than a responsibility."

That is the key word: burden. If something is a burden we're less enthused about it, and it seems that is the case with compliance in this research. Fielding says it is up to business leaders to make sure that they have clear and realistic strategies and facilities for staying on the right side of the law – or better yet, taking corporate social responsibility seriously.

**Who's Responsible for Data Security Compliance?**

Asked about the statistic on compliance being the responsibility of IT, Fielding says this is a recipe for disaster. IT’s responsibility is to make sure procurement, configuration, maintenance, and support of IT equipment and services all enable an organization’s compliance obligations — not to act as sheepdogs for the whole organization.

“Each business unit should be determining their own operational parameters to fit within the organization’s strategy, and that means understanding any applicable compliance requirements and putting them into effect," she says.

The solution surely is for the responsibility for compliance to be spread among the whole organization, starting with a lead from the top. Fielding says it is the responsibility of senior management to provide the rest of the organization with parameters, resources, and steerage so that legal/contractual/business obligations can be met, but what often seems to happen is that the top level of an organization assumes that "compliance" is something that can be achieved simply by telling people to do it (and threatening them with punishment if they don’t).

"This neither creates an environment where compliance is incentivized, and doesn't offer suitable or adequate resources for achieving it," she says. "After all, it's so much easier to scapegoat a junior employee for noncompliance than it is to build and maintain a culture which _enables_ compliance."

IT Staff Increasingly Saddled With Data Protection Compliance

From hardening Windows systems to adding access control and segmenting the network, there are steps organizations can take to better secure corporate data.

Having been in the cybersecurity industry since the early '90s, I've witnessed its transformation over many years. Today, my team conducts extensive research and testing to uncover vulnerabilities that organizations often overlook. We've successfully breached the networks of major companies in North America and identified security gaps that could have led to catastrophic consequences if left unmitigated.

In this article, I will share the top three tips that every organization must implement to secure their data and protect themselves from potential attacks based on our daily assessments and discoveries.

**1\. If Your Network Isn't Segmented, It's Not Secure**

Cybersecurity experts preach the benefits of network segmentation, but according to data cited by CIO, only 25% of organizations implement it. If you don't have a logical separation between your most critical information and your everyday employees, you're going to have a hard time securing your network.

To secure corporate data, organizations need to have configurations in place on any floor and office space that touches network ports. Doing so will prevent someone from accessing the network from any device. Even seemingly harmless devices such as printers can pose a threat to a network. During a physical penetration test we were asked to conduct for a large airline, the consultant was able to gain physical access to the airline's internal network via a printer at the gate, all without encountering any employee intervention.

To prevent unauthorized access, it's vital to implement access controls such as passwords or user authentication, as well as keeping firmware up to date to address any known vulnerabilities. And if the corporate backup solution is easily accessible to you, then it's easily accessible to threat actors who can delete the backups and detonate ransomware. In the airline example, network segmentation would isolate printers from other parts of the network to limit the potential impact of a security breach. 

Firewall access controls should be established between internal network segments to limit access to network resources in the event of an attack. Physical or logical access control should also be implemented to prevent unauthorized physical access to devices.

So, keep your devices in check (and your printers) and your network will thank you for it.

**2\. Modernize Your Network as Much as You Can Afford**

Over the past 30 years, Microsoft has made significant strides in the security of Windows and Windows networking. However, the Windows operating system still supports out-of-the-box legacy solutions that go back to Windows 95 — if not further, to Windows for Workgroups. If you've invested in modern operating systems such as Windows 10 or 11, or Windows Server 2016 or newer, there is no reason to continue to support these legacy solutions. By enabling "native mode domain," you can disable all the backward compatibility that may be weakening your network security and immediately enhance the security of your network. 

Companies can better reduce their security risks by eliminating their reliance on "end of life" solutions. Invest in upgrading legacy systems and ensure that all system software is patched through a vulnerability management and remediation program.

