Hang Up on Hackers: Protect Yourself from Mobile App Video Conferencing Vulnerabilities
Whether they’re attending regular work meetings or catching up with extended family across the globe, many people leverage video conferencing to better connect with others – a process that will likely continue as our world only becomes more digital. But as the rapid adoption of video conferencing tools and apps occurs, potential threats to online safety emerge.
Agora is one of these tools for connection. The company’s video conferencing software is included in apps like MeetMe, Skout, Nimo TV, temi, Dr. First Backline, and Talkspace, across more than 1.7 billion devices globally. According to McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR), Agora’s video software development kit (SDK) until recently included a vulnerability that could have allowed an attacker to spy on ongoing video and audio calls.
In accordance with McAfee’s safe vulnerability disclosure policy, ATR provided Agora with details of its thorough research into the issue so that the software developer could take action to address it with a software update.
But let’s take a look at what a vulnerability like this could mean for users.
Potentially Uninvited Video Attendees
So, how exactly could this vulnerability allow others to spy on private calls?
The McAfee ATR team discovered that the Agora vulnerability stemmed from an error of incomplete encryption – the process of converting information or data into seemingly random output to prevent unauthorized access. Agora’s SDK implementation did not allow applications to securely configure the setup of video/audio encryption, thereby leaving a potential for hackers to snoop on them.
Therefore, if exploited, this particular vulnerability could’ve allowed a criminal to launch man-in-the-middle attacks, which occur when a hacker secretly intercepts and possibly alters the communications between two unsuspecting users. Aka, they could spy on users’ private video calls.
Put Your Security on Speed Dial
The vulnerability discovery and mitigation cooperation between McAfee and Agora illustrates why it’s so important for threat researchers to work closely and constructively with app developers to make our digital lives as safe as possible.
As a consumer, however, it’s important to realize what exactly you’re getting into when downloading applications for video conferencing and other tools that help you stay connected.
While the security community encourages developers to write software code with security in mind, software apps tend to struggle with bugs and vulnerabilities in their early days. Consumers should by all means download and enjoy the hottest new apps, but they should also take steps to protect themselves from any undiscovered issues that might threaten them.
Here are a few tips that can help ensure your safety while connecting with others online:
Update, update, update!
It’s easy to click “Install later” when software updates pop up on your screen. However, these updates often come with security patches for vulnerabilities like the ones mentioned above. To ensure that your software and apps have the latest security fixes, update them immediately or select the option update automatically if available.
Avoid using vulnerable apps
Until a patch is created, you should operate under the assumption that a hacker could compromise your video calls. Avoid using vulnerable apps until developers make a software security update available to help protect your calls from being infiltrated.
Leverage Holistic Security Solutions
In order to protect yourself and your loved ones from potential risks, make sure you have a holistic security solution in place, such as McAfee Total Protection, which can help block risky downloads with McAfee WebAdvisor, protect you from malicious mobile apps, and help update Windows and your apps all in one place with Vulnerability Scanner.
Stay Updated
To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) team is committed to uncovering security issues in both software and hardware to help developers provide safer products for businesses and consumers. We recently investigated and published several findings on a personal robot called “temi”, which can be read about in detail here. A byproduct of our robotic research was a deeper dive into a video calling software development kit (SDK) created by Agora.io. Agora’s SDKs are used for voice and video communication in applications across multiple platforms. Several of the most popular mobile applications utilizing the vulnerable SDK included social apps such as eHarmony, Plenty of Fish, MeetMe and Skout, and healthcare apps such as Talkspace, Practo and Dr. First’s Backline. In early 2020, our research into the Agora Video SDK led to the discovery of sensitive information sent unencrypted over the network. This flaw, CVE-2020-25605, may have allowed an attacker to spy on ongoing private video and audio calls. At the time of writing, McAfee is unaware of any instances of this vulnerability being exploited in the wild. We reported this research to Agora.io on April 20, 2020 and the company, as of December 17th, 2020 released a new SDK, version 3.2.1, which mitigated the vulnerability and eliminated the corresponding threat to users.
Encryption has increasingly become the new standard for communication; often even in cases where data privacy is not explicitly sensitive. For example, all modern browsers have begun to migrate to newer standards (HTTP/2) which enforce encryption by default, a complete change from just a few years ago where a significant amount of browsing traffic was sent in clear text and could be viewed by any interested party. While the need to protect truly sensitive information such as financial data, health records, and other personally identifiable information (PII) has long been standardized, consumers are increasingly expecting privacy and encryption for all web traffic and applications. Furthermore, when encryption is an option provided by a vendor, it must be easy for developers to implement, adequately protect all session information including setup and teardown, and still meet the developers’ many use cases. These core concepts are what led us to the findings discussed in this blog.
To boldly go where no one has gone before
As part of our analysis of the temi ecosystem, the team reviewed the Android application that pairs with the temi robot. During this analysis, a hardcoded key was discovered in the app.
Figure 1: Application ID hardcoded in temi phone app
This raised the question: What is this key and what is it used for? Thanks to the detailed logging provided by the developers, we had a place to start, https://dashboard.agora.io.
What is Agora?
According to the website – “Agora provides the SDKs and building blocks to enable a wide range of real-time engagement possibilities” In the context of our initial robot project, it simply provides the technology required to make audio and video calls. In a broader context, Agora is used for a variety of applications including social, retail, gaming and education, among others.
Agora allows anyone to create an account and download its SDKs for testing from its website, which also provides extensive documentation. Its GitHub repositories also provide detailed sample projects on how to use the product. This is amazing for developers, but also very useful to security researchers and hackers. Using the logging comments from the above code we can look at the documentation to understand what an App ID is and what it is used for.
Figure 2: Agora documentation about App ID
The last two sentences of this documentation really grabbed our attention. We had found a key which is hardcoded into an Android application that “anyone can use on any Agora SDK” and is “prudent to safeguard”.
Agora provides several different SDKs with different functionality. Since we encountered Agora through use of the video SDK, we decided to focus on only this SDK for the rest of this research. Simulating the mindset of an attacker, we began to investigate what this App ID or key could be used for. Furthermore, in the context of the video SDK, the question evolved into whether an attacker could interact with this video and audio traffic.
“They’ve done studies, you know. 60% of the time, encrypting works every time.”
Since Agora provides sample projects and allows for free developer accounts, the best way to understand what potential attack vectors exists is to use these tools. Examining the GitHub example projects and the following associated documentation, we can learn exactly what is needed and how a normal user is connected to a video call.
Figure 3: Sample project initializeEngine function
Here we see in the example code the App ID being used to create a new “RtcEngine” object. As can be seen in the documentation, creating an RtcEngine is the foundation and first step needed to create any video call.
