A list of topics we covered in the week of February 17 to February 23 of 2025

February 21, 2025 - Healthcare security is failing patients time and again. This week DM Clinical Research and Helath Net Federal Services take the spotlight

February 20, 2025 - Beware before downloading Google Chrome from a Google search, you might get more than you expected.

February 20, 2025 - An infostealer known as ACRStealer is using legitimate platforms like Google Docs and Steam as part of an attack.

February 20, 2025 - South Korea says it's uncovered evidence that DeepSeek has secretly been sharing data with ByteDance, the parent company of popular social media app TikTok.

February 19, 2025 - Malwarebytes now protects ARM-based Windows devices, such as Microsoft’s Surface Pro X and Lenovo’s Yoga laptops.

 A week in security (February 17 &#8211; February 23) 

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

February 19, 2025 - Malwarebytes now protects ARM-based Windows devices, such as Microsoft’s Surface Pro X and Lenovo’s Yoga laptops.

February 19, 2025 - Google is allowing its advertizing customers to fingerprint website visitors. Can you stop it?

February 19, 2025 - Info stealers are thriving on Mac, with one specific variant accounting for 70% of all info stealer detections at the end of 2024.

February 18, 2025 - A flea market buyer found medical information about hundreds of patients on second hand decommissioned hard drives.

February 17, 2025 - A list of topics we covered in the week of February 10 to February 16 of 2025

 Protected: zQA Content Editing Styles 

Malwarebytes now protects ARM-based Windows devices, such as Microsoft’s Surface Pro X and Lenovo’s Yoga laptops.

For the last four years, Malwarebytes has been protecting ARM-based machines running on Apple’s M-series processors. Now, we’ve expanded our protection range to include ARM-based Windows machines such as Copilot+ PCs, including Microsoft Surface Pro, Lenovo Yoga Slim and ThinkPad, and Dell Inspiron, among others. 

ARM-based chips offer advantages such as improved performance, longer battery life, lower costs, and advanced features like on-device AI processing. 

And with ARM processors gaining popularity in the PC market—projections suggest that they could have 25% market share by 2027—there is no doubt that malware creators will expand their reach into this area. 

Malwarebytes helps you get ahead of these threats. With active protection layers that defend against system vulnerabilities, malicious links, and more, Malwarebytes has you covered across your devices. 

**Where can I get it?** 

Go to the Malwarebytes website and hit the Free Download button to try it yourself, or click the button below. Our installer will automatically detect if you have an ARM device.

We recommend Windows 11 or higher for this installation, because Windows 11 has been optimized to run on ARM processors.

 Malwarebytes introduces native ARM support for Windows devices  

This post is the result of research into the real-world application of the Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) technique along with Cisco Talos’ series of posts about  malicious Windows drivers.

Exploring vulnerable Windows drivers

Though it's still just a proof of concept, the malware is functional and can evade the Secure Boot process on devices from multiple vendors.

Source: Alexander56891 via Shutterstock

Researchers have spotted what they believe is the first ever malware capable of infecting the boot process of Linux systems.

"Bootkitty" is proof-of-concept code that students in Korea developed for a cybersecurity training program they're involved in. Though still somewhat unfinished, the bootkit is fully functional and even includes an exploit for one of several so-called LogoFAIL vulnerabilities in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) ecosystem that Binarly Research uncovered in November 2023.

**A Novel Proof-of-Concept**

Bootkits operate at the firmware level and execute before the operating system loads, allowing them to bypass the Secure Boot process for protecting systems from malware during startup. Such malware can persist through system reboots, operating system reinstallation, and even physical replacement of certain parts, like hard drives.

Researchers at ESET who analyzed Bootkitty after finding a sample on VirusTotal just last month described it as the first UEFI bootkit for Linux they have come across. That's significant because, until now, bootkits — the most notorious of which includes BlackLotus and FinSpy — have been Windows-specific.

"\[Bootkitty's\] main goal is to disable the kernel's signature verification feature and to preload two as yet unknown ELF binaries via the Linux init process (which is the first process executed by the Linux kernel during system startup)," ESET researchers Martin Smolar and Peter Strycek wrote.