**3\. Greater Visibility Into Threat Vectors Through Content Filtering **

To improve your firewall's visibility into traffic leaving your environment, ensure that you have content visibility to block potential threats. The first question to ask is whether your employees are on the corporate network. A work-from-home culture may not scale well for you. However, there's no reason for your server systems to have unrestricted access to the Internet. Leveraging solutions such as content filtering can help you control the type of sites that could be accessed while an attacker is attempting to exploit your organization. For instance, blocking access to Mega.io and other common file-sharing sites used by ransomware threat actors is effective in stopping data exfiltration.

For employees in a work-from-home culture, content-filtering options such as Zscaler or even DNS monitoring solutions such as Umbrella from Cisco are useful not only for controlling the type of websites that corporate devices can access from outside of the building, but also for providing monitoring capabilities in case an employee falls victim to a phishing attack. Corporate assets should still be under the control of the organization, even if they're being used outside the traditional office environment.

Companies can no longer afford to take their eye off the ball when it comes to security measures — even basic protections such as firewalls are only minimally effective at intervening in today's potential threat levels. I cannot stress enough the importance of implementing these three things to be a step ahead of attackers and have visibility into your entire environment.

Lessons From a Pen Tester: 3 Steps to Stay Safer

The zero-day security bugs are being used to deploy the sophisticated but "odd" TriangleDB spying implant on targeted iOS devices.

Apple has released emergency patches for two new zero-day vulnerabilities in its software that an advanced persistent threat (APT) actor has been using to deploy malware in an ongoing iOS spying campaign dubbed "Operation Triangulation."

Meanwhile on Wednesday, Kaspersky released a new report that provided additional details on the TriangleDB spyware implant used in the campaign, which it flagged as containing a number of oddities, such as disabled features that could be deployed at a future time. 

According to the company, its analysis showed that for now, the malware supports 24 functional commands that serve various purposes such as creating, modifying, removing and stealing files, listing and terminating processes, gathering credentials from the victim's keychain and monitoring their location.

"Features that we found especially significant are the abilities to read any file on the infected device, extract passwords from the victim's keychain and track the device geolocation," says Georgy Kucherin, one of the security researchers at Kaspersky who discovered the zero-day bugs that Apple disclosed this week.

**A Trio of Zero-Days**

One of the newly addressed security vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-32434) affects multiple iOS versions and gives attackers a way to execute arbitrary code with kernel level privileges on iPhones and iPads. The other vulnerability (CVE-2023-32439) exists in Apple's WebKit browser and enables arbitrary code execution via maliciously crafted web content. Apple on June 21, 2023, issued updates addressing both vulnerabilities. 

The two bugs are part of a set of three Apple zero-days that researchers at Kaspersky have discovered so far while investigating Operation Triangulation. The investigation began about seven months ago when the security firm spotted several dozen iOS devices on its corporate Wi-Fi network behaving in a suspicious manner.

The company released a report on its initial analysis of the malicious activity, in early June. At the time, Kaspersky described the attackers as likely exploiting multiple vulnerabilities in Apple software to deliver the TriangleDB spyware implant on iOS devices belonging to targeted iOS users. Researchers at the company identified the first of the flaws as CVE-2022-46690, an out-of-bounds issue that allowed an application to execute arbitrary code at the kernel level. Kaspersky described the malware itself as running with root privileges, capable of executing arbitrary code on affected devices and implementing a set of commands for collecting system and user information.

Reading files on the infected device allows attackers to get access to sensitive information such as photos, videos, emails, as well as databases containing conversations from messenger apps, Kucherin says. TriangleDBs' keychain dumping features allow the attackers to harvest the victim's passwords, and then further use them to access various accounts owned by the victim.

**TriangeDB Shows Curious Spyware Behavior**

Somewhat curiously, the implant requests multiple privileges from the operating system (on infected devices) without any obvious ways to use the information, Kucherin says. Examples of privileges that the malware requests—but doesn’t presently use—include access to the microphone, camera and the address book. 

"These features may be implemented in auxiliary modules that can be loaded by the implant," at some future time, he notes.