Figure 4: Agora documentation on RtcEngine
If we continue to examine the example code and look at the documentation’s steps for connecting to a call, we come to a function named “joinChannel”.
Figure 5: Agora sample program joinChannel function
This function is responsible for connecting an end user to a call. In the example code, there are four parameters, three of which are hardcoded and one of which can be set to null. Without doing too much more digging, it appears that while Agora lists the App ID as important, it is not the only component needed to join a video call. An attacker would also require the values passed to the joinChannel API in order to join a call. If we assume that these values are only hardcoded for the purpose of a demo application, how would an attacker obtain the other necessary values? Code is an awesome resource, but when it comes to a network conversation the truth is in the packets. By running this example code and capturing traffic with Wireshark, we can further our understanding of how this system works.
Figure 6: Wireshark capture of Agora traffic
When looking at the traffic, what immediately stands out is the values passed to joinChannel in the example code above. They are sent in plaintext across the network, in addition to the App ID needed to initiate the RtcEngine. Considering this is an example app, it is important to understand the difference between a test scenario and a production scenario. As noted in the code in Figure 5, the “token” parameter is being set to null. What is a token in this context, and would that affect the security of these parameters? We can use the Agora documentation to understand that a token is designed to be randomly generated and provide more security for a session.
Figure 7: Agora documentation regarding tokens
With tokens being an option, it is important we see what the traffic looks like in a scenario where the token parameter is not null. The use of a token is hopefully what we find in production or at least is what is recommended in production by Agora.
Figure 8: Agora documentation on token authentication
Running the example application again, this time using a token and capturing traffic, we can discover that the token is also a non-issue for an attacker.
Figure 9: Wireshark capture of Agora call with tokens
The token is sent in plaintext just like the other parameters! You may have noticed this capture does not show the App ID; in this case the App ID is still sent in plaintext, in a different packet.
The Spy Who Loved Me
Information being sent in plaintext across the network to initiate a video call is one thing, but can this actually be used by an attacker to spy on a user? Will the call support a third party? Will the user be notified of a new connection? In order to answer these questions, we can use the example applications provided by Agora to run some tests. The diagram below shows the scenario we are going to try and create for testing.
Figure 10: Agora attack scenario
The first step for an attacker sitting on the network is to be able to identify the proper network traffic containing the sensitive information. With this information from the network packets, they can then attempt to join the call that is in progress. Using a Python framework called Scapy, we built a network layer in less than 50 lines of code to help easily identify the traffic the attacker cares about. This was done by reviewing the video call traffic and reverse engineering the protocol. Like a lot of reversing, this is done by using context clues and a lot of “guess and check”. Strings help us identify the use for certain fields and provide clues to what the fields around them might be. In some cases, fields are still unknown; however, this is normal. An attacker or researcher only needs to decipher enough of a packet to make an attack possible.
Figure 11: Agora Scapy filter
The above code identifies, parses, and displays in human readable form, only the important information in the three main packet types discovered in the Agora traffic. From here we can automate the scenario outlined in Figure 10 using Python with a few modifications to the example apps. It totally works! The demo video below shows an attacker sniffing network traffic to gather the call information and then launching their own Agora video application to join the call, completely unnoticed by normal users.
Besides using a token, were there any other security measures available to developers that might have mitigated the impact of this vulnerability? Per Agora’s documentation, the developer has the option to encrypt a video call. We also tested this, and the App ID, Channel Name, and Token are still sent in plaintext when the call is encrypted. An attacker can still get these values; however, they cannot view the video or hear the audio of the call. Despite this, the attacker can still utilize the App ID to host their own calls at the cost of the app developer. We will discuss in the next section why, even though encryption is available, it is not widely adopted, making this mitigation largely impractical.
You talkin’ to me? Are you talkin’ to me?
This research started with the discovery of an App ID hardcoded into “temi”, the personal robot we were researching. Agora documents clearly on its website that this App ID should be “kept safe”, which we discovered as a vulnerability while researching temi. However, further examination shows that even if temi had kept this value safe, it is sent in cleartext over the network along with all the other values needed to join the call. So how does this impact other consumers of the Agora SDK outside of temi?
Agora’s website claims – “Agora’s interactive voice, video, and messaging SDKs are embedded into mobile, web and desktop applications across more than 1.7 billion devices globally.” To ensure our comparisons would be reasonable, we looked only at other Android applications which used the video SDK. We also focused on apps with a very large install base.
To give a quick cross-section of apps on Google Play that utilize Agora, let’s focus on MeetMe, Skout, Nimo TV, and, of course, temi. Google Play reports the number of installs at 50 million+ each for MeetMe and Skout, 10 million+ for Nimo TV and 1000+ for temi. By examining the applications’ decompiled code, we can easily determine all four of these applications have hardcoded App IDs and do not enable encryption. We see very similar code as below in all the applications:
Figure 12: joinChannel function from Android apps not using encryption
The most important line here is the call to setEncryptionSecret which is being passed the “null” parameter. We can reference the Agora documentation to understand more about this call.
Figure 13: Agora documentation on setEncryptionSecret
Even though the encryption functions are being called, the application developers are actually disabling the encryption based on this documentation. A developer paying close attention might ask if this is the only place the API is being called. Could it be set elsewhere? The team searched the decompiled code for all the applications reviewed and was unable to find any other instance of the API call, leading us to believe this is the only call being made. With this in mind, the cleartext traffic has a greater impact that goes well beyond a personal robot application to millions – potentially billions – of users. Without encryption enabled and the setup information passed in cleartext, an attacker can spy on a very large range of users.
Although Agora should not have been sending this sensitive information unencrypted, if it offers an encrypted traffic option, why is it not being used? This would at least protect the video and audio of the call, even though an attacker is able to join. While it is impossible to be certain, one reason might be because the Agora encryption options require a pre-shared key, which can be seen in its example applications posted on GitHub. The Agora SDK itself did not provide any secure way to generate or communicate the pre-shared key needed for the phone call, and therefore this was left up to the developers. Many calling models used in applications want to give the user the ability to call anyone without prior contact. This is difficult to implement into a video SDK post-release since a built-in mechanism for key sharing was not included. It is also worth noting that, generally, the speed and quality of a video call is harder to maintain while using encryption. These may be a few of the reasons why these application developers have chosen to not use the encryption for the video and audio. Now that the SDK properly and transparently handles encryption of call setup, developers have the opportunity to leverage a more secure method of communication for traffic. Additionally, developers still have the option to add full encryption to further protect video and audio streams.
Agora has published a list of best practices for all its developers and partners here, which does include use of encryption when possible. We generally recommend following vendors’ security best practices as they are designed to apply to the product or service directly. In this case, the vulnerability would still exist; however, its effectiveness would be extremely limited if the published best practices were followed. Although we have found Agora’s recommendations were largely not being adopted, Agora has been actively communicating with customers throughout the vulnerability disclosure process to ensure its recommended processes and procedures are widely implemented.
