Category Archives: Technology Risk

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Lessons from MBIA: When Breaches Go Viral

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We can add another breached company to the ever-growing list: the Municipal Bond Insurance Association (MBIA). While not necessarily unique from other breaches we’ve seen lately, the MBIA incident brought another aspect of breach fallout into the public eye, and that’s the potential for data exposures to go viral. These viral breaches generate tendrils of compromised information that reach far and wide, creating a nightmare for containment—and public relations.

Known as the largest bond insurer in the country, MBIA services accounts for many government investment pools. In late September, the company was alerted by an ethical hacker that hundreds of pages of customer data were showing up online for all to see. We’ve since learned that one of the company’s database servers had been improperly configured, resulting in the exposure of highly sensitive data. Account numbers were compromised along with customers’ names, account balances and other confidential information. But the damage didn’t stop there. Not only was MBIA’s customer data floating around the Internet for all to see, it also had been indexed by several search engines. Information that should have been heavily protected was now on the Web in multiple locations, far outside the control of MBIA.

The release of customer data wasn’t the only problem. High-level security keys were also exposed and indexed, including administrative credentials and instructions for creating new deposit accounts. Not only were cybercriminals given a nearly perfect tutorial to dig into additional data held by MBIA that hadn’t been compromised in the first go-round, the instructions also provided a way for thieves to quietly pull funds out of the compromised accounts. The integrity of MBIA’s systems had been damaged far beyond a simple data breach.

Piling on to the organization’s woes were two failures of their own making. One is that their Oracle server is commonly known to need careful configuration to avoid a potential security gap.

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Oracle has even provided documentation to help administrators configure it correctly and ensure the servers are secure. The other was that MBIA was actually notified of the exposure more than a week before the company finally cut off access to the compromised server.

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Not only was the company behind the curve in configuring its critical infrastructure correctly, it then delayed in fixing a problem that was brought to its attention.

In many respects, MBIA’s breach wasn’t all that different from other breaches. Network vulnerabilities are common avenues for hackers, and security warnings have been known to be overlooked. Target’s massive 2013 breach and similar recent exposures back this up.

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Unfortunately for MBIA, these factors all came together in a perfect storm that resulted in a truly viral breach. Sensitive customer data was compromised and unspeakably valuable credentials and account creation instructions were also exposed. The indexing of that information on more than one major search engine spread the leaked data far and wide. Containment and mitigation became exponentially more difficult.

There is some reasonably good news in all of this. At this time, it doesn’t appear any of MBIA’s clients were defrauded as a result of the breach—yet. There are also important lessons we can learn from MBIA’s mistakes. Network assets must be carefully administered, as their security is one of the first lines of defense against criminals. In addition, security warnings—whether they’re provided by ethical hackers, concerned customers or automated intrusion detection systems—must be immediately checked out.

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DDoS Attacks Cost Businesses $40,000 an Hour

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One of the most common weapons in the cybercriminal’s arsenal is the DDoS attack.

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According to the network security experts at Digital Attack Map, “A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. They target a wide variety of important resources, from banks to news websites, and present a major challenge to making sure people can publish and access important information.

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While many have heard of these attacks or suffered from the outages they cause, most people do not understand the true business risks these incidents pose. To get a better picture of the threat, Internet security firm Incapsula surveyed 270 firms across the U.S. and Canada about their experiences with DDoS attacks. On average, they found, 49% of DDoS attacks last between 6 and 24 hours.

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“This means that, with an estimated cost of $40,000 per hour, the average DDoS cost can be assessed at about $500,000—with some running significantly higher,” the company reported. “Costs are not limited to the IT group; they also have a large impact on units such as security and risk management, customer service, and sales.”

Check out the infographic below for more of Incapsula’s findings on the actual costs of DDoS attacks:

Darkhotel Cyber Attacks Are Targeting Traveling Executives

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Traveling business executives have been falling prey to cybercriminals acting through hotel Internet networks since at least 2009. In an ongoing, sophisticated “espionage campaign” nicknamed “Darkhotel,” thousands of people traveling through Asia have been targeted and hacked through infected hotel WiFi, cybersecurity company Kapersky Lab reported Monday. About two-thirds of the attacks took place in Japan, while others occurred in Taiwan, China and other Asian countries.

“For the past few years, a strong actor named Darkhotel has performed a number of successful attacks against high-profile individuals, employing methods and techniques that go well beyond typical cybercriminal behavior,” said Kurt Baumgartner, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab. “This threat actor has operational competence, mathematical and crypto-analytical offensive capabilities, and other resources that are sufficient to abuse trusted commercial networks and target specific victim categories with strategic precision.”