Another significant discovery that Kaspersky made when analyzing TriangleDB is the fact that the attackers behind the malware have an eye on targeted macOS users as well. "Perhaps the most interesting finding is the 'populateWithFieldsMacOSOnly' method that we found in the implant," Kucherin says. "Its existence means that similar implants can be used to target not just iOS devices, but also Mac computers."

Kaspersky has assessed it was the victim of a targeted attack, but likely not the only one. Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) intelligence outfit has alleged—without providing any proof—that the US National Security Agency (NSA), likely in cahoots with Apple, is behind the malware and the spying operation. The agency has accused the two of installing the spyware on thousands of iOS devices belonging to Russian diplomats and Russia-affiliated individuals of supposed interest to the US government. In a tone reminiscent of US accusations against Russia and China, Russia's foreign ministry described the iOS spyware campaign as part of a decades long effort to collect "large-scale data of Internet users" without their permission or knowledge.

Both the NSA and Apple have rejected those allegations.

Kaspersky has released a utility called ‘triangle\_check’ that organizations can use to search for signs of the spyware implant on their iOS devices.

2 More Apple Zero-Days Exploited in Ongoing iOS Spy Campaign

The company says its Themis Co-pilot for Outlook helps recipients discern business email compromise attacks, reducing false positives for security staff.

Cloud email security provider Ironscales added a new arrow to its quiver: Themis Co-pilot for Microsoft Outlook, a self-service threat-reporting chatbot powered by PhishLLM, the company's own large language model (LLM).

Business email compromise (BEC) is a large and growing problem in which attackers use deception and impersonation to fool users into giving away personally identifiable information (PII), corporate assets, and even money. According to the FBI, BEC has cost businesses $50 billion globally in the past 10 years, with a 17% year-over-year growth in losses in 2022. And Verizon's "2023 Data Breach Investigations Report" (DBIR) reported that over the past year, 74% of breaches involved human judgment.

Microsoft Outlook addresses BEC with a Report Phish button, which sends a report to system admins but depends on the user being able to discern a phishing email. To that end, Ironsides developed Themis Co-pilot to flag suspicious emails and lead recipients through a dialogue explaining how to tell if something is a phishing lure.

Themis Co-pilot taps into Ironscales' Themis AI security data set, which was built from millions of security events and — like ChatGPT and other well-known generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools — employs reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to keep current. Unlike ChatGPT, Themis AI and PhishLLM are proprietary and held only by Ironscales, which eliminates many of the privacy and confidentiality concerns AI tools raise when employees feed back new data.

The idea behind RLHF is that by feeding new phishing examples and human decisions back into PhishLLM via Themis AI, the actions of Themis Co-pilot will become more accurate. This virtuous cycle will, ideally, not only result in fewer false positives for the security team to clear, but can help train users to learn what to look for in a phishing attempt.

Themis Co-pilot is available now in closed beta from Ironscales.

Keep up with the latest cybersecurity threats, newly-discovered vulnerabilities, data breach information, and emerging trends. Delivered daily or weekly right to your email inbox.

Subscribe

Ironscales Adds AI Assistant to Suss Out Phishing Attempts

The notorious APT15 used common malware tools and a third-generation custom "Graphican" backdoor to continue its information gathering exploits, this time against foreign ministries.

From late 2022 to early 2023, a Chinese state-level threat actor used a novel malware to conduct espionage against foreign ministries in North and South America.

The group in question, APT15 (aka Flea, Nickel, Vixen Panda, KE3CHANG, Royal APT, and Playful Dragon) already "has a track record of honing in on government targets, diplomatic missions, and embassies, likely for intelligence-gathering purposes," Symantec researchers explained in a June 21 blog post. In recent years it has targeted diplomatic organizations, government organizations, and NGOs.

This latest campaign primarily focused on ministries of foreign affairs, but also included a government finance department and a corporation. All the targets were based in the Americas, a region which "does appear to have become more of a focus for the group in recent times," the researchers wrote.

To carry out their espionage, APT15 employed well over a dozen tools, malicious and otherwise. Among its arsenal: Mimikatz and two of its variants, four Web shells including AntSword and China Chopper, and CVE-2020-1472, a three-year-old but CVSS 10.0 "Critical" privilege escalation vulnerability in the Windows server process Netlogon.