Yo, Adrian, we did it. We did it.
Privacy is always a top concern for consumers, but also remains an enticing threat vector for attackers. If we look at the two biggest apps we investigated (MeetMe and Skout), both are rated for mature audiences (17+) to “meet new people” and both advertise over 100 million users. MeetMe also mentions “flirting” on the Google Play store and its website has testimonies about people meeting the “love of their life”. Although they are not explicitly advertised as dating apps, it would be reasonable to draw the conclusion that it is at least one of their functions. In the world of online dating, a breach of security or the ability to spy on calls could lead to blackmail or harassment by an attacker. Other Agora developer applications with smaller customer bases, such as the temi robot, are used in numerous industries such as hospitals, where the ability to spy on conversations could lead to the leak of sensitive medical information.
One goal of the McAfee Advanced Threat Research team is to identify and illuminate a broad spectrum of threats in today’s complex and constantly evolving landscape. As per McAfee’s responsible disclosure policy, McAfee ATR informed Agora as soon as the vulnerability was confirmed to be exploitable. Agora was very receptive and responsive to receiving this information and further advanced its current security capabilities by providing developers with an SDK option (version 3.2.1) to encrypt the initial call setup information, mitigating this vulnerability. We have tested this new SDK and can confirm it fully mitigates CVE-2020-25605. At the time of writing, McAfee is unaware of any instances of this vulnerability being exploited in the wild, which demonstrates another powerful success story of mitigating an issue which may have affected millions of users before it is used for malicious purposes. Our partnership with Agora resulted in the release of a more secure SDK which has empowered developers across multiple companies to produce more secure video calling applications. We strongly recommend any development team which uses the Agora SDK to upgrade to the latest version, follow Agora’s outlined best practices, and implement full encryption wherever possible.
Vulnerability Details
CVE:CVE-2020-25605 CVSSv3 Rating: 7.5/6.7 CVSS String: AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N/E:P/RL:O/RC:C CVE Description: Cleartext transmission of sensitive information in Agora Video SDK prior to 3.1 allows a remote attacker to obtain access to audio and video of any ongoing Agora video call through observation of cleartext network traffic.
What is your organization’s readiness for the emerging eXtended Detection Response (XDR) technology? McAfee just released the first iteration of this technology, MVISION XDR. As XDR capabilities become available, organizations need to think through how to embrace the new security operations technology destined to empower detection and response capabilities. XDR is a journey for people and organizations.
The cool thing about McAfee’s offering is the XDR capabilities is built on the McAfee platform of MVISION EDR, MVISION Insights and is extended to other McAfee products and third-party offerings. This means –— as a McAfee customer — your XDR journey has already begun.
The core value prop behind XDR is to empower the SecOps function which is still heavily burdened with limited staff and resources while the threat landscape roars. This cry is not new. As duly noted in the book, Ten Strategies of World-class Cybersecurity Operations Center, written quite a few moons ago:“With the right tools, one good analyst can do the job of 100 mediocre ones.” XDR is the right tool.
SecOps empowerment means impacting and changing people and process in a positive manner resulting in better security outcomes. Organizations must consider and prepare for this helpful shift. Here are three key considerations organizations need to be aware of and ready for:
The Wonder of Harmonizing Security Controls and Data Across all Vectors
A baseline requirement for XDR is to unify and aggregate security controls and data to elevate situation awareness. Now consider what does this mean to certain siloedfunctions like endpoint, network and web. Let’s say you are analyst who typically pulls telemetry from separate control points (endpoint, network, web) moving from each tool with a login, to another tool with another login and so on. Or maybe you only have access to the endpoint tool.To gain insight into the network you emailed the network folks with artifacts you are seeing on the endpoint and ask if these is anything similar,they have seen on the edge and what they make of it.Often there is a delayed response from network folks given their priorities. And you call the web folks for their input on what they are seeing. Enter XDR. What if this information and insights was automatically given to you on a unified dashboard where situation awareness analysis has already begun. This reduces the manual pivoting of copy and pasting, emailing, and phone calls. It removes the multiple data sets to manageand the cognitive strain to make sense of it. The collection, triaging, and initial investigative analysis are automated and streamlined. This empowers the analysts to get to a quicker validation and assessment. The skilled analyst will also use experience and human intuition to respond to the adversary, but the initial triaging, investigation, and analysis has already been done. In addition, XDR fosters the critical collaboration between the network operations and security operations since adversary movement is erratic across the entire infrastructure.
Imagine if your SecOps gained high priority threat intelligence before the adversary hits and enters your environment. What does it mean to your daily SecOps processes and policy? It removes a significant amount to of hunting, triaging and investigation cycles. It simply prioritizes and accelerates the investigation. It answers the questions that matter. Any associated campaign is bubbled up immediately. You are getting overa hundred high alerts, but one is related to a threat campaign that is likely to hit. It removes the guess work and prioritizes SecOps efforts. It assesses your environment and the likely impact—what is vulnerable. More importantly it suggests counter measures you can take. It moves you from swimming in context to action in minutes.
This brings the SecOps to a decision moment faster—do they have the authority to respond? Are they a participant in prevention efforts? Note this topic is Strategy Three in the Ten Strategies of World-class Cybersecurity Operations Center where it is highly encouraged to empower SecOps to make and/or participate in such decisions. Policies for response decisions and actions vary by organizations, the takeaway here is decision moments come faster and more often with significant research and credible context from MVISION XDR.
Enjoy the Dance Between Security and IT
XDR is an open, integrated platform. So, what does it mean to people and process if all the pieces are integrated and security functions coordinate efforts? It depends on the pieces that are connected. For example, if SecOps can place a recommendation to update certain systems on the IT service system automatically it removes the necessity to login into the IT system and place a request or in some cases call or email IT (eliminating a time-consuming step.) There is aheightened need for what–if scenario policies driven by Secure Orchestration Automation Response (SOAR) solutions. These policies are typically reflected in a manual playbook or SOAR playbook.
Let’s consider an example, when an email phishing alert is offered the SOAR automatically (by policy/play required) compares the alert against others to see if there are commonalties worth noting.If so, the common artifacts are assigned to one analyst versus distributing separate alerts to many analysts. This streamlines the investigation and response to be more effective and less consuming.There are many more examples, but the point is when you coordinate security functions organization must think through how they want each function to act under specific circumstances—what is your policy for these circumstances.
These are just a few areas to consider when you embrace XDR. I hope this initial discussion started you thinking about what to consider when embracing XDR.We have an online SOC audit where you can assess your SOC maturity and plan where you want to go. Join us for a webinar on XDR readiness where experts will examine how to prepare to optimize XDR capabilities. We also have a SOC best practices series, SOCwise that offers regular advice and tips for your SOC efforts!
