Category Archives: Technology Risk

Игроки всегда ценят удобный и стабильный доступ к играм. Для этого идеально подходит зеркало Вавады, которое позволяет обходить любые ограничения, обеспечивая доступ ко всем бонусам и слотам.

McAfee Labs Predicts Top Cybersecurity Threats for 2015

Posted on by

2015 cybersecurity trends

In 2015, cybercriminals will increasingly be non-state actors who monitor and collect data through extended, targeted attack campaigns, McAfee Labs predicts. In the group’s 2015 Threats Predictions, Intel Security identified internet trust exploits, mobile, internet of things and cyber espionage as the key vulnerabilities on next year’s threat landscape.

“The year 2014 will be remembered as ‘the Year of Shaken Trust,’” said Vincent Weafer, senior vice president of McAfee Labs. “This unprecedented series of events shook industry confidence in long-standing Internet trust models, consumer confidence in organizations’ abilities to protect their data, and organizations’ confidence in their ability to detect and deflect targeted attacks in a timely manner. Restoring trust in 2015 will require stronger industry collaboration, new standards for a new threat landscape, and new security postures that shrink time-to-detection through the superior use of threat data. Ultimately, we need to get to a security model that’s built-in by design, seamlessly integrated into every device at every layer of the compute stack.”

McAfee Labs predicts the top cybersecurity threats in 2015 will be:

1. Increased use of cyber warfare and espionage tactics. Cyber espionage attacks will continue to increase in frequency as long-term players will become stealthier information gatherers, while newcomers to cyber-attack capabilities will look for ways to steal sensitive information and disrupt their adversaries.

  • Established nation-state actors will work to enhance their ability to remain hidden on victim systems and networks.
  • Cybercriminals will continue to act more like nation-state cyber espionage actors, focusing on monitoring systems and gathering high-value intelligence on individuals, intellectual property, and operational intelligence.
  • McAfee Labs predicts that more small nation states and terror groups will use cyber warfare.

2. Greater Internet of Things attack frequency, profitability, and severity. Unless security controls are built-in to their architectures from the beginning, the rush to deploy IoT devices at scale will outpace the priorities of security and privacy. This rush and the increasing value of data gathered, processed, and shared by these devices will draw the first notable IoT paradigm attacks in 2015.

  • The increasing proliferation of IoT devices in environments such as health care could provide malicious parties access to personal data even more valuable than credit card data. For instance, according to the McAfee Labs report entitled Cybercrime Exposed: Cybercrime-as-a-Service, the cybercrime community currently values stolen health credentials at around $10 each, which is about 10 to 20 times the value of a stolen U.S. credit card number.

3. Privacy debates intensify. Data privacy will continue to be a hot topic as governments and businesses continue to grapple with what is fair and authorized access to inconsistently defined “personal information.”

  • In 2015 we will see continued discussion and lack of clarity around what constitutes “personal information” and to what extent that information may be accessed and shared by state or private actors.
  • We will see a continued evolution in scope and content of data privacy rules and regulations, we may even see laws begin to regulate the use of previously anonymous data sets.
    buy isotroin online blackmenheal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/isotroin.html no prescription pharmacy

  • The European Union, countries in Latin America, as well as Australia, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and many others may enact more stringent data privacy laws and regulations.

4. Ransomware evolves into the cloud. Ransomware will evolve its methods of propagation, encryption, and the targets it seeks. More mobile devices are likely to suffer attacks.

  • We predict ransomware variants that manage to evade security software installed on a system will specifically target endpoints that subscribe to cloud-based storage solutions.
    buy prograf online blackmenheal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/prograf.html no prescription pharmacy

  • Once the endpoint has been infected, the ransomware will attempt to exploit the logged-on user’s stored credentials to also infect backed-up cloud storage data.
  • We expect the technique of ransomware targeting cloud-backed-up data to be repeated in the mobile space.
  • We expect a continued rise in mobile ransomware using virtual currency as the ransom payment method.