The attackers' only unique tool was Graphican, a new variant of its old Trojan backdoor used to run commands and download files from victim machines. "This backdoor has evolved some of its anti-detection mechanisms," acknowledges Avishai Avivi, CISO at SafeBreach. "That said, the fact that threat actors often use the same techniques allows companies to test their defenses proactively."

**What Is Graphican?**

Graphican is an iteration on APT15's other Trojan backdoor, Ketrican, itself an evolution of their earlier model, BS2005.

Graphican mostly distinguishes itself by foregoing a typical, hardcoded command-and-control (C2) server. Instead, it uses Microsoft Graph — an API for Microsoft 365 services — to retrieve an encrypted server address from a OneDrive folder.

Once the connection is made and the machine compromised, however, Graphican possesses the same basic functionalities as its predecessor — creating an attacker-controlled command line on the victim machine, creating new processes and files, and downloading files. "The similarities in functionality between Graphican and the known Ketrican backdoor may indicate that the group is not very concerned about having activity attributed to it," the researchers speculate.

Avivi sees it differently. "The reality is that APT groups are really looking for efficiency," he says. "Suppose a tool is proven effective for launching attacks or opening backdoors. In that case, they'll keep using it until it loses its efficacy or is stopped. R&D costs time and money for adversaries just like it does for companies."

**Who Is APT15?**

According to Symantec, APT15 has been around for nearly two decades. The group has made its biggest waves in recent years, however, so much so that in 2021 Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit performed a coordinated seizure of its known infrastructure. Even that coordinated action from Microsoft wasn't enough to stop APT15, which returned a year later with a spyware campaign targeting Uyghur populations en masse.

Organizations interested in hardening against APT15 may not want to start with infection vectors. The group has been known to use phishing emails, "but there have also been reports of it exploiting public-facing applications, as well as using VPNs, to gain initial access to victim networks," Symantec explained.

On the other hand, the relative consistency in APT15's malware can be of benefit to defenders.

"Adversaries will use proven techniques to accomplish their goals," Avivi says, pointing to APT15's rehashing of largely similar malicious backdoors. "That is one, among many reasons, why validating security controls against known patterns and cycles can help companies better defend against these threat actors."

20-Year-Old Chinese APT15 Finds New Life in Foreign Ministry Attacks

The US Department of Justice adds litigators under its National Security Division to take on sophisticated cyber threats from adversarial nation-states.

The US Department of Justice has created a new National Security Cyber Section, also known as NatSec Cyber, to respond to increasing cybersecurity threats from nation-state actors.

The new NatSec Cyber division will work in coordination with the DoJ Criminal Division's Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) and the FBI's Cyber Division, to quickly respond and prosecute cyberattacks from state-backed cybercriminals, according to the agency's announcement.

The naming of a dedicated team of DoJ cybercrime lawyers comes in the wake of major cyberattack campaigns targeting US interests including the Russian group Cl0P's ongoing ransomware attacks on the MOVEit file transfer zero-day flaw, and ramped-up cyber espionage attacks out of China including the recent Volt Typhoon cyberattacks.

"NatSec Cyber will give us the horsepower and organizational structure we need to carry out key roles of the Department in this arena," Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division said in a statement announcing the new team. "This new section will allow NSD to increase the scale and speed of disruption campaigns and prosecutions of nation-state threat actors, state-sponsored cybercriminals, associated money launderers, and other cyber-enabled threats to national security."

Keep up with the latest cybersecurity threats, newly-discovered vulnerabilities, data breach information, and emerging trends. Delivered daily or weekly right to your email inbox.

Subscribe

New DoJ Cyber Prosecution Team Will Go After Nation-State Threat Actors

Gen Digital, the parent company of the security companies, is the latest victim in a rash of Cl0p attacks on the bug in the MOVEit transfer software, leading to employee data being revealed.

Gen Digital, the parent company of cybersecurity subsidiaries such as Avast and Norton, confirmed on June 20 that the personal information of its employees was compromised in yet another a MOVEit attack by the Cl0p ransomware gang.