Balancing Digital: Helping Your Family Manage Ongoing Stress
Editor’s Note: This is part I in a series on helping families protect their mental and digital health in times of chronic stress. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice or treatment.
The data continues to confirm that living with the stress of a prolonged pandemic is taking a toll on the mental health of both the young and old. Add increased technology use to this state of chronic stress and there’s no doubt that families everywhere sit in the crosshairs of any number of mental health risks.
Cumulative Stress
After nearly a year of isolation, stop-and-start school days, restricted travel, and the added layer of political tension, many are experiencing feelings of hopelessness that pandemic circumstances only magnify.
According to a nationwide survey by researchers from Rutgers and Harvard, more than one-third of young adults in the U.S. report having thoughts of hopelessness, while nearly half show symptoms of depression.
These numbers are ten times higher than what was exhibited in the general population before the COVID-19 pandemic, say researchers.
Pandemic stress is also impacting younger children. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports mental health visits have spiked for young children and adolescents since the pandemic started.
The Tech Connection
A 2016 Time cover story offers critical insight into why anxiety and depression have continued to rise among young people and the role technology plays in that equation.
Time writer Susanna Schrobsdorff describes the crisis this way: “They are the post-9/11 generation, raised in an era of economic and national insecurity. They’ve never known a time when terrorism and school shootings weren’t the norm. They grew up watching their parents weather a severe recession, and, perhaps most important, they hit puberty at a time when technology and social media were transforming society.”
Janis Whitlock, director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury, added that technology is the primary driver feeding young people’s anxiety and depression. “It’s that they’re in a cauldron of stimulus they can’t get away from, or don’t want to get away from, or don’t know how to get away from.”
Steve Schneider, a high school counselor, likened the constant pressure many teens feel from their phones to a scab that’s constantly being picked. “At no point do you get to remove yourself from it and get perspective.”
Headline Stress Disorder
Even with a vaccine signaling an end in sight to a degree of our stress, other tensions are proving to be relentless, causing what some doctors are calling “headline stress disorder,” a condition in which non-stop news cycles trigger intense feelings of worry and helplessness.
So how can we help our kids bear up under the weight of it all?
Staying especially connected to one another during this time and alert to the signs of emotional distress is one way parents can help kids balance their digital and mental health. Here are a few other ways to consider.
7 Ways to Build Your Family’s Digital, Mental Health
Prioritize digital health. Kids need help with limits, especially when school schedules, team sports, and gatherings are in flux. Pay attention to your child’s social media use — how much and what kind — and consider establishing time limits and filtering the content that’s flowing across their screens.
Pay attention to online friend groups. Kids connect with new people online all the time through gaming platforms, group chats, and apps. With school schedules in limbo, in-person friend groups can easily form online and expose your child to a number of online risks.
Follow the ‘Three Rs.’ Routine (make a schedule and stick to it); Relationship (go above and beyond to connect 1-1); and Reassurance (remind kids they are safe and that everything is going to be okay — quash rumors).
Make time to talk. Not all signs of emotional distress will be outward; some will be subtle, and some, even non-existent. That’s why it’s essential to consistently take the time to assess how your kids are doing.
Help process distressing events. Getting to the root of a child’s anxiety often means helping them identify the deeper fears and “what ifs” and them learn to distinguish between what they can and cannot control.
Practice focusing on facts. A big part of #5 is helping kids understand the facts (quash rumors) about alarming events or conditions is one way to help them feel more in control of what’s happening around them. This includes coaching them in critical thinking and media literacy skills.
Model & encourage healthy habits. Physical health is intertwined with mental health. Especially during times of crisis, encourage and model good habits like exercising, eating well, meditation and deep breathing, and getting enough sleep.
The silent storms beneath this pandemic will continue to surface and teach us for years to come. Until then, be encouraged that no one has the “what to do,” figured out or the parental superpower to control the uncontrollable. We’re all in this together and, together, hopefully soon, we’ll be enjoying the light of better days.
To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, subscribe to our email, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.
Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”.
Security vendors have spent the last two decades providing more of the same orchestration, detection, and response capabilities, while promising different results. And as the old adage goes, doing the same thing over and over again whilst expecting different results is…? I’ll let you fill in the blank yourself.
Figure 1: The Impact of XDR in the Modern SOC: Biggest SIEM challenges – ESG Research 2020
SIEM! SOAR! Next Generation SIEM!The names changed, while the same fundamental challengesremained: they all required heavy lifting and ongoing manual maintenance.As noted by ESG Research, SIEM – being a baseline capability within SOC environments–continues to present challenges to organisations by being either too costly, exceedingly resource intensive, requiring far too much expertise, and various other concerns.A common example of this is how SOC teams still mustcreate manual correlation rules to find the “bad” connections between logs from different products, applications and networks. Too often, these rulesfloodedanalysts with information and false alerts and render the product too noisyto effective.
The expanding attack surface, which now spans Web, Cloud, Data, Network and more, has also added a layer of complexity. The security industry cannot only rely onits customers’analysts to properly configure a security solution with such a wide scope. Implementing only the correct configurations, fine-tuning hundreds of custom log parsers and interpreters, defining very specific correlation rules, developing necessary remediation workflows, and so much more – it’s all a bit too much.
Detections now bubble up from many siloed tools, too, including Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) for network protection, Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) deployed across managed systems, and Cloud Application Security Broker (CASB) solutions for your SaaS applications. Correlating those detections to paint a complete picture is now an even bigger challenge.
There is also no ‘R’ in SIEM – that is, there is no inherent response built into SIEM. You can almost liken it to a firealarm that isn’t connected to the sprinklers.
SIEMs have been the foundation of security operations for decades, and that should be acknowledged. Thankfully, they’re now being used more appropriately, i.e. for logging, aggregation, and archiving.
Now, Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions are absolutely on the right track – enabling analysts to sharpen their skills through guided investigations and streamline remediation efforts – but it ultimately suffers from a network blind spot. Similarly, network security solutions don’t offer the necessary telemetry and visibility across your endpoint assets.
Considering the alternatives
Of Gartner’s Top 9 Security and Risk Trends for 2020, “Extended detection and response capabilities emerge to improve accuracy and productivity” ranked as their #1 trend. They noted, “Extended detection and response (XDR) solutions are emerging that automatically collect and correlate data from multiple security products to improve threat detection and provide an incident response capability…The primary goals of an XDR solution are to increase detection accuracy and improve security operations efficiency and productivity.”
That sounds awfully similar to SIEM, so how is an XDR any different from all the previous security orchestration, detection, and response solutions?
