[From the desk of Paul Davis – his opinions and no-one else’s]
Apart from the reporter’s opinions đ
So onto the news:
Evading cyber legislation: Jurisprudence cloaking is the future of cyber warfare
Now hackers have come up with virtual ways to be transparent â at least to the law: cyber cloaks.
Cyber cloaks are most powerful for those engaged in criminal cyber activity, as it offers the freedom from consequence of persecution.
In general, the cloak consists of one or more of five core ingredients, and there are almost immeasurable âflavorsâ that can be combined with great care and precision.
I will not go into great detail as not to promote specific attacks, however the notion of how these techniques work is most important to help protect your organization against their use.
Each of the five techniques listed above carry the ability to cloak a perpetratorâs real identity from a legal perspective.
Yes, itâs true that there are ways to find out who perpetrated the act beyond legal methods and mitigating the perpetrators, but these techniques are generally only available for national self-defense, and even those are highly restrictive.
Itâs high time that the legal and security community understand that the IP address is dead for legal purposes and begin to work on rational ways to uncover malicious folks through the fog of technology and regional borders.
The answer to this cloaking malaise is to leverage enterprising technologies, such as fingerprinting and other fraud-like enumerations, which expose the perpetrator and provide an indelible mark from which to arrest them.
Legal teams and security professionals alike must get beyond the lay of security technology and reach into the next generation to find answers.
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Cyber attacks threatening national security double in past year, GCHQ reveals
Cyber attacks that threaten national security have doubled in a year with the UK now facing up to seven serious assaults every day, GCHQ has warned.
The intelligence agency is identifying 200 cyber attacks every month that either target critical organisations and networks or come from significant sources, such as hostile states.
That compares to 100 a month just last summer.
The intelligence agency is identifying 200 cyber attacks every month that either target critical organisations and networks or come from significant sources, such as hostile states.
That compares to 100 a month just last summer.
Officials also warned that advanced hacking technology is increasingly available âoff the shelfâ online meaning more and more offenders will be able to launch more sophisticated attacks.
Simply technology for denial of service attacks can be bought for a few pounds, while more sophisticated technology can be up to ÂŁ100,000.
GCHQ and the Government on Monday launched a ÂŁ6.5 million Cyber Invest programme, which will work with academic experts and the private sector to support research in to cyber attacks and how best to protect against them.
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JPMorgan Chase CSO reportedly reassigned following data breach
JPMorgan Chase & Co’s CSO Jim Cummings was reportedly reassigned to a new position within the bank following the company’s major data breach this past year.
Bloomberg reported that it obtained a memo indicating that Cummings would be moving to Texas to âwork on military and veterans housing initiatives for the bank.â During his CSO tenure, Cummings supervised more than 1,000 people.
He formerly served as the head of the US Air Force’s cyber-combat unit.
Greg Rattray formerly served as CISO at the bank and was reassigned in June to become the head of global cyber partnerships and government strategy.
Bloomberg reported that company insiders said both Cummings and Rattray brought military culture to the bank, which didn’t always mesh with JPMorgan’s Wall Street ways.
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DDoS attack only the tip of the iceberg: study
In the survey, 28% of the respondents in Saudi Arabia most often cited malware and 36% cited hacking as the number one threats to their companies, while DDoS was chosen as the most dangerous threat by only 10%.
Globally, DDoS attacks often coincide with malware incidents (in 45% of all cases), and corporate network intrusions (in 32% of all cases).
Data leaks were also detected simultaneously with an attack in 26% of cases.
Construction and engineering companies encountered this problem more often than others: according to respondents worldwide, 89% of DDoS attacks on these companies coincided with other types of attacks.
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Connectivity and Cybercrime
Legal measures play a key role in the prevention and combating of cybercrime
Increasing levels of cybercrime, as both individuals and organized criminal groups exploit new criminal opportunities.
Law enforcement cybercrime investigations require an amalgamation of traditional and
new policing techniques.
While high-level consensus exists regarding broad areas of criminalization, detailed analysis of the provisions in source legislation reveals divergent approaches.
A comprehensive study on Cybercrime was conducted by the UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime).
Reviewed here is the Executive Summary of this excellent report which covers all the aspects of Cybercrime in almost 300 pages.
In 2011, at least 2.3 billion people, the equivalent of more than one third of the worldâs total population, had access to the internet.
