[From the desk of Paul Davis – his opinions and no-one else’s]
Apart from the reporter’s opinions 😉
So onto the news:
All Windows users should patch these two new ‘critical’ flaws
Microsoft has released patches for two critical security vulnerabilities that affect every supported version of Windows.
The patch, MS15-112 addresses a memory corruption flaw in Internet Explorer.
If exploited, an attacker could gain access to an affected machine, gaining the same access rights as the logged-in user, such as installing programs, and deleting data.
The other patch affecting all versions of Windows, MS15-115, fixes a series of flaws that could allow an attacker to remotely execute code on an affected machine by exploiting how the operating system handles and displays fonts.
Some of the flaws can only be triggered if an attacker logs on to the affected machine, but some can be triggered by the user visiting a web page that contains exploit code.
Link: http://paulgdavis.us3.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=45bf3caf699abf9904ddc00e3&id=6303020b2a&e=20056c7556
Emerging hacking trends worry seasoned security professionals
“Currently what’s worrying me the most — and I don’t know where everyone else is — is the speed at which [hackers] are able to attack us.
Previously, if someone wanted to find and exploit every single website that had some vulnerability in it, that could take months. … As of about a year and a half ago, now we’re talking like 4 to 16 minutes, somewhere within that range.
And that’s the slow way to do it.”
This is one of the more alarming hacking trends RSnake addressed in this interview with SearchSecurity at the 2015 RSA Conference.
However there is a small window to prepare for such speedy attacks.
Link: http://paulgdavis.us3.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=45bf3caf699abf9904ddc00e3&id=3b0e905a58&e=20056c7556
The top security threats of 2016
We’re seeing a shift as threat actors turn towards digital methods to cause harm or get their point across — but what are we likely to see next year.
According to Intel’s McAfee security team, things are going to get interesting.
– Hardware
– Vulnerabilities
– Cloud services
– Wearables
– Connected cars
– Warehouses of stolen data
– Hacktivism
Link: http://paulgdavis.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=45bf3caf699abf9904ddc00e3&id=68a112c4c2&e=20056c7556
Friday Is Peak Malware Distribution Day, Study Shows
If Mondays are usually when security administrators have their hands full cleaning up malware threats and data breaches, there’s a perfectly good reason for it.
The weekend is when employees typically tend to bring their office laptops home and browse the Internet via poorly secured Wi-Fi connections — sometimes downloading all sorts of malicious software in the process.
They then introduce the threat on the corporate network when they log back in at work.
Cloud security services vendor Cyren recently examined daily malware distribution trends during the third quarter of this year as part of its “Cybersecurity Awareness Report.” It discovered that Friday is the peak distribution day for spam and malicious software.
According to the company, cybercriminals appear to be purposely spiking malware distribution on Fridays to take advantage of what they apparently consider to be less protected employees and corporate systems.
Cyren’s review showed that, on average, cybercriminals distributed about 2.25 billion attachments containing malware on Fridays during the third quarter of 2015, or roughly three times the number distributed on other week days.
According to Cyren, cybercriminals appear to be attempting to extract the name of the employer the victim works for in addition to their corporate network login names, email addresses, business phone numbers and passwords.
Often the scams involved the use of emails that purport to arrive from trusted organizations such as LinkedIn, Amazon and Apple, Cyren said.
The fake domains that cybercriminals have set up to lure users into parting with their corporate credentials include fake sites linked to Apple, DHL, Bank of America, Amazon and PayPal.
Link: http://paulgdavis.us3.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=45bf3caf699abf9904ddc00e3&id=fa54b80f07&e=20056c7556
Europe needs to tackle key security challenges, says TeleTrust
There are three key challenges for which Europe needs to find answers appropriate to the region, according to Norbert Pohlmann, chairman of IT security association TeleTrust.
“Research has shown that, when asked whether private data belongs to companies, 76% of US respondents said ‘yes’ compared with just 22% of European respondents,” he said.
Another key area that needs to be resolved is the problematic business model where services are provided in exchange for personal data.