The answer is: An XDR is a converged platform leveraging a common ontology and unifying language. An effective XDR must bring together numerous heterogeneous signals, and return a homogenous visual and analytical representation..XDRmust clearly show the potential security correlations (or in other words, “attack stories”) that the SOC should focus on. Such a solution would de-duplicate information on one hand, but would emphasize the truly high-risk attacks, while filtering out the mountains of noise. The desired outcomewould not requireexceeding amounts ofmanual work;allowing SOC analysts to stop serving as an army of “translators” and focus on the real work –leading investigations and mitigating attacks. This normalized presentation of data would be aware of context and content, be advanced technologically, but simple for analysts to understand and act upon.
SIEMs are data-driven, meaning they need data definitions, custom parsing rules and pre-baked content packs to retrospectively provide context. In contrast, XDR is hypothesis driven, harnessing the power of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence engines to analyse high-fidelity threat data from a multitude of sources across the environment to support specific lines of investigation mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
The MITRE ATT&CK framework is effective at highlighting “how bad guys do what they do, and how they do it.” While traditional prevention measures are great at “spot it and stop it” protections, MITRE ATT&CK demonstrates there are many steps taking place in the attack lifecycle that aren’t obvious. These actions don’t trigger sufficient alerting to generate the confidence required to support a reaction.
XDR isn’t a single product. Rather, it refers to an assembly of multiple security products (and services) that comprise a unified platform.AnXDR approach will shiftprocesses and likely merge and encouragetighter coordination between different functions likeSOC analysts, hunters, incident respondersand ITadministrators.
The ideal XDR solution must provide enhanced detection and response capabilities across endpoints, networks, and cloud infrastructures. It needs to prioritise and predict threats that matter BEFORE the attack and prescribe necessary countermeasures allowing the organisation to proactively harden their environment.
Figure 2: Where current XDR approaches are failing
McAfee’s MVISION XDR solution does just that, by empowering the SOC to do more with unified visibility and control across endpoints, network, and cloud. McAfee XDR orchestrates both McAfee and non-McAfee security assets to deliver actionable cyber threat management and support both guided and automated investigations.
What if you could find out if you’re in the crosshairs of a top threat campaign, by using global telemetry from over 1 billion sensors that automatically tracks new campaigns according to geography and industry vertical? Wouldn’t that beinsightful?
“Many firms want to be more proactive but do not have the resources or talent to execute. McAfee can help bridge this gap by offering organisations a global outlook across the entire threat landscape with local context to respond appropriately. In this way, McAfee can support a CISO-level strategy that combines risk and threat operations.”
– John Oltsik, ESG Senior Principal Analyst and Fellow
But, hang on… Is this all just another ‘platform’ play?
Take a moment to consider how ‘platform’ offerings have evolved over the years. Initially designed to compensate for the heterogeneity and volume of internal data sources and external threat intelligence feeds, the core objective has predominantly been to manifest data centrally from across a range of vectors in order to streamline security operations efforts.We then saw the introduction of case management capabilities.
Over the past decade, the security industry proposed solving many of the challenges presented in SOC contexts through integrations. You would buy products from a few differentvendors, whopromisedit would all work together through API integration, and basically give you some form of pseudo-XDR outcomes we’re exploring here.
Frankly, there are significant limitations in that approach. There is no data persistence; you basically make requests to the lowest API denominator on a one-to-one basis. The information sharing model wasa one-way‘question and answer’ leveraging a scheduled push-pull methodology. The other big issue was the inability to pull information in whatever form – you were limited to the API available between the participating parties, with the result ultimately only as good as the ‘dumbest’ API.
And what about the lack of any shared ontology, meaning little to no common objects or attributes? There were no shared components, such as UI/UX, incident management, logging, dashboards, policy definitions, user authentication, etc.
What’s desperately been needed is an open underlying platform – essentially like a universal API gateway scaled across the cloud that leverages messaging fabrics like DXL that facilitate easy bi-lateral exchange between many security functions– where vendors and partner technologies create tight integrations and synergies to support specific use cases benefitting SOC ecosystems.
Is XDR, then, a solution or product to be procured?Or just a security strategy to be adopted?Potentially, it’s both.Some vendors are releasing XDR solutions that complement their portfolio strengths, and others are just flaunting XDR-like capabilities.
Closing Thoughts
SIEMsstill deliver specific outcomes to organisations and SOCs, which cannot be replaced by XDR. In fact, with XDR, a SIEM can be even more valuable.
For most organisations, XDR will be a journey, not a destination. Their ability to become more effective through XDR will depend on their maturity and readiness toembrace all the requiredprocesses.In terms of cybersecurity maturity, if you’d rate your organisation at a medium to high level, the question becomes how and when.
Most organisations using an Endpoint Detection and Response(EDR) solution are likely quite readyto embrace XDR’scapabilities. They are already investigating and resolving endpoint threats and they’re ready to expand this effort to understand how their adversaries move across their infrastructure, too.
If you’d like to know more about how McAfee addresses these challenges with MVISION XDR, feel free to reach out!
In November last year, we lost our much-loved family dog. We were all so devasted. Harley was a very handsome black and white Cavoodle who died from a paralysis tick bite after giving us 12 years of love. After lots of tears and weeks of sadness, we have decided it’s time to start our search for another fur baby.
But it seems we are not the only ones in the market for a new puppy. Thanks to COVID and our new very home focussed lives, puppies have been in hot demand since early 2020 and they still are. What better way to deal with lockdown loneliness and a home-based existence than a brand-new ball of fluff!
Over the last few weeks, I’ve spoken to multiple breeders from all around Australia who have over 50 families waiting for a puppy! A Portuguese Water Dog breeder told me yesterday that it would be 2023 before she could offer me a puppy!! So,
So, how do you avoid being caught up in a puppy scam and losing money? Here’s what I’m doing to ensure we don’t get swindled while we search for our new puppy:
1. Take Your Time
Cybercriminals rely on us being in a rush and not doing our homework. A quick google search for popular dog breeds such as Cavoodles, Labradors or Dachshunds will yield pages of results, not all of them legit!
Scammers are very talented at making their sites look genuine. They will copy photos of puppies and breeders from legitimate sites and will even use certificates and identification numbers from these legitimate breeders too. Quite often the only detail that differs is the contact telephone number and email address.
Facebook and Instagram ads are also created using these details too making it very hard to identify what is legitimate and what isn’t.
2. Do Your Homework
Doing your due diligence is the best way to prevent becoming a victim of a puppy scam. Even if the person on the end of the phone sounds delightful and the pictures are gorgeous, you owe it to yourself – and your bank account – to ensure you are dealing with a legitimate breeder. Here’s what I recommend you do:
Google the name of the breeder to ascertain whether they have NOT been caught up in a scam.
Always ring the association that the breeder says they are registered with and crosscheck all the information you have been given.