Over 60 per cent of all internet users are in developing countries, with 45 per cent of all internet users below the age of 25 years.
By the year 2017, it is estimated that mobile broadband subscriptions will approach 70 per cent of the worldâs total population.
By the year 2020, the number of networked devices (the âinternet of thingsâ) will outnumber people by six to one, transforming current conceptions of the internet.
In the hyperconnected world of tomorrow, it will become hard to imagine a âcomputer crimeâ, and perhaps any crime, that does not involve electronic evidence linked with internet protocol (IP) connectivity. âDefinitionsâ of cybercrime mostly depend upon the purpose of using the term.
A limited number of acts against the confidentiality, integrity and availability of computer data or systems represent the core of cybercrime.
Beyond this, however, computer-related acts for personal or financial gain or harm, including forms of identity-related crime, and computer content-related acts (all of which fall within a wider meaning of the term âcybercrimeâ) do not lend themselves easily to efforts to arrive at legal definitions of the aggregate term.
Certain definitions are required for the core of cybercrime acts.
However, a âdefinitionâ of cybercrime is not as relevant for other purposes, such as defining the scope of specialized investigative and international cooperation powers, which are better focused on electronic evidence for any crime, rather than a broad, artificial âcybercrimeâ construct.
Legal measures play a key role in the prevention and combating of cybercrime.
These are required in all areas, including criminalization, procedural powers, jurisdiction, international cooperation, and internet service provider responsibility and liability.
At the national level, both existing and new (or planned), cybercrime laws most often concern criminalization, indicating a predominant focus on establishing specialized offences for core cybercrime acts.
Countries increasingly recognize, however, the need for legislation in other areas.
Compared to existing laws, new or planned cybercrime laws more frequently address investigative measures, jurisdiction, electronic evidence and international cooperation.
Globally, less than half of responding countries perceive their criminal and procedural law frameworks to be sufficient, although this masks large regional differences.
While more than two-thirds of countries in Europe report sufficient legislation, the picture is reversed in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania, where more than two-thirds of countries view laws as only partly sufficient, or not sufficient at all.
Only one half of the countries, which reported that laws were insufficient, also indicated new or planned laws, thus highlighting an urgent need for legislative strengthening in these regions.
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8 of top 10 vulnerabilities used by exploit kits target Adobe Flash Player
According to a new report by Recorded Future, eight of the top 10 vulnerabilities used by exploit kits target Adobe Flash Player.
The remaining two non-Flash flaws favored in the crimeware as a service (CaaS) ecosystem were in Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 10 and 11 and other âMicrosoft products including Silverlight.â
After conducting threat intelligence analysis of 108 exploit kits, Recorded Future found that Adobe Flash Player had thousands of references and dominated the list of top vulnerabilities. âUnderstanding what vulnerabilities are targeted by exploit kits can better inform patch management functions within organizations,â explained the company.
For this research, Recorded Future did not reverse engineer any malware; instead it focused on âmeta-analysis of available information from information security blogs, forum postings, etc.â from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30, 2015.
Exploit kits may use âdozens of other vulnerabilities,â but Adobe Flash is the top target of popular exploit kits.
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Japan fights its own corporate pride, opaqueness in push to improve cybersecurity
Improving cybersecurity practices has emerged as a top national priority for Japan, stung in recent years by embarrassing leaks at Sony Pictures, the national pension fund and its biggest defense contractor, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which possibly suffered the theft of submarine and missile designs.
To be sure, the cybersecurity industry around the world, not just in Japan, frequently echoes the call for greater transparency within and among organizations.
The U.S.
Senate last month passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act to ease data sharing between private companies and the government for security purposes, although civil liberties advocates warned it posed a threat to privacy.
But the problem may be particularly acute for Japan’s private sector behemoths and government ministries.
These sprawling bureaucracies are wrapped in a “negative culture that cuts against wanting to communicate quickly,” said William H.
Saito, the top cybersecurity adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
In 2013, the latest year of available data, the Japanese government network faced an eightfold increase in cyberattacks from two years prior, with attacks spreading into civil infrastructure, as well as the telecommunications and energy sectors.
A Cabinet-level cybersecurity agency in September published a strategy paper that proposed, among other things, extending government-run cybersecurity classes to companies, awarding financial incentives for firms that demonstrate improved security capabilities and requiring companies to fill a chief cybersecurity officer role.
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