Binarly, which also analyzed Bootkitty, found the malware to contain an exploit for CVE-2023-40238, one of several image parsing LogoFAIL vulnerabilities in UEFI that the company reported last year. The Bootkitty exploit leverages shellcode embedded within bitmap image (BMP) files to bypass Secure Boot and get the OS to trust the malware, Binarly said. The vendor identified Linux systems from multiple vendors as being vulnerable to the exploit, including those from Lenovo, Fujitsu, HP, and Acer.

"While this appears to be a proof-of-concept rather than an active threat, Bootkitty signals a major shift as attackers expand bootkit attacks beyond the Windows ecosystem," Binarly wrote. "The operating system bootloaders present a vast attack surface that is often overlooked by defenders, and the constant growth in complexity only makes it worse."

The UEFI — and prior to that the BIOS ecosystem — has been a popular target for attackers in recent years because of how malware operating at that level can remain virtually undetectable on compromised systems. But concerns over UEFI security really came to a head with the discovery of BlackLotus, the first malware to bypass Secure Boot protections even on fully patched Windows systems.

The malware took advantage of two vulnerabilities in the UEFI Secure Boot process, CVE-2022-2189, also known as Baton Drop, and CVE-2023-24932, to install itself in a virtually undetectable and unremovable manner. The relatively easy availability of the malware and Microsoft's struggles in addressing it, prompted a call from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for improved UEFI protections.

"Based on recent incident responses to UEFI malware such as BlackLotus, the cybersecurity community and UEFI developers appear to still be in learning mode," CISA noted at the time. "In particular, UEFI secure boot developers haven't all implemented public key infrastructure (PKI) practices that enable patch distribution."

**Functional Bootkit**

ESET found Bootkitty to contain capabilities for modifying, in memory, functions that normally verify the integrity of the GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB), which is responsible for loading the Linux kernel during startup. However, the specific functions that Bootkitty attempts to modify in memory are supported only on a relatively small number of Linux devices, suggesting the malware is more proof of concept than an active threat. Bolstering that theory is the presence of several unused artifacts in the code, including two functions for printing ASCII art and text during execution, ESET said.

The Korean students who developed the bootkit informed ESET after the security vendor published its analysis. ESET quoted the students as saying they had created the malware in an effort to spread awareness about the potential for bootkits becoming available for Linux systems. Details of the malware were only supposed to have become available as part of a future conference presentation. However, a few samples of the bootkit ended up being uploaded to VirusTotal, they noted.

**About the Author**

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop, Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

'Bootkitty' First Bootloader to Take Aim at Linux

Aftermath of MOVEit vulnerability: Data vigilante ‘Nam3L3ss’ leaks nearly 8 million employee records from industry giants like Amazon,…

Aftermath of MOVEit vulnerability: Data vigilante ‘Nam3L3ss’ leaks nearly 8 million employee records from industry giants like Amazon, 3M, HP, and Delta, exposing cybersecurity flaws across major firms.

A “Data Vigilante” using the alias Nam3L3ss has leaked millions of employee records from global industry giants, in connection with the widespread **MOVEit vulnerability**. For your information, the MOVEit flaw is a security vulnerability in the MOVEit file transfer software, which many organizations use to share sensitive data.

Nam3L3ss, who denies being a hacker, began leaking the data on Friday, November 8, 2024. So far, sensitive and non-sensitive records from 27 companies, totalling 7,952,414 employee records, have been exposed. This includes 2,861,111 records from Amazon employees, a breach acknowledged by the company.

“Amazon and AWS systems remain secure, and we have not experienced a security event. We were notified about a security event at one of our property management vendors that impacted several of its customers including Amazon,” Amazon spokesperson Adam Montgomery told Hackread.com. “The only Amazon information involved was employee work contact information, for example, work email addresses, desk phone numbers, and building locations.”

****Data Analysis****

The Hackread.com research team conducted an in-depth analysis of each file leaked by Nam3L3ss, revealing that the data includes full names, email addresses, phone numbers, office addresses, residential addresses, company names, location coordinates, and more.