5. New mobile attack surfaces and capabilities. Mobile attacks will continue to grow rapidly as new mobile technologies expand the attack surface.

  • The growing availability of malware-generation kits and malware source code for mobile devices will lower the barrier to entry for cybercriminals targeting these devices.
  • Untrusted app stores will continue to be a major source of mobile malware. Traffic to these stores will be driven by “malvertising,” which has grown quickly on mobile platforms.

6. POS attacks increase and evolve with digital payments. Point of sale (POS) attacks will remain lucrative, and a significant upturn in consumer adoption of digital payment systems on mobile devices will provide new attack surfaces that cybercriminals will exploit.

  • Despite current efforts by retailers to deploy more chip-and-pin cards and card readers, McAfee Labs sees continued growth in POS system breaches in 2015 based on the sheer numbers of POS devices that will need to be upgraded in North America.
  • Near field communications (NFC) digital payment technology will become an entirely new attack surface to exploit, unless user education can successfully guide users in taking control of NFC features on their mobile devices.

7. Shellshock sparks Unix, Linux attacks. Non-Windows malware attacks will increase as a result of the Shellshock vulnerability.

  • McAfee Labs predicts that the aftershocks of Shellshock with be felt for many years given the number of potentially vulnerable Unix or Linux devices, from routers to TVs, industrial controllers, flight systems, and critical infrastructure.
  • In 2015, this will drive a significant increase in non-Windows malware as attackers look to exploit the vulnerability.

8. Growing exploitation of software flaws. The exploitation of vulnerabilities is likely to increase as new flaws are discovered in popular software products.

  • McAfee Labs predicts that exploitation techniques such as stack pivoting, return- and jump-oriented programming, and a deeper understanding of 64-bit software will continue to drive the growth in the number of newly discovered vulnerabilities, as will the volume of malware that exploits those newly discovered vulnerabilities.

9. New evasion tactics for sandboxing. Escaping the sandbox will become a significant IT security battlefield.

  • Vulnerabilities have been identified in the sandboxing technologies implemented with critical and popular applications. McAfee Labs predicts a growth in the number of techniques to exploit those vulnerabilities and escape application sandboxes.
    buy xifaxan online blackmenheal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/xifaxan.html no prescription pharmacy

  • Beyond application sandboxing, McAfee Labs predicts that 2015 will bring malware that can successfully exploit hypervisor vulnerabilities to break out of some security vendors’ standalone sandbox systems.

Lessons Learned from Data Breaches

Posted on by

Recent data breaches have left some large organizations reeling as they deal with the aftermath. They include the Target data breach, compromises at Home Depot, JP Morgan, USPS (which exposed employee Social Security Numbers and other data) and, most recently, Sony Pictures. The Sony hack also proved to be embarrassing to some of the company’s executives, as private email correspondences were exposed.

Collateral damage from data breach is significant: one in nine customers affected by a data breach stopped shopping at a particular retailer. According to LifeLock, a recent survey of corporate executive decision-makers found that while concern for a breach is 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale, only 10% to 20% of their total cyber security budgets go to breach remediation. Establishing an incident response plan in advance can reduce the cost per compromised record by $17.

While strengthening cybersecurity is important, the impact on breached organizations shows that preparing a response must be part of the breach-management equation. These breaches present an opportunity for business leaders and risk professionals to learn important lessons about how to protect their companies, customers and employees if a breach should occur.

Below are steps companies can take to establish a response plan, as well as information on the data breach landscape.

 

 

 

The bebe Hack: Guarding Against Cyberbreach During the Holiday Shopping Season

Posted on by

bebe data breach

On Friday, retail chain bebe announced that it had identified an attack on computers that operate the in-store payment processing system. The attack may have exposed data from cards swiped in retail locations in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands between Nov. 8 and Nov. 26, including cardholder name, account number, expiration date and verification code. The breach did not impact customers who shopped online or in other international locations, bebe reported, and the company has hired a security firm to stop and investigate the attack.