The company stated that it was affected by a cyberattack in response to inquiries, confirming that personal information such as names, addresses, employee IDs, and email addresses were revealed. 

"We use MOVEit for file transfers and have remediated all of the known vulnerabilities in the system. When we learned of this matter, we acted immediately to protect our environment and investigate the potential impact. We have confirmed that there was no impact to our core IT systems and our services and that no customer or partner data has been exposed," according to Gen Digital's public notice, which further confirmed that it informed all parties that may have been affected, as well as data protection regulators. 

The bug, a critical-severity SQL injection tracked as CVE-2023-34362, started out as a zero-day vulnerability that has been part of an exploitation campaign at the hands of Cl0p ransomware gang. The attacks are ongoing even post-patch, and has targeted more than 100 companies and organizations so far.

"As a general best practice, we advise never to directly allow for apps like MOVEit Transfer to be directly exposed to the Internet in cloud environments," said Amitai Cohen, attack vector intel lead at Wiz, in an emailed statement. "Instead, place the app behind a VPN, a reverse proxy or a single sign-on (SSO) landing page. This strategy will help to mitigate the effect of potential attacks exploiting vulnerable or misconfigured application endpoints and other attacks that are similar in nature."

Keep up with the latest cybersecurity threats, newly-discovered vulnerabilities, data breach information, and emerging trends. Delivered daily or weekly right to your email inbox.

Subscribe

Avast, Norton Parent Latest Victim of MOVEit Data Breach Attacks

It's time to update what we think we understand about ransomware, including new defensive measures and how fast the attack response should be.

INFOSEC23 – London – With a threat as persistently pervasive as ransomware, myths and misconceptions are bound to emerge in tandem. Richard de la Torre, technical marketing manager at Bitdefender, used his time at the podium during this week's Infosecurity Europe conference to enumerate — and dispel — some of the more common ones.

While some of the items on de la Torre's list are likely very familiar to most security practitioners, he cites a ransomware misperception that there's no capability to fight this all too common hostage taking of business data. Not true — proactive organizations are increasingly using decryptors and also making more strategic use of threat intelligence to prevent or disrupt attacks, he adds. 

And despite all the worry and attention devoted to ransomware-as-a-service and more leading edge ransomware incidents, de la Torre claims ransomware attack vectors remain relatively basic. "The threat process has not changed and access starts through phishing attacks," he says.

**Ransomware Is Big Business**

All that being said, most organizations still haven't grasped that ransomware has mushroomed into big business, turbocharged by its RaaS business model with an operator who's sometimes state-sponsored. The operator variously buys, develops, and resells the ransomware code and hires affiliates, usually hackers, who infiltrate networks. They then plant malware, establish a command and control (C&C) server, detonate the ransomware, and collect ransom.

"These are multi-billion dollar organizations, who hire access brokers and data miners and HR teams and recruit on the dark and deep Web," he says.

Another misconception is that organizations must have a speedy response to a ransomware infection, and that time is of the essence to prevent encryption and loss of business data. While that may have been true a few years ago, times have changed, de la Torre notes. Most attackers now focus more on data exfiltration, and the "actual ransomware is used as a distraction while \[attackers\] exfiltrate data." 

More commonly, attackers will move laterally inside a network, for days or even months, doing reconnaissance to see if an organization has cyber insurance, identify key customers, and pinpoint where the richest datasets are.

De la Torre also says it's a misconception that attackers only go after large targets. Most ransomware attacks typically target small organizations, as larger organizations have SOC teams and more resources dedicated to cybersecurity. But the smaller targets aren't the prize, just a steppingstone. More often, ransomware attackers "target smaller organizations who have affiliations with larger organizations via a supply chain as a backdoor," he explains.

In terms of defense, he recommended having good defense in depth, with email security to stop phishing emails and good detection and response to "detect when there has been a change to Azure, for example," de la Torre says. "You want something tamper proof and that you are able to recover from."