****List of Affected Companies and Employee Counts****

    3M: 48,630 employees
    
    HP: 104,119 employees
    
    Delta: 57,317 employees
    
    MetLife: 585,130 employees
    
    Amazon: 2,861,111 employees
    
    McDonald's: 3,295 employees
    
    Lenovo: 45,522 employees
    
    TIAA: 2,464,625 employees
    
    CalSTRS: 422,311 employees
    
    BT: 15,347 employees
    
    URBN: 17,553 employees
    
    Leidos: 52,610 employees
    
    UBS: 20,462 employees
    
    HSBC: 280,693 employees
    
    Firmenich: 13,248 employees
    
    U.S. Bank: 114,076 employees
    
    Canada Post: 69,860 employees
    
    Westinghouse: 18,193 employees
    
    Rush University: 15,853 employees
    
    Omnicom Group: 37,320 employees
    
    Charles Schwab: 49,356 employees
    
    City National Bank: 9,358 employees
    
    Applied Materials: 53,170 employees
    
    Cardinal Health: 407,437 employees
    
    Bristol-Myers Squibb: 37,497 employees
    
    TIAA (additional listing): 23,857 employees
    
    Fidelity Investments: 124,464 employees

List of targeted companies (Screenshot credit: Hackread.com)

****Nam3L3ss’s Manifesto: Motivation and Methodology****

In a post on Breach Forums, Nam3L3ss outlined their “manifesto” to explain who they are and why they’re leaking data. According to the post, they monitor misconfigured and unsecured cloud databases across various services, including AWS Buckets, Azure, Digital Ocean, Google, and FTP and MongoDB servers, to extract and make this data public.

Nam3L3ss also claims to monitor ransomware groups, analyze stolen data, clean it by removing duplicates and irrelevant information, and then release it online. For example, the leaked MetLife employee directory originated from MetLife, a global financial services firm that suffered a ransomware attack in 2023.

Nam3L3ss intro and Manifesto (Screenshot credit: Hackread.com)

The Cl0p ransomware gang exploited MOVEit extensively, targeting hundreds of organizations worldwide. They even **created clear web websites to leak** the stolen data in July 2024.

**Ferhat Dikbiyik**, chief research and intelligence officer at Black Kite, weighed in on the recent Amazon data breach, explaining, that Amazon’s recent data breach traced back to a third-party vendor’s use of the MOVEit tool, is another wake-up call for the supply chain’s hidden vulnerabilities.

“Amazon’s recent data breach traced back to a third-party vendor’s use of the MOVEit tool, is another wake-up call for the supply chain’s hidden vulnerabilities. The MOVEit flaw initially hit hundreds, but the shockwave extended across 2,700+ organizations as the ripple effects reached third and even fourth-party vendors,” Ferhat said.

“We’ve identified over 600 MOVEit servers that were likely caught in this “spray” attack—leaving a vast field of potential targets,” he explained. “CL0P ransomware, the group exploiting this flaw, named 270 victims within three months, and the count is still rising.”

“With 200 to 400 organizations speculated to have paid ransoms, the real impact stretches far beyond these numbers. This breach emphasizes that ransomware risk doesn’t stop at your company’s doorstep. In today’s ecosystem, exposure management must extend across the entire supply chain to truly defend against the next big attack.”

****Data Vigilante?****

Although the term Data Vigilante is debatable, Nam3L3ss expresses frustration with companies and government institutions for failing to secure their networks. By leaking this data, they aim to raise awareness about data security and encourage better cybersecurity practices.

****Implications of the Data Leak and Advice to Employees****

Although passwords and financial details weren’t included in the leaked files, the exposure poses significant risks to companies and employees. Threat actors, especially state-sponsored groups like **North Korea’s Lazarus Group**, are known to exploit such data to initiate phishing scams, steal cryptocurrency, and access financial information that could aid their **country’s economy**.

If you work for one of the affected companies, be on the lookout for phishing scams via email, SMS phishing (smishing), and voice phishing (vishing) attempts, as attackers may try to exploit this data for further scams.