Almost exactly a year after the massive Target hack, this latest incident comes after a steady stream of sizable breaches among retailers, including Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase and eBay. Consumers have begun to find these hacks increasingly less surprising, and stopped paying as much attention – a phenomenon many are calling “breach fatigue.”

But companies are not entirely off the hook. While Target is on the rebound and subsequent breach victims have endured less damage to consumer perception, these cybersecurity incidents still demand a notable amount of contingency planning and mitigation.

According to public relations and social media firm Affect, there are four keys to protecting brand reputation in the event of a security breach:

1) Develop a Fully Locked and Loaded Response Plan

In the digital age, it is essential to have a cyber attack plan in place as part of an organization’s crisis management strategy. Companies can get ahead of a crisis by leveraging social media to diffuse damaging situations. In order to prepare, be sure to anticipate and understand the kinds of threats that could influence your business and your industry.

“There are four phases of crisis communications: readiness, response, reassurance and recovery,” said Sandra Fathi, president of Affect. “In order to properly respond to a crisis, each stage must be ready to go at a moment’s notice — develop materials such as messages and prepared statements, prepare delivery channels like hotlines and social media platforms and train employees regarding awareness and organizational procedures.
buy filitra online https://galenapharm.com/pharmacy/filitra.html no prescription

”

2) The Customer is Top Priority

Arguably the most important step in maintaining a brand’s image amid a breach is to be honest with customers and inform them about what has occurred — the sooner the better, especially if their personal information is at stake. In fact, 47 states have Security Breach Notification Laws that govern communication with customers in the face of a security breach including the timeline for those communications. Several weeks elapsed before Target released an official statement to their customers and as a result, experienced massive backlash from customers, other organizations and the media alike.

Adam Levin, chairman and founder of IDT911, a provider of data risk and identity management services, believes every company needs to demonstrate three things in the wake of a data breach.

buy amoxil online www.methanol.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/png/amoxil.html no prescription pharmacy

“Urgency, transparency, and empathy are all critical. I don’t think they [Target] showed enough of those three,” Levin said in an interview with ABCNews.com. Not being upfront with customers can result in a loss of confidence in the brand that can hinder not only the company’s reputation, but could lead to a loss in revenue.

buy flexeril online www.methanol.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/png/flexeril.html no prescription pharmacy

3) Monitor the Situation in Real-Time

Social media can be a powerful tool but “with great power comes great responsibility.” While positive engagements boost a brand’s respect, companies must always monitor for negative interactions in real-time and be even more stringent during a security breach, as customers will turn to social media to respond to situations, regardless of their allegiance to the brand. Develop a Social Media Response Map that outlines anticipated situations and correlated standard responses to avoid any last minute shuffle. Don’t shy away from angry customers that continuously post adverse comments.

buy zydena online www.methanol.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/png/zydena.html no prescription pharmacy

Depending on the situation, it may be worthwhile to engage with these individuals in a private forum and resolve their concerns, taking the negative sentiments offline.

4) Don’t Repeat the Same Mistakes

For brands, it is especially important to not make the same mistakes twice. Customers may or may not forgive a first offense, so a second go-around is even harder to rebound from. Companies must carefully document and analyze each breach to identify how it happened, why it happened and how to prevent such an event in the future. Consider changing security vendors, deploying new software, re-training staff and amending company policies. It is also important to communicate these changes to customer to reassure them that a similar breach will not reoccur.

The Impact of Collaboration in Cyber Risk Insurance

Posted on by

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller once said, “There are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be. Even that is merging into one category: those that have been hacked and will be again.” This is the environment in which risk managers must protect their businesses, and it isn’t easy.

Cyber risk is not an IT issue; it’s a business problem. As such, risk management strategies must include cyber risk insurance protection. Until recently, cyber insurance was considered a nice-to-have supplement to existing insurance coverage. However, following in the wake of numerous, high-profile data breaches, cyber coverage is fast becoming a must-have. In fact, new data from The Ponemon Institute indicates that policy purchases have more than doubled in the past year, and insiders estimate U.S. premiums at around $1 billion today and rising.