So strategic, in fact, that the hackers appear to know the names, arrival and departure times, and room numbers of the targets. While maintaining an intrusion on hotel networks, the hackers used this information, waiting until the victim checked in and logged on to the hotel Wi-Fi, then submitting their room number and surname to log in. When the hackers saw the victim on the network, they would trick the executive into downloading and installing a “backdoor” with the Darkhorse spying software disguised as an update for legitimate software like Google Toolbar, Adobe Flash or Windows messenger. Once installed, the backdoor can be used to download other spying tools, such as an advanced keylogger and an information-stealing module.

“These tools collect data about the system and the anti-malware software installed on it, steal all keystrokes, and hunt for cached passwords in Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer; login credentials for Gmail Notifier, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo! and Google; and other private information,” Kapersky explained. “Victims lose sensitive information likely to be the intellectual property of the business entities they represent.”

While the company has identified the means of attack and many of the victims, the hackers carrying them out remain active, the company warned. The attackers did leave a footprint in part of the malicious code—two Korean characters—but, while the cryptographic skills suggest there may be a government entity behind it, some elements of the attacks could be performed by the most basic cybercriminals, and no one has been identified.

Kapersky Lab offered tips to guard against Darkhotel and other cybersecurity threats targeting travelers:

When traveling, any network, even semi-private ones in hotels, should be viewed as potentially dangerous. The Darkhotel case illustrates an evolving attack vector: individuals who possess valuable information can easily fall victim to Darkhotel itself, as it is still active, or to something similar to a Darkhotel attack. To prevent this, Kaspersky Lab has the following tips:

  • Choose a Virtual Private Network (VPN) provider—you will get an encrypted communication channel when accessing public or semi-public Wi-Fi
  • When traveling, always regard software updates as suspicious. Confirm that the proposed update installer is signed by the appropriate vendor
  • Make sure your Internet security solution includes proactive defense against new threats rather than just basic antivirus protection

Tom Ridge Tells Cyber Conference Insurance Should Incentivize Risk and Resilience Planning

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More Americans worry about being hacked than they are of mugging, burglary, sexual assault, murder, or physical harm of a child, according to a new Gallup poll. While hacking concerns did increase with household income, they impacted a majority of Americans in every income and age bracket, while no other form of violent crime surpassed 45% of those polled.

A new survey from Advisen and Zurich found that this fear is nearly universal for companies as well. Across industries, 88% of businesses view cyber as at least a moderate risk – up to 93% among larger businesses and 81% among small. Despite this widespread recognition, however, fewer businesses have a breach response in place than just a year ago. In 2014, only 62% have a response place – a 10% decrease from 2013. Yet 66% now use cloud services, presenting a 20% jump from last year.

“Clearly, security concerns are being outweighed by the benefits of technology,” said Erica Davis, Zurich vice president and assistant national manager for E&O, while presenting the findings on Tuesday at Advisen’s Cyber Risk Insights Conference.

Throughout the conference, consensus was clear: the 69% of Americans and 88% of businesses are on the right track, as their fears are well-founded. “There are two types of banks today: those that have been breached, and those that will,” Roc Starks, senior vice president and director of corporate insurance at Citizens Bank, said at one of the day’s panels. “First response is the critical difference in how banks and customers will fare.”

Keynote speaker and former Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge (now of Ridge Insurance Solutions) shared this outlook on cybersecurity across industries. “There are going to be breaches,” he said. “Resilient companies are the ones that are prepared to respond.”

Yet breach response without risk management and an eye toward mitigation is no longer sufficient. “Those prepared to organize around risk and resilience are those that will withstand and lead,” he added. “By the time we get here next year, the risks will be different – the digital sun will never set.”

The landscape of cyberrisk and hacking schemes is constantly evolving, and changing at a scale and speed unlike anything seen before, Ridge said. For attendees, there was little doubt about this insight, as panelists throughout the day detailed new phishing schemes seen, top areas of emerging vulnerability, and the myriad breaches they or their industry colleagues have navigated. More companies are investigating the most useful forms of coverage for their unique exposures and exploring what management structures and risk owners are most effective to monitor and mitigate cyber. The recognition is there, and so are some of the solutions, but the insurance landscape must still evolve, as must the strategies. “We’ve seen a mind-shift,” Ridge said. “CEOs get it, but they do not know what to do and who the threats come from.”

To that end, there is more the industry can do to help. Ridge lauded the idea of “intelligent insurance,” arguing that, in addition to devoting greater resources to investigating cyber threats, the insurance industry should turn its attention to incentivizing companies to manage cyberrisk more effectively.

Much as in insurance disciplines like kidnap and ransom, some of the greatest benefits of insuring cyberrisk may come from the processes of evaluation and contingency planning. According to Ridge and other conference speakers, finding out how to oversee and incentivize those processes may be the next adaptation for cybersecurity insurers.