1.  Hacker Leaks Thousands of Microsoft and Nokia Employee Details
2.  Hackers Calling Employees to Steal VPN Credentials from US Firms
3.  Hacker Leaks Data of 33K Accenture Employees in 3rd-Party Breach
4.  Shadow IT: Personal GitHub Repos Expose Employee Cloud Secrets
5.  Indian Ex-Employee Jailed for Wiping 180 Virtual Servers in Singapore

Data Vigilante Leaks 8 Million Employee Records from Amazon, HP and Others

CISA should make its recommended goals mandatory and perform audits to ensure compliance.

Gary Barlet, Public Sector Chief Technology Officer, Illumio

November 12, 2024

5 Min Read

Source: Zoonar GmbH via Alamy Stock Photo

COMMENTARY  
Companies across the country are lining up to join the latest cybersecurity trend: the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) Secure by Design pledge, a commitment aimed at software manufacturers that compels them to keep up with fundamental cybersecurity strategies. Companies such as Lenovo, Google, AWS, Cloudflare, and Microsoft have already signed on. 

On the face of it, the Secure by Design pledge is a good thing. Its seven goals each encourage manufacturers to adopt or increase the usage of a key cybersecurity strategy within one year. The goals, such as "implement multifactor authentication (MFA)" are worthy, if basic, and CISA encourages companies to document their progress. If they fall short, they are also encouraged to report that failure to CISA. 

The problem is that this pledge is entirely voluntary. Companies are free to sign it — or not — as they wish. And there's no regulatory compliance factored in. This means that if a company does sign the pledge and falls short of one or more goals, no one may ever know and no action will be taken. It will be as if the pledge never existed in the first place.   

Without teeth, the pledge is essentially worthless. Outside of highlighting the low-bar steps major companies should take to ensure their infrastructure is secured from the most common attacks (which, admittedly, is a good thing), it takes no steps to ensure that companies will actually do so. And it provides no repercussions if they fail.    

**Is the Honor System Good Enough?**

With data breaches up 72% in 2023 and the average cost of a breach estimated at $4.88 million, can we afford for our nation's technological infrastructure to be governed by the honor system? What happens when the next big cyberattack takes down a pillar of our society because the company responsible failed to implement MFA?  

I'd argue for a much more aggressive approach from our federal government. Given the potential for widespread disruptions inherent with any cybersecurity failure, we can't afford to take such a lax attitude toward securing our systems. The sanctity of our nation's airlines, power grids, and other critical infrastructure relies on stringent cybersecurity measures. Merely "suggesting" that companies institute basic protocols is not enough. We need to mandate it — and punish those who fail. 

**The EU's Higher Standard**

I look at the European Union's approach to setting standards for its electronic devices. In 2022,  the EU passed a law mandating electronics manufacturers move to a standardized charging port for their mobile devices. The EU's stance toward Apple, which famously used a proprietary Lightning charging port for its iPhones, was simply: Adapt or die. Apple adapted. As a result, iPhones in Europe are now sold with the standardized USB-C charging port, alongside every other mobile device. 

The EU did not fool around with vague suggestions or pledges. It saw the value to consumers of a standardized charging port and demanded that manufacturers make the change. Those that failed to comply were not allowed to sell their devices in Europe. Simple. Effective. 

You can also look closer to home, to California, for an example of this kind of confident action by the government. The government of California adopted the Zero Emissions Vehicle requirements in 1990, and has adjusted the rules over the ensuing decades as technology has evolved. The purpose was to protect the state's air from automotive pollution. The result has been a near industrywide reduction in auto emissions for the past 30 years. 

For vehicle manufacturers that want to sell cars in California, the largest economy in the United States, the equation was the same one facing Apple in the EU: Adapt or die. They could either engineer their vehicles to produce fewer emissions or simply not sell them in California. Most elected for the former option, and, as a result, automotive emission control technology has advanced further in the past 30 years than at any point since the automobile was introduced. 

**Adopting a Similar Approach**

To protect our cyber infrastructure, we need to adopt a similar approach. Instead of simply making recommendations, our nation's cybersecurity agency should be empowered to make regulations.  