At a state level, Pohlmann said there needed to be significant policy changes to ensure that it is clear what national security agencies are and are not allowed to do, regarding personal data.
Industrial espionage is a key area that needs to be addressed in Europe, in the light of the theft of industrial secrets that cost around €51bn a year in Germany alone.
Link: http://paulgdavis.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=45bf3caf699abf9904ddc00e3&id=bbab98e9f1&e=20056c7556
Penta Security Systems Inc. Announces Critical Cyber Security Vulnerability Statistics for First Half of 2015
SEOUL, South Korea, Nov. 10, 2015 /PRNewswire/ Penta Security Systems Inc., a leading South Korean information security company, today announced the release of its annual Web Application Threat Report.
The report is based on customer data logs of its enterprise-level web application firewall (WAF) WAPPLES, as well as its cloud-based WAF service Cloudbric.
For the first half of 2015, Penta Security reported a total of 2.4 billion web application attacks based on the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 web risks.
Penta Security determined that Sensitive Data Exposure was the most prevalent OWASP web risk with a 29.9% occurrence.
This indicates that the majority of web attacks were focused on exposing website vulnerabilities.
OWASP considers the impact of Sensitive Data Exposure as ‘severe’ due to prospective attackers’ ability to access or modify confidential user information while businesses are still legally liable for damages.
Penta Security also discovered that 48.3% of attacks were motivated by web server vulnerability scanning, which also led to subsequent secondary and tertiary attacks.
When analyzing web attack trends for the first half of 2015, Penta Security reported a large shift in attack methods towards more discreet and difficult to trace attacks in order to exploit sensitive data.
For instance, the most frequent attacks used in the second half of 2014 were injection attacks, which can noticeably compromise a victim’s web server and requires immediate resolution.
However, in the first half of 2015, injection attacks decreased by 74% and were replaced by two separate attacks centered on accessing web server settings files and sending abnormal HTTP requests.
Link: http://paulgdavis.us3.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=45bf3caf699abf9904ddc00e3&id=5a284e10b6&e=20056c7556
How fully homomorphic encryption can prevent infiltration of secure networks
Research and advancements within technology are showing that fully homomorphic encryption can substantially limit the infiltration of secure networks, combat the offensive techniques used by nation-states and usher in a new generation of cloud computing technologies.
Up to now, there have been few feasible methods to monitor and detect infiltration or exfiltration without releasing sensitive signatures, permitting the visibility of data, or preventing secure monitoring for sensitive signatures in host-based systems.
An approach to address these challenges of monitoring encrypted sensitive network traffic, while still using sensitive signatures, is based on recent advances in practical fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) in a practical encrypted data guard.
FHE would allow computations to be run on encrypted data.
The success of this technology would enable broader use of cloud computing technologies, and it would make existing host-based monitoring capabilities more effective by permitting the secure use of sensitive signatures.
Our approach uses homomorphic encryption to compare encrypted data flowing across a guard against encrypted signatures in text files and more complicated signals such as audio files.
Initial results show the feasibility of testing encrypted text data in under a minute.
This run-time enables practical application for usable email and file transfer systems.
We are proposing to research and design novel FHE signature evaluation algorithms, cloud data guard architectures and system integration issues to maximize quality of service.
Link: http://paulgdavis.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=45bf3caf699abf9904ddc00e3&id=e102b0c955&e=20056c7556
============================================================
Feedback, questions? Our mailing address is: ** dailynews@paulgdavis.com (mailto:dailynews@paulgdavis.com)
If you know someone else who would be interested in this Newsalert, please forwarded this email.
If you want to be added to the distribution list, please click this: ** Subscribe to this list (http://paulgdavis.us3.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=45bf3caf699abf9904ddc00e3&id=e09452545a)
** Unsubscribe from this list (http://paulgdavis.us3.list-manage2.com/unsubscribe?u=45bf3caf699abf9904ddc00e3&id=e09452545a&e=20056c7556&c=95792aebb8)
** Update subscription preferences (http://paulgdavis.us3.list-manage.com/profile?u=45bf3caf699abf9904ddc00e3&id=e09452545a&e=20056c7556)