As most puppies come vaccinated and microchipped, ask the breeder to share contact details of the veterinary clinic the puppy has been to.
3. Photos and Video Chat
If you are not able to pick up your pet in person, requesting photos and even a video call with the breeder and your potential puppy is essential.
Ask the breeder for multiple photos of the pet with specific items – this help you ascertain that the pet is real and not photoshopped. A recent newspaper is a great item to suggest.
However, a video call is probably the best way of giving you total piece of mind. Yes, it maybe crazy and noisy but there’s nothing like seeing something with your own eyes to satisfy yourself that it is real and not photoshopped!
4. Trust Your Gut
We all have a 6th sense and now is the time to use it:
If the breeder is trying to push for the sale as they are moving to a new house or are unwell, be suspicious.
If the breeder is putting pressure on you to deposit funds to secure your puppy ASAP, be suspicious.
If the breeder is asking an inflated price for the pet, be suspicious. Do your research so you know what an average asking price would be.
If email communication with breeder has signs of broken English or poor grammar, be very suspicious.
I can’t imagine our family without pets. They play such an important, cohesive role and we take such joy in sharing photos of our crazy cats and their weird antics on our family group chat.
Next week, we are going to pickup our new puppy. After much debate about breeds, we have chosen a tri coloured beaglier – male of course! The breeder sounds delightful over the phone and the pictures are gorgeous. But just to ensure total piece of mind, I am driving nearly 7 hours to pick up our new fur baby in person. I’ll be sure to share some photos!
The concept of a trail of breadcrumbs in the offensive security community is nothing new; for many years, researchers on both sides of the ethical spectrum have followed the compass based on industry-wide security findings, often leading to groundbreaking discoveries in both legacy and modern codebases alike. This happened in countless instances, from Java to Flash to Internet Explorer and many more, often resulting in widespread findings and subsequent elimination or modification to large amounts of code. Over the last 12 months, we have noticed a similar trend in the analysis, discovery and disclosures of vulnerabilities in networking stacks. Starting with JSOF’s Ripple20, which we analyzed and released signatures for, a clear pattern emerged as researchers investigated anew the threat surfaces in the tcp/ip stacks deployed worldwide. Microsoft was no exception, of course running the Windows networking stack dating back to the earliest iterations of Windows, and frequently updated with new features and fixes.
In fact, looking back at just the last 8 months of Microsoft patches, we’ve tracked at least 25 significant vulnerabilities directly related to the Windows network stack. These have ranged from DNS to NTFS, SMB to NFS and recently, several tcp/ip bugs in fragmentation and packet reassembly for IPv4 and IPv6.
That brings us to this month’s patch Tuesday, which contains several more high-profile critical vulnerabilities in tcpip.sys. We’ll focus on three of these, including 2 marked as “remote code execution” bugs, which could lead to wormability if code execution is truly possible, and a persistent denial-of-service vulnerability which could cause a permanent Blue Screen of Death on the latest versions of Windows.
There are clear similarities between all 3, indicating both Microsoft and researchers external to Microsoft are highly interested in auditing this library, and are having success in weeding out a number of interesting bugs. The following is a short summary of each bug and the progress we have made to date in analyzing them.
What is CVE-2021-24086?
The first vulnerability analyzed in this set is a Denial-of-Service (DOS) attack. Generally, these types of bugs are rather uninteresting; however, a few can have enough of an impact that although an attacker can’t get code execution, they are well worth discussing. This is one of those few. One of the things that boost this vulnerability’s impact is the fact it is internet routable and many devices using IPv6 can be directly accessible over the internet, even when behind a router. It is also worth noting that the default Windows Defender Firewall configuration does not mitigate this attack. In a worst-case scenario, an attacker could spray this attack and put it on a continuous loop to potentially cause a “permanent” or persistent DOS to a wide range of systems.
This vulnerability exists when Windows’ tcpip.sys driver attempts to reassemble fragmented IPv6 packets. As a result, this attack requires many packets to be successful. The root cause of this vulnerability is a NULL pointer dereference which occurs in Ipv6pReassembleDatagram. The crash occurs when reassembling a packet with around 0xffff bytes of extension headers. It should be impossible to send a packet with that many bytes in the extension headers according to the RFC, however this is not considered in the Ipv6pReceiveFragments function when calculating the unfragmented length. Leveraging a proof-of-concept through the Microsoft MAPP program, McAfee was easily able to reproduce this bug, demonstrating it has the potential to be seen in the wild.
What is CVE-2021-24094?
This vulnerability is classified by Remote Code Execution (RCE), though our analysis thus far, code execution comes with unique challenges. Similar to CVE-2021-24086, this issue involves IPv6 packet reassembly by the Windows tcpip.sys driver. It is different from 24086 in that it doesn’t require a large packet with extension headers, and it is not a NULL pointer dereference. Instead, it is a dangling pointer which, if the right packet data is sprayed from an attacker over IPv6, will causes the pointer to be overwritten and reference an arbitrary memory location. When the data at the pointer’s target is accessed, it causes a page fault and thus a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Additionally, an attacker can create persistence of the DoS by continually pointing the attack at a victim machine.
While the reproduction of this issue causes crashes on the target in all reproductions so far, it’s unclear how easy it would be to force the pointer to a location that would cause valid execution without crashing. The pointer would need to point to a paged-in memory location that had already been written with additional data that could manipulate the IPv6 reassembly code, which would likely not come from this attack alone, but may require a separate attack to do so.
What is CVE-2021-24074?
CVE-2021-24074 is a potential RCE in tcpip.sys triggered during the reassembly of fragmented IPv4 packets in conjunction with a confusion of IPv4 IP Options. During reassembly, it is possible to have two fragments with different IP Options; this is against the IPv4 standard, but Windows will proceed further, while failing to perform proper sanity checks for the respective options. This type confusion can be leveraged to trigger an Out of Bounds (OOB) read and write by “smuggling” an IP option Loose source and record route (LSRR) with invalid parameters. This option is normally meant to specify the route a packet should take. It has a variable length, starts with a pointer field, and is followed by a list of IP addresses to route the packet through.
By leveraging the type confusion, we have an invalid pointer field that will point beyond the end of the routing list provided in the packet. When the routing function Ipv4pReceiveRoutingHeader looks up the next hop for the packet, it will OOB read this address (as a DWORD) and perform a handful of checks on it. If these checks are successful, the IP stack will attempt to route the packet to its next hop by copying the original packet and then writing its own IP address in the record route. Because this write relies on the same invalid pointer value as before, this turns out to be an OOB write (beyond the end of the newly allocated packet). The content of this OOB write is the IP address of the target machine represented as a DWORD (thus, not controlled by the attacker).