Ransomware Misconceptions Abound, to the Benefit of Attackers

From fake job listings that ding your reputation to fake job applicants who hack your network, job scams are a major threat.

Job scamming is a pandemic within a pandemic. These operations can grow to multimillion-dollar businesses, operating in countries all over the world. In one survey, 32% of job seekers reported applying and even interviewing for a fake job, 15% had their personal information stolen, and 9% said they'd lost money to the scammers. Financial losses topped $367 million last year in the United States alone.

Gabriel Friedlander, founder and CEO of Wizer Training, says these scammers operate just like any other business. But instead of marketing products or services, their goal is to commit crimes.

"They have marketing, where they send out their scams," Friedlander says. "They try to capture leads, convert them to opportunities, and close the deal by scamming the person or hacking the company. They're using a lot of the tools that marketers are using. The thing is, they have a better mousetrap because they can offer anything."

**Risks to Companies and Brands**

Job scams not only hurt job seekers, but they also wreak havoc on company brands and expose sensitive data to exploiters. Roger Grimes, the data-driven defense evangelist at KnowBe4, says he's surprised by the sheer creativity of job scammers, who steal the credentials of real people and then apply to jobs using legitimate-looking emails or portfolio URLs. Often these emails will hide malware within resume attachments or links, according to a report by Trellix.

Fred House, senior director of detection research and operations at Trellix Advanced Research Center, gives one example: Qakbot malware in emails can be exposed, rooted out, and addressed. Then within a few days, Qakbot evolved into a new threat.

The scamming company is "an organization that's very well-funded, that's very agile," House says. "And that's the cat-and-mouse game."

Companies sometimes receive a huge volume of job applications through social media applications like LinkedIn or software-as-a-service apps like Workday, and making sure each applicant is legitimate can be a monumental task. Even if an application appears safe, these threat actors are also prepared for interviews.

Grimes says he has spoken with employers who think they've found the "perfect candidate" — someone who has answered all of their interview questions correctly. However, once the person is hired, they disappear or are unable to do the job.

"They're very rehearsed," Grimes says. "When you're trying to verify the legitimacy, they've heard \[it\] 100 times, and they know how to respond. They know what documents to send you. That can be very convincing."

Vulnerable companies include those without a cybersecurity team or software in place to monitor potential job applicants. While this implies smaller firms are at risk, it's often the Fortune 500 brands that are targeted.

"The bigger they are, the harder it is for them to verify that this headhunting firm is the one that's working on behalf of them," Grimes says. "It's not as easy as people make it out to be."

Adds AJ Nash, vice president of ZeroFox: "If you're a company that's desirable, that's a bigger brand, that's a bigger opportunity to lure people in. That dream is an opportunity. That's going to be enticing."

**How to Guard Against Scams**

The most important protections against scams for human resources and security departments are awareness, education, and training. Companies that lack knowledge about these kinds of job scams are more prone to attacks.

If you can't meet the applicant in person, conduct a thorough background check, says Wizer Training's Friedlander. Background checks, he adds, are no longer "nice-to-haves" but a must to keep companies safe. He also suggests reaching out to that applicant in multiple ways to make sure this is a legitimate person being hired for the role.

Having a tight security posture is fundamental to staying safe.

"It comes down to the protections they have in place," Trellix's House says. "How sophisticated is their email security? Do they have a Web proxy where once the user clicks on the link, it goes through their Web proxy, and it has a chance to analyze it?"

Companies should aggressively look to root out these scams and put pressure on job sites, like Indeed, and social media channels, like LinkedIn, to make sure these cybercriminals are defeated, according to KnowBe4's Grimes.

In a statement, LinkedIn acknowledged the "rise in fraudulent activity across the internet over the last several months, and we have the technology, including artificial intelligence systems, and teams of experts to stop the majority of detected fraudulent activity before you ever see it. In addition, we've introduced new tools to ensure a safe experience, including the ability to see if an account has a verified phone number or email." A LinkedIn report states that 57.9 million fake accounts were removed between July and December in 2022.