But is a cyber policy really necessary? In short, yes. As P.F. Chang’s China Bistro recently discovered, commercial general liability (CGL) policies generally do not include liability coverage to protect against cyber-related losses. CGL policies are intended to provide broad coverage, not necessarily deep coverage. Considering the complexity of cyber risks, there is a real and legitimate need for specialized policies that indemnify the insured against cyber-related loss and liability.

The fact is, cyber risk is a problem all its own.

buy rybelsus online thecifhw.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/rybelsus.html no prescription pharmacy

The cyber threat is pervasive, and attacks are increasing exponentially. Cyberattack trends are also shifting constantly. An attack can come from multiple directions and in multiple forms, targeting different information and outcomes: an attack launched by a hacker group intent on making a political statement, malware that enters the network through a third-party service provider to steal credit card information, or a data breach perpetrated by a trusted insider seeking competitive intellectual property (IP).

In this complex, dynamic threat landscape, the ability to accurately assess risk becomes a monumental undertaking. If we accept that every organization has been hacked or will be again, it’s clear that prior incidents are no longer relevant or legitimate indicators of a company’s risk. Similarly, stagnant security checklists required by many insurers are hardly representative of actual, ever-changing cyber risk. Traditional risk assessment methodologies that rely on these elements to determine pre-binding risk simply have no place in today’s world.

Risk Assessment for the Cyber Era

The industry needs assessment methods consistent with the changing threat landscape. That means real-time, active assessment of an entity’s entire business ecosystem including upstream and downstream threats, as well as the often overlooked insider threat. What this provides is a holistic understanding of an entity’s vulnerabilities, high priority risks and security maturity.

In the current cyber environment, it’s implicit that every organization will be the victim of a cyberattack and that there will be some cyber loss as a result. Thus, savvy underwriters are looking beyond mere ticks on a checklist to determine insurability; rather, they’re looking for security maturity and cyber resilience.

The more cyber resilient an organization, the faster it can identify a cyberattack, stop it and recover from the impact. Data loss is expected. It’s the severity of the data loss that will impact the company’s business, damage its brand and customer loyalty and erode investor confidence.

buy advair online thecifhw.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/advair.html no prescription pharmacy

Those organizations that can quickly and effectively minimize the risk and get back to business are generally considered a safer bet.

buy paxil online thecifhw.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/paxil.html no prescription pharmacy

This is where organizations can realize the benefits of holistic cyber insurance assessment. All too often, critical data is uncovered after a breach occurs. By implementing a proactive risk assessment before an attack occurs, the organization can gain in-depth intelligence about its highest priority risks before an incident, not years later when it’s too late to do anything about it. A pre-binding assessment provides the right data at the right time to inform risk management decisions and align resources with an organization’s highest priority risks.

Additionally, organizations that adopt continuous proactive assessment and ongoing risk mitigation demonstrate mature security practices, which indicate an organization’s ability to return to regular operations faster following a cyber incident.

Partners Against Cybercrime

Historically, there has been an antagonistic relationship between the insurer and client, but in the wake of catastrophic data breaches, these two sides are now finding common ground. For instance, several insurance brokers today are requiring a holistic, pre-binding risk assessment before a company can receive a policy. This benefits both the insurer and the pre-insured by providing invaluable insights about the company’s security, often revealing unexpected weaknesses and new priorities. Some policies also tie risk assessment to financial incentive to encourage ongoing risk mitigation. This becomes a virtuous circle situation for the insured, as it gets the benefit of reduced premiums after risk maturity has been measured, which allows the company greater insight and the ability to be proactive about reducing security risks.

For decades, the bargaining power has been with the insurer. With a revised approach, and in keeping with the demands of today’s cyber landscape, the relationship between insurer and insured has become collaborative as both sides work together to identify and mitigate risk. In this way, cyber insurance becomes an avenue for companies to improve cybersecurity, not to simply offset risk.