Microsoft rates this bug as “Exploitation more likely”, however exploitation might not be as straightforward as it sounds. For an attack to succeed, one would have to groom the kernel heap to place a certain value to be read during the OOB read, and then make it so the OOB write would corrupt something of interest. Likely, a better exploitation primitive would need to be established first in order to successfully exploit the bug. For instance, leveraging the OOB write to corrupt another data structure that could lead to information disclosure and/or a write-what-where scenario.
From a detection standpoint, the telltale signs of an active exploitation would be fragmented packets whose IP Options vary between fragments. For instance, the first fragment would not contain an LSRR option, while the second fragment would. This would likely be accompanied by a heavy traffic meant to shape the kernel heap.
Similarities and Impact Assessment
There are obvious similarities between all three of these vulnerabilities. Each is present in the tcpip.sys library, responsible for parsing IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. Furthermore, the bugs all deal with packet reassembly and the RCE vulnerabilities leverage similar functions for IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Given a combination of public and Microsoft-internal attribution, it’s clear that researchers and vendor alike are chasing down the same types of bugs. Whenever we see vulnerabilities in network stacks or Internet-routed protocols, we’re especially interested to determine difficulty of exploitation, wormability, and impact. For vulnerabilities such as the RCEs above, a deep dive is essential to understand the likelihood of these types of flaws being built into exploit kits or used in targeted attacks and are prime candidates for threat actors to weaponize. Despite the real potential for harm, the criticality of these bugs is somewhat lessened by a higher bar to exploitation and the upcoming patches from Microsoft. We do expect to see additional vulnerabilities in the TCP/IP stack and will continue to provide similar analysis and guidance. As it is likely to take some time for threat actors to integrate these vulnerabilities in a meaningful way, the best course of action, as always, is widespread mitigation via patching.
Valentine’s Day is nearly upon us – and as couples and singletons alike gear up for a day that’s traditionally all about sharing, when it comes to our digital identities, might we be sharing too much, and how can we protect ourselves? With data showing that past, present and possibly even future lovers are willing to secretly snoop on your online information to find out all about you, it’s safe to say that ill-intentioned online criminals can too.
Living in a digital world has made it far easier to share more than just our hearts with the people we care about – but this can leave us more vulnerable to over sharing, and therefore to fraudsters. Online fraudsters have been known to use Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to take advantage of online dating sites and social media to scam those looking for love. And with many feeling isolated and shut off from friends and family at the moment, online dating can be a way to make connections which are currently lacking – whether that be romantic relationships or friendships. However, this opens up the opportunity for online scammers to make the most of our desire to feel connection with others, and these criminals will know where to look to find out more about you.
Social media: friend or foe?
Whether you love it or loathe it, Valentine’s Day is going to look a little different this year. If you’re looking for that special someone, the current lockdown, working from home and simply not going out as much as usual will have taken its toll on your social and dating life. It should come as no surprise that as a result of the pandemic, time spent online has surged, with people having either introduced or significantly increased their online activity, including online dating and social media use.
While many believe the risk lies in the dating apps themselves, the information you share across any online entity – known as your digital footprint – is where you need to pay attention, and dating apps can be a safe and enjoyable way to meet new people as long as you take the right precautions. And on a day that is very social media friendly – many can’t help but share photos and post about loved ones online on Valentine’s Day – make sure you are doing so safely. While a lot of people associate online crime with malware or phishing attacks, many aren’t aware of how vulnerable they are when sharing information on social media. If you are not careful potential love interests, and criminals alike, can find information about your family, your home, and your job – all leaving you vulnerable. So it’s worth checking your privacy settings before sharing that photo on Instagram.
Protecting your dating identity
The threat of having your personal identity stolen, having your dating profile hacked, or being catfished, are thankfully rare, but every year person can fall victim to these threats, so it’s no wonder that so many don’t feel secure when dating online. In the worst cases, those whose dating profiles are hacked might be extorted for money, and those encountering a catfish could end up handing over personal information which can be used against them.
Not oversharing is not an art – only share information on your profile if you feel comfortable in doing so. This is important from both a personal and security standpoint. If your information is compromised, it could lead to anywhere from identity theft to harassment, so when you use a dating app, keep the sharing to a minimum—and keep your eyes peeled for any suspicious activity across your social media, online accounts, and even your finances.
These things all sound frightening – and of course, they are! But it’s important to remember that they are thankfully rare, and you can still enjoy all the benefits that dating apps and social media have to offer if you take some simple steps. My top tips include:
Don’t overshare on social media. Oversharing online can paint a picture of us very quickly. Keep sensitive data such as your date of birth, address, job, or names of family members private. Also, consider carefully whether you really want your relationship status made public.
Sharing is not always caring.Only share photos and other social media posts with your intended audience. If you have blocked an individual, make sure they stay out of your social media feeds. Services like Facebook and Instagram have features that allow posts to be viewed only by confirmed connections. Check your privacy settings regularly, as they often change.
Protect your identityand important personal and financial details using McAfee Identity Theft Protection, which also includes recovery tools should your identity be compromised.
Employ multi-factor authenticationto double check the authenticity of digital users and add an additional layer of security to protect personal data and information.
Be careful who you befriend online.Only accept friend requests from people you know in real life. Often hackers or criminals will send requests so they can see the information you are sharing to help them in access your private information.
Set up unique logins for each app you are using. Setting up a different password for each app or account you use is a great way to protect yourself and your data online. If you no longer use a social media account, delete your information and deactivate your account.
Watch out for geo-tagging.Many social networks will tag a user’s location when uploading a photo, as well as offering users the option to tag their location when posting. You should ensure this feature is turned off to avoid disclosing your location to criminals or people you would not want to know your whereabouts.
So whether you’re single and looking for love, or loved up and ready to shout about it online, just remember to bear the above in mind to protect yourself from online scams.
It’s Time to Have “The Talk” About the Internet: 7 Conversation-Starters for Staying Much Safer Online
With Safer Internet Day upon us, it’s time to have “The Talk.” The internet talk, that is.
What’s the internet talk? It’s a candid conversation about how safe we’re really being when we go online, as opposed to how safe we think we’re being. Indeed, there can be a sizable gap between the two, and our 2021 Consumer Security Mindset Report shows us just how significant it is:
70% of respondents said they purchased at least one connected device in 2020, while 1 in 3 bought three connected devices. However,
Only 50% purchased security software, and 1 in 4 of those who have said that they check to see if their security software is up to date.
Over half of U.S. respondents (51%) said that they never considered how much the data they store online is worth. However, nearly 9 in 10 consumers say they would be proactive about protecting that data if it could be traded as a currency, which indeed it is by hackers who sell it on the black market.
Nearly 1 in 3 (29%) respondents admitted that they are not confident in their ability to prevent a cyber-attack.
I don’t know about you, but I was struck by the fact that only 50% of people are purchasing security software when they buy a new device. If that’s so, then it’s indeed time for the talk.