CISA should begin by making its recommended goals mandatory, forcing software companies to do the following: 

●      Increase the use of MFA 

●      Reduce default passwords 

●      Enable a significant measurable reduction in the prevalence of one or more vulnerability classes 

●      Increase the installation of security patches by customers 

●      Publish a vulnerability disclosure policy 

●      Demonstrate transparency in vulnerability reporting. 

●      Increase the ability for customers to gather evidence of cybersecurity intrusions 

Next, CISA should perform audits to ensure compliance. Relying on companies to self-report is no different from giving them permission not to report. Look closely at CISA's list of pledgees and come back in a year to see how many of these vaunted companies will have willingly admitted they aren't taking the most basic steps toward protecting their users' data. 

Finally, CISA should be empowered to make a simple statement to software manufacturers that want to sell products in the US similar to what the EU said to electronics manufacturers and what California said to automobile manufacturers: Adapt or die. 

If you want to sell software in the US, you should have to follow basic principles that will ensure your software is safe. This should not be a "nice to have." It should be mandatory. The stakes are as high if not higher than with charging ports and automobile emissions. As we witnessed with the recent failure of cybersecurity software, the impact was felt across entire industries and resulted in billions of dollars in lost productivity. This is not a realm for timidity.    

Hi all -- please add this to all of your content at the bottom between now and Thursday -- I'm adding it to this week's news items now. Rashid, Fahmida Donahue, Jim Bracken, Becky Spiegelman, Karen Beek, Kristina

Don't miss the upcoming free Dark Reading Virtual Event, "Know Your Enemy: Understanding Cybercriminals and Nation-State Threat Actors," Nov. 14 at 11 a.m. ET. Don't miss sessions on understanding MITRE ATT&CK, using proactive security as a weapon, and a masterclass in incident response; and a host of top speakers like Larry Larsen from the Navy Credit Federal Union, former Kaspersky Lab analyst Costin Raiu, Ben Read of Mandiant Intelligence, Rob Lee from SANS, and Elvia Finalle from Omdia. Register now!

**About the Author**

Public Sector Chief Technology Officer, Illumio

Gary Barlet has nearly three decades of cloud, cybersecurity, and network experience in the US federal government leading security and IT teams in both civilian agencies and the Department of Defense (DoD). At Illumio, Gary works with government agencies, contractors, and the broader ecosystem to build in zero-trust segmentation as a strategic component of the government’s zero-trust architecture. Before joining Illumio, Gary served as the chief information officer at the Office of the Inspector General for the US Postal Service and served in the Air Force in several technology leadership capacities, retiring from his role as cyber operations officer.

The Power of the Purse: How to Ensure Security by Design

Microsoft has released security updates to fix a total of 118 vulnerabilities across its software portfolio, two of which have come under active exploitation in the wild.
Of the 118 flaws, three are rated Critical, 113 are rated Important, and two are rated Moderate in severity. The Patch Tuesday update doesn't include the 25 additional flaws that the tech giant addressed in its Chromium-based

Microsoft has released security updates to fix a total of 118 vulnerabilities across its software portfolio, two of which have come under active exploitation in the wild.

Of the 118 flaws, three are rated Critical, 113 are rated Important, and two are rated Moderate in severity. The Patch Tuesday update doesn't include the 25 additional flaws that the tech giant addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser over the past month.

Five of the vulnerabilities are listed as publicly known at the time of release, with two of them coming under active exploitation as a zero-day -

*   **CVE-2024-43572** (CVSS score: 7.8) - Microsoft Management Console Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (Exploitation detected)
*   **CVE-2024-43573** (CVSS score: 6.5) - Windows MSHTML Platform Spoofing Vulnerability (Exploitation Detected)
*   **CVE-2024-43583** (CVSS score: 7.8) - Winlogon Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
*   **CVE-2024-20659** (CVSS score: 7.1) - Windows Hyper-V Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability
*   **CVE-2024-6197** (CVSS score: 8.8) - Open Source Curl Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (non-Microsoft CVE)

It's worth noting that CVE-2024-43573 is similar to CVE-2024-38112 and CVE-2024-43461, two other MSHTML spoofing flaws that have been exploited prior to July 2024 by the Void Banshee threat actor to deliver the Atlantida Stealer malware.