Listing specific do's and don'ts on the company's career page and social media platforms is one step to assisting potential job seekers on avoiding scams. This includes phrases such as "We will never ask you for money" and "We will never ask for your Social Security number or identifying information," says ZeroFox's Nash.

Outsourcing may be the best solution to combat these scams, based on the size of the company and the number of employees dedicated to cybersecurity. Nash says this includes setting up social media monitoring and brand protection. The potential damage to a company may be significant and requires investment in security.

"Companies who aren't doing that — they're going to find out the hard way when bad things happen," Nash says.

**Protect Your Reputation**

A company's reputation can be damaged, even if a company isn't affected financially after reports of fake jobs. Even though the company isn't responsible, leadership should understand how their brand can be stolen and used for malicious purposes, Nash says.

"It's not their fault, but it is going to reflect on them," Nash says. "When someone is scammed out of a job, their company name will be associated with that scam. A job seeker will now have a lesser opinion on that organization."

Once the HR department or security team is notified that a job scam associated with the company has occurred, Nash recommends showing empathy toward that potential job applicant. He recommends using language such as, "I'm really sorry to hear this has happened to you. Thank you for reporting it to us. We will take it under advisement, talk to our intel team — whatever it might be."

**The Future of Job Scams**

Grimes notes that these scams have evolved in the past decade or so. Finding a job applicant wasn't always this complicated.

"This is something our parents didn't have to worry about," Grimes says. "If you're applying for a job to GE, it really was for GE, and GE was hiring somebody. They were dealing with a person that they met in person. But I don't think the problems we have with the employment industry are going away anytime soon. I think it's as much of a part of our fabric as social engineering and phishing."

Learning to protect ourselves from cybercrimes is an unfortunate part of the Internet age. It's the way of the world, according to Friedlander.

"Cyber-risk is not as clear as physical risk," Friedlander says. "It's not tangible. And people need to be educated. You just can't see it most of the time."

**SIDEBAR: Will Job Scamers Use Deepfakes?**

Remember when the reverse image search was a great way to determine if a photo was fake or stolen? Thanks to synthetic scams using artificial intelligence and deep fake technology, that service isn't quite as useful.

"You go on websites and in one click have a fake image of a human being that never existed in the history of humanity, and it's really convincing," said AJ Nash, vice president of ZeroFox. "Whether it's video, whether it's pictures, whether it's audio, whether it's sound effects, there's a lot of synthetic scams. And the technology is really coming along quite well." 

The speed of this kind of tech and the ways they can be used maliciously can be mind-boggling. Gabriel Friedlander, CEO of Wizer, said voice cloning has become increasingly simple to do. 

Wizer posts training videos on security awareness and one features how a job seeker's face and voice were used to land an IT job to hack into a company. The only reason the scam was revealed is when the company reached out to the real person wondering why she had disappeared. The video is a demonstration but the scammers are very real. 

"Deep fakes, AI will continue to get really good to the point where we just won't know the difference between an AI deep fake and a real person," said Roger Grimes, KnowBe4's data-driven defense evangelist. "I mean that's absolutely going to happen."

The good news is that the technology isn't flawless. Nash said it's difficult to impersonate human interactions and human movements. He recommended finding a way to see the hands of an individual in a photo or on camera. Apparently, the intricacies of fingers haven't been perfected yet.

Keep Job Scams From Hurting Your Organization

A slew of critical advisories this week showcase an exploding edge device attack surface for SMBs, which have limited cybersecurity protection, visibility, and maintenance available.

Small and midsized businesses (SMBs) have some security work ahead as two major edge device vendors (Asus and Zyxel) announce critical security vulnerabilities to patch — and another (Western Digital) cuts off unpatched devices from the cloud.

Asus released new firmware on June 19 to fix nine separate vulnerabilities in several of the company's router models, one of which could let a cyberattacker gain code execution ability. Two of the most serious flaws are a critical memory corruption weakness in the Asus router firmware, tracked under CVE-2022-26376, and the second could allow a threat actor to "achieve arbitrary code execution," according to NIST, and dates back to 2018, tracked under CVE-2018-1160.