Whether we have the talk with our kids, our parents, or even have it with ourselves, this is a chance to make sure we’re protecting the things that matter when we go online—our families, our privacy, our finances, our data, and, of course, our stuff too—like our computers, tablets, smartphones, and other connected things too.
Internet security: What’s there to talk about?
Plenty. However, let’s look at Safer Internet Day as a way to take some important first steps by asking a handful of questions that can lead to a much safer you online.
If you’re using simple passwords or repeating the use of the same password with little or no variation, it’s time to make a change. Strong, unique passwords protect you in this age of data breaches and hacks, where passwords are stolen and then sold on the black market. If creating strong and unique passwords for each of your accounts sounds like a lot of work, consider using a password manager to create and securely store passwords for you.
3) Are you protected by a firewall and a VPN?
A firewall acts as a digital barrier that blocks unauthorized access to your computers and devices, which is a must these days (and has been for some time now). It’s often included with comprehensive security software (one more reason why having comprehensive security software is far superior to having “just” antivirus).
A virtual private network (VPN) is software that creates a secure connection over the internet, so you can safely connect from anywhere. You may want to use it at home when you’re looking for extra protection while banking or handling finances. And you’ll most certainly want to use it when logged into public Wi-Fi at places like airports, hotels, and cafes because so-called “free Wi-Fi” is often unsecured, making it easier for hackers to access your device or the information you’re sending and receiving.
4) Are you oversharing on social media?
It may come as surprising, but hackers can piece together a great deal of information about you from social media and use it as the means for all manner of attacks. That includes identity theft, social engineering attacks where they impersonate you or someone you know, and even password theft. Avoid oversharing on social media by keeping details like addresses, school names, and other personally identifying information to yourself. Also, set you profiles to private so that only friends and family can see them.
5) Can you tell a secure website from one that isn’t?
When you’re shopping, banking, or passing along any sort of sensitive information, make sure the site address starts with “https” instead of “http.” The “s” stands for secure, and many browsers will represent that with a little padlock icon to indicate use of https, which uses encryption to scramble and help secure data from prying eyes.
Updates do more than keep your apps and software current with the latest features, they often include security improvements as well. When and where possible, set your devices and software to update automatically. And when prompted to update, say yes. The few moments you spend here can prevent major headaches down the road should your app or software open an avenue to an attack.
7) When’s the last time you backed up your data?
Now that’s the $50,000 question. And I say that only half-jokingly. Where would you be without your photos, files, tax records, finances, projects, and so on? The answer is probably “a world of hurt.” Losing it could set you back personally and financially. Back up your data. I suggest doing so with a combination of a reputable cloud storage service and a local physical device like an external hard drive that you store in a safe location.
Another option for particularly sensitive data and files is use encrypted storage. For example, our File Lock feature allows you to create password-protected encrypted drives on your PC that only appear when you’ve unlocked them, perfect for storing sensitive files like tax returns and financial documents.
Having “The Talk” is your first step to a much safer life online
Sometimes asking the right question can set things in motion, and I hope that’s what this little talk does by helping you identify and patch up any gaps you find in your security. Go ahead and set aside some time to have “The Talk.” You and anyone you have it with will be safer for it.
Stay Updated
To stay updated on all things McAfee and for more resources on staying secure from home, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.
Quantum computing is the next frontier in computer science. It can bring untold benefits, allowing the development of new materials, tackling pandemics and making the world a greener, safer place. But it also threatens to break the encryption that keeps our data safe from prying eyes. France’s recent announcement to invest €1.8b into Europe’s quantum computing effort – on top of Germany’s two billion euros and the EU’s one billion euro quantum strategy – will help ensure Europe doesn’t miss the boat on what is set to become the cornerstone of innovation in the coming decades.
In short, quantum computing is an entirely new paradigm for making calculations on computers. Today, all computing relies on sequences of ones and zeroes to make increasingly complex calculations, culminating in the smartphones, cloud services and the supercomputers that exist today.
Quantum computing uses peculiar characteristics of physics to allow machines to perform complex algebra calculations in one fell swoop: “It would take ten thousand years to factor something on the fastest computer today, that could be minutes or seconds given a sufficiently powerful quantum computer,” said McAfee’s chief technology officer Steve Grobman on a recent podcast. “Think about it more as waves than binary,” added John King, a McAfee research fellow also on the podcast. “You reinforce the ones that you want, and dampen the ones that you don’t want,” he said.
To achieve these quirks of physics requires machines operating at temperatures colder than outer space, so it is unlikely that every person will have a quantum computer in their basement anytime soon. However, with the Internet and cloud computing, we will have the ability to harness the power of quantum computing remotely, just like data centres can be used from hundreds of kilometers away at the tap of a few buttons in a web browser today.
Nor is quantum computing always going to be superior to the well-developed binary technologies in place today, which are handsomely suited to making precise calculations. “Quantum computing is not well suited for general purpose computing, but for solving very specific math problems that are well suited to the quantum model,” said Grobman.
But the pattern-recognising abilities of quantum algorithms are uniquely well suited to complex problem. Think how to best distribute COVID-19 vaccines across populations, or even the world, or optimising global shipping networks leading to lower emissions from boats and planes.
On the flipside quantum is also, unfortunately, much better at breaking encryption algorithms than tradiditional computing power . Data that is considered secure today could be rendered public knowledge in the coming decade’s advances in quantum technology, with massive implications for company secrets and national security.
In the US and China, private and public actors are already pouring huge investments into quantum, and without considerable efforts, Europe exposes itself to gaping security holes, and missing out on harnessing the power of quantum to solve pressing problems such as climate change.
This is why France’s recent announcement is not just timely, but necessary, for Europe to continue charting a path of global success in the future. Today, the theory of quantum computers is way ahead of their actual capability. But in 10 years, it will be a different story, and given the scale of the challenge, acting now is of essence.
Making the most of quantum is not just about building the computers themselves. The entire paradigm of computer science is being upended. Europe is already facing a shortage of computer scientists, and its future computer science graduates must have the tools and knowledge needed to harness this new technology. This is why France is right to focusing funding not only on research and equipment, but also talent and skills to power this computer science revolution.
For McAfee, making the digital world safe is a top priority, and naturally our attention gravitates toward the opportunities and threats quantum computing poses to keeping data secure and safe.
But making the world a safer place isn’t just about preventing cyberattacks and encrypting valuable data. It’s equally about making the world greener and using the power of technology to solve our pressing societal and economic challenges. Quantum computing will play a key role in all these goals, provided the technology is in the right hands. Bad actors see the same opportunities in quantum to disrupt and bring chaos as we see in making the world a better place, and the only way to stymie their efforts is ensuring that Europe, along with the US and others determined to make the world a better place, stay one step ahead.