Microsoft makes no mention of how the two vulnerabilities are exploited in the wild, and by whom, or how widespread they are. It credited researchers Andres and Shady for reporting CVE-2024-43572, but no acknowledgment has been given for CVE-2024-43573, raising the possibility that it could be a case of patch bypass.

"Since the discovery of CVE-2024-43572, Microsoft now prevents untrusted MSC files from being opened on a system," Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News.

The active exploitation of CVE-2024-43572 and CVE-2024-43573 has also been noted by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which added them to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring federal agencies to apply the fixes by October 29, 2024.

Among all the flaws disclosed by Redmond on Tuesday, the most severe concerns a remote execution flaw in Microsoft Configuration Manager (CVE-2024-43468, CVSS score: 9.8) that could allow unauthenticated actors to run arbitrary commands.

"An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending specially crafted requests to the target environment which are processed in an unsafe manner enabling the attacker to execute commands on the server and/or underlying database," it said.

Two other Critical-rated severity flaws also relate to remote code execution in Visual Studio Code extension for Arduino (CVE-2024-43488, CVSS score: 8.8) and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Server (CVE-2024-43582, CVSS score: 8.1).

"Exploitation requires an attacker to send deliberately-malformed packets to a Windows RPC host, and leads to code execution in the context of the RPC service, although what this means in practice may depend on factors including RPC Interface Restriction configuration on the target asset," Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7, told about CVE-2024-43582.

"One silver lining: attack complexity is high, since the attacker must win a race condition to access memory improperly."

**Software Patches from Other Vendors**

Outside of Microsoft, security updates have also been released by other vendors over the past few weeks to rectify several vulnerabilities, including —

*   Adobe
*   Amazon Web Services
*   Apache Avro
*   Apple
*   AutomationDirect
*   Bosch
*   Broadcom (including VMware)
*   Cisco (including Splunk)
*   Citrix
*   CODESYS
*   Dell
*   Draytek
*   Drupal
*   F5
*   Fortinet
*   GitLab
*   Google Android
*   Google Chrome
*   Google Cloud
*   Hitachi Energy
*   HP
*   HP Enterprise (including Aruba Networks)
*   IBM
*   Intel
*   Ivanti
*   Jenkins
*   Juniper Networks
*   Lenovo
*   Linux distributions Amazon Linux, Debian, Oracle Linux, Red Hat, Rocky Linux, SUSE, and Ubuntu
*   MediaTek
*   Mitsubishi Electric
*   MongoDB
*   Mozilla Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Thunderbird
*   NVIDIA
*   Okta
*   Palo Alto Networks
*   Progress Software
*   QNAP
*   Qualcomm
*   Rockwell Automation
*   Salesforce Tableau
*   Samsung
*   SAP
*   Schneider Electric
*   Siemens
*   Sophos
*   Synology
*   Trend Micro
*   Veritas
*   Zoom, and
*   Zyxel

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Microsoft Issues Security Update Fixing 118 Flaws, Two Actively Exploited in the Wild

Ultimately, the goal of businesses and cyber insurers alike is to build more resilient IT environments to avoid cyberattacks and the ransom, downtime, and reputation hit that come along with them.

Source: Olekcii Mach via Alamy Stock Photo

COMMENTARY

The rising cost of cyberattacks, including downtime, investigations, lawsuits, ransoms, and more are prompting cyber insurers to re-examine underwriting and encourage greater cyber resiliency in their customer bases. With the influx of cyber-insurance claims stemming from the CrowdStrike IT outage and the exorbitant price of recovering from data breaches — $4.88 million, on average, according to IBM — the cyber-insurance industry will continue to self-correct and evolve to fit market needs while maintaining profitability.

Insurers will come away from July's widespread IT outage relatively unscathed, as the outages were caused by a vendor error, not a cyberattack, and because it was fixed fairly quickly. Still, insurer Parametrix estimates insured losses from US Fortune 500 companies will total $540 million to $1.08 billion, not even including Microsoft. Now, imagine this is a cyberattack that goes through a third-party software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider and takes down a similar swath of business, but recovery is slower, and companies must pay ransoms to recoup their data. How many billions of dollars will cyber insurers be out then? 