The same day, Western Digital announced it has blocked devices running unpatched firmware from its cloud as of June 15.

A severe vulnerability impacting Western Digital's MyCloud Home and other cloud storage devices could lead to remote code execution, according to NIST. Despite the fact that the bug, tracked under CVE-2022-36327, received a CVSS vulnerability-severity score of 9.8 out of 10, the flaw was known to the public for a full month before affected devices were blocked from accessing the Western Digital cloud.

Also this week, Zyxel released patches against code-injection vulnerabilities in three versions of its network-attached storage devices. The firmware command injection vulnerability is tracked under CVE-2023-27992 and could let an unauthenticated user execute operating system commands.

**SMB Edge Cyberattack Surface Explodes **

This glut of edge-device patch warnings this week showcases the fact that SMBs are increasingly at risk thanks to the exploding number of edge devices being connected to their networks. For an idea of the scale of the endpoint attack surface, experts put the number of active Internet of things (IoT) and edge devices around the world at more than 12 billion. That number is expected to hit 27 billion by 2025.

At the same time, many of these organizations are largely woefully lacking in basic cybersecurity hygiene and monitoring. At first, edge devices can seem like an economic choice for building out an SMB infrastructure, but they are much tougher to secure, explains Melissa Bischoping, director, endpoint security research at Tanium.

"For small businesses, using small-office-home-office (SOHO) routers and devices is often a cost-effective solution," she says, "but the lack of monitoring and centralized management in many of these devices can result in vulnerabilities and insecure configurations that provide easy access to an adversary."

Meanwhile, never ones to miss an opportunity, threat actors are making the most of this sweet spot.

“Edge infrastructure is an incredibly attractive target for attackers because it generally lacks the depth of monitoring and visibility that endpoints have, and is always public facing by design, removing an initial hurdle for access,” Bischoping explains.

Making these devices an even softer mark, many are built with open source components, says John Gallagher, vice president of Viakoo Labs.

"Edge devices like routers, NAS drives, IP cameras, and other IoT/OT systems are the fastest growing part of an organization’s attack surface due to their use of open source software components and often being unmanaged and unmonitored," Gallagher explains. “Traditional IT security solutions that are agent-based don't work for IoT/OT devices which require agentless solutions."

**How SMBs Can Secure the Edge**

Securing the SMB edge starts with knowing what there is to protect, according to Gallagher.

"First, make sure you have a complete inventory of devices by using an agentless asset discovery solution," Gallagher says.

Once cybersecurity teams have visibility into what there is to defend, that information can be used to direct resources effectively, Bischoping adds.

"Prioritize visibility of the edge assets and leverage that information to address patching, credential management, and configuration hardening as part of your ongoing security hygiene and controls," she says. "Other quick wins include ensuring you’ve rotated default login credentials on these devices, employed secure authentication mechanisms, and enforced least-privilege access for any accounts that may log in to those devices."

And, to handle with firmware and password updates at the scale required for IoT and edge devices, Gallagher recommends an automated approach.

Commenting on how SMBs can manage the edge more effectively, organizations should also consider whether devices need to be connected to the Internet, or would be better suited for a more secure internal network connection, advises Matthew Morin, senior director of product management with NetRise.

"In the case of many vulnerabilities announced by Asus, Zyxel, and Western Digital, ensuring the affected devices were only accessible via internal networks would have dramatically reduced the impact of the vulnerabilities," Morin recommends. "SMBs must understand what is publicly disclosed from their networks and regularly review if what is exposed needs to be there."

Teams should also look for devices with no particular owner or purpose and pull the plug. "Lastly, ensure that devices have clear ownership and tracking of their lifecycle management, so that devices that go end of life or end of support can be replaced before they get exploited." Gallagher adds.

Once those processes are in place, Morin says the next step for more mature organizations is incorporating software bills of materials (SBOMs) for added visibility.

"For more mature organizations, a good next step is ensuring that they have component-level visibility, such as an SBOM for network-connected devices," Morin adds. "In this case, with an SBOM, an organization could have been aware of this risk well before the vendor decided to patch the issue."

Source

DARKReading