Because cybersecurity is still a relatively new corner of the insurance market, ambiguity remains around what should be covered, the role cyber insurance plays in potentially encouraging ransom payments, etc. There's no doubt that it's still finding its footing, figuring out in real-time and on a world stage how to insure companies against rapidly changing and advancing cybersecurity threats.

This evolution will be what finally causes businesses to face reality and prioritize cyber resiliency to ensure data is always recoverable in the event their primary network is taken offline or data is held for ransom. Companies may not take it upon themselves to invest in better data protection practices, and the cyber-insurance market ultimately will force their hand.

**Cyber Insurers Drag Us Into the Future**

Over the past five years, the rise of ransomware has shifted not only an organization's risk profile but also the estimated payouts. In many insurance policies, it's all about risk mitigation, but unless an underwriter can accurately assess the risk or implement requirements to mitigate the threat, it becomes a financial business risk for the insurance company. Therefore, cyber-insurance prices have significantly risen along with the bar to qualify for coverage.

Many of the new requirements focus on data storage and backups. Segmented, encrypted, and immutable backups are the industry standard, but because of limited resources, unawareness, or segmented cybersecurity teams, it hasn't always been a prioritized industry standard. Now, companies will have no choice but to up their game if they want coverage. Those who fail to adopt these requirements will be left without insurance or an effective recovery plan, unable to financially recover when the inevitable ransomware attack hits.

However, in June, businesses stood before the House Homeland Security Committee and told Congress that they are struggling to obtain cyber insurance, and even once insurance is secured, they struggle to understand the nuances of what's covered. Plus, ransom payments themselves are increasing as cybercriminals learn they can demand, and receive, large payouts. According to Chainalysis, the median ransom payment in 2024 was $1.5 million as of July, a huge increase from $200,000 in early 2023.

Because such a significant portion of companies are uncertain what is actually covered by their cyber insurance — around 40%, according to Sophos — they can't risk having to pay the whole ransom themselves or face never recovering their valuable data. Companies must do what they can to reduce their own risk.

**Recoverable Data Is Its Own Form of Cyber Insurance**

Companies can reduce the cost of attacks by ensuring data remains recoverable, mitigating operational downtime, and preventing the need to pay ransoms. Ransomware relies on the fact that production or backup data is made useless for organizations to recover following an attack, but with immutable backup in place, organizations ensure access to their data remains. This is especially true as ransomware is now targeting backups specifically.

Immutability is a must-have for any type of backup storage because it is time-based, not key-based like encryption. This means that there is truly no way (outside of destruction of the physical hardware) to alter or remove the backup data once it is written into a device that has object lock, i.e., immutability, enabled. You can truly maximize this strategy by encrypting backup data before writing it to immutable storage; that way, it's unreadable (unless you have the key) and unalterable. 

It's also important to ensure that a disaster recovery plan is in place that includes a multilevel backup solution and disaster recovery testing on a weekly and monthly basis to get ahead of any potential issues. Once these are implemented, keep copies of all the backup tests to prove to an insurance company that you have a lower risk factor. 

Ultimately, the goal of businesses and cyber insurers alike is to build more-resilient IT environments to avoid cyberattacks and the ransom, downtime, and reputation hit that come along with them. Law enforcement will continue to fight cybercrime, but there's no indication it will let up. Changes in the cyber-insurance market have the potential to disrupt the threat landscape by prompting the ubiquitous adoption of backup best practices and cyber resiliency.

**About the Author**

CEO, Object First

Object First CEO, David Bennett is a tech veteran and a seasoned channel executive with more than 30 years of IT channel leadership. Before joining Object First, he was CEO of Axcient and chief revenue officer at Webroot. Bennett has also held international leadership roles within such companies as Lenovo, Sony, and Kingston. British-born, he now resides in Colorado with his wife and family.

How Shifts in Cyber Insurance Are Affecting the Security Landscape

Microsoft on Tuesday disclosed that three new security flaws impacting the Windows platform have come under active exploitation as part of its Patch Tuesday update for September 2024.
The monthly security release addresses a total of 79 vulnerabilities, of which seven are rated Critical, 71 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. This is aside from 26 flaws that the tech

Windows Security / Vulnerability

Microsoft on Tuesday disclosed that three new security flaws impacting the Windows platform have come under active exploitation as part of its Patch Tuesday update for September 2024.

The monthly security release addresses a total of 79 vulnerabilities, of which seven are rated Critical, 71 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. This is aside from 26 flaws that the tech giant resolved in its Chromium-based Edge browser since last month's Patch Tuesday release.

The three vulnerabilities that have been weaponized in a malicious context are listed below, alongside a bug that Microsoft is treating as exploited -

*   **CVE-2024-38014** (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Installer Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
*   **CVE-2024-38217** (CVSS score: 5.4) - Windows Mark-of-the-Web (MotW) Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability
*   **CVE-2024-38226** (CVSS score: 7.3) - Microsoft Publisher Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability
*   **CVE-2024-43491** (CVSS score: 9.8) - Microsoft Windows Update Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

"Exploitation of both CVE-2024-38226 and CVE-2024-38217 can lead to the bypass of important security features that block Microsoft Office macros from running," Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said in a statement.

"In both cases, the target needs to be convinced to open a specially crafted file from an attacker-controlled server. Where they differ is that an attacker would need to be authenticated to the system and have local access to it to exploit CVE-2024-38226."

As disclosed by Elastic Security Labs last month, CVE-2024-38217 – also referred to as LNK Stomping – is said to have been abused in the wild as far back as February 2018.

CVE-2024-43491, on the other hand, is notable for the fact that it's similar to the downgrade attack that cybersecurity company SafeBreach detailed early last month.

"Microsoft is aware of a vulnerability in Servicing Stack that has rolled back the fixes for some vulnerabilities affecting Optional Components on Windows 10, version 1507 (initial version released July 2015)," Redmond noted.

"This means that an attacker could exploit these previously mitigated vulnerabilities on Windows 10, version 1507 (Windows 10 Enterprise 2015 LTSB and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2015 LTSB) systems that have installed the Windows security update released on March 12, 2024 — KB5035858 (OS Build 10240.20526) or other updates released until August 2024."

The Windows maker further said it can be resolved by installing the September 2024 Servicing stack update (SSU KB5043936) and the September 2024 Windows security update (KB5043083), in that order.

It's also worth pointing out that Microsoft's "Exploitation Detected" assessment for CVE-2024-43491 stems from the rollback of fixes that addressed vulnerabilities impacting some Optional Components for Windows 10 (version 1507) that have been previously exploited.

"No exploitation of CVE-2024-43491 itself has been detected," the company said. "In addition, the Windows product team at Microsoft discovered this issue, and we have seen no evidence that it is publicly known."

**Software Patches from Other Vendors**

In addition to Microsoft, security updates have also been released by other vendors over the past few weeks to rectify several vulnerabilities, including —

*   Adobe
*   Arm
*   Bosch
*   Broadcom (including VMware)
*   Cisco
*   Citrix
*   CODESYS
*   D-Link
*   Dell
*   Drupal
*   F5
*   Fortinet
*   Fortra
*   GitLab
*   Google Android and Pixel
*   Google Chrome
*   Google Cloud
*   Google Wear OS
*   Hitachi Energy
*   HP
*   HP Enterprise (including Aruba Networks)
*   IBM
*   Intel
*   Ivanti
*   Lenovo
*   Linux distributions Amazon Linux, Debian, Oracle Linux, Red Hat, Rocky Linux, SUSE, and Ubuntu
*   MediaTek
*   Mitsubishi Electric
*   MongoDB
*   Mozilla Firefox, Firefox ESR, Focus and Thunderbird
*   NVIDIA
*   ownCloud
*   Palo Alto Networks
*   Progress Software
*   QNAP
*   Qualcomm
*   Rockwell Automation
*   Samsung
*   SAP
*   Schneider Electric
*   Siemens
*   SolarWinds
*   SonicWall
*   Spring Framework
*   Synology
*   Veeam
*   Zimbra
*   Zoho ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, SupportCenter Plus, and ServiceDesk Plus MSP
*   Zoom, and
*   Zyxel

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