Cybersecurity and risk management solutions company SureCloud has announced the appointment of Caren Havelock as its new chief marketing officer.

Havelock brings over 21 years of IT marketing experience to the newly created role at SureCloud, with a proven record of building and growing high-performing teams.

She previously led the EMEA marketing function at secure identity solutions firm Ping Identity. Prior to that, Havelock held senior marketing positions in cybersecurity with Symantec and CyberGuard.

Commenting on her appointment, Havelock said: “I’m delighted to be joining the SureCloud team on the eve of a pivotal chapter in the company’s growth. I’ve seen first-hand the security challenges present in an increasingly complex IT landscape. SureCloud is not only committed to overcoming these challenges for individual businesses, but revolutionizing the industry as a whole.”

Richard Hibbert, SureCloud CEO, added: “I am thrilled to have Caren’s talents at the company, and I am sure she will play a key role in our quest to becoming the go-to organization for subscription-based integrated risk management and tech-enabled cyber-services.”

Emotional intelligence is becoming an increasingly important skill for CISOs to master as their roles continue to broaden, according to a new study by F-Secure.

A series of interviews conducted with relatively small number of CISOs (28) from the US, UK and other European countries suggested that the role of CISO is no longer purely technical in nature. Two-thirds said they understood the growing importance of emotional intelligence in enabling them to understand, empathize and negotiate with people both inside and outside of their organization.

Additionally, three-quarters noted that their role has shifted to covering every aspect of technology being deployed in their organization, as opposed to focusing on network risk. This was particularly the case for CISOs working in healthcare, manufacturing and retail industries.

The report, entitled CISOs’ New Dawn also found that over half of those interviewed were experiencing an increase in responsibilities as a result of new privacy regulations. More than a third revealed they were considering leaving their position or changing professions, suggesting that the new landscape may be creating more stress and burnout for CISOs, which has previously been highlighted as a significant problem.

Encouragingly, most CISOs felt secure in their posts and 65% saw themselves as critical to their business.

Tim Orchard, executive vice-president, managed detection and response at F-Secure, commented: “Today, CISOs are expected to understand and mitigate a wide variety of risks, and then relay that information – regardless of how technical it is – to everyone, from boards and company employees to external security professionals, regulators and even law enforcement.

“The shift to relying more on ‘soft’ skills began years ago. However, the pandemic highlighted how CISOs that proactively work with people inside and outside their organizations can be leaders for their companies.”

One of the interviewees, Scott Goodhart, CISO Emeritus at the AES Corporation, said: “For companies, the technical aspects related to cybersecurity risks have become indistinguishable from other business risks. It just doesn’t make sense to treat attacks as only an IT or cybersecurity problem if they can potentially cost companies thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars due to downtime, extortion payoffs, stolen intellectual property, etc.

“In a way, technical-only CISOs have become a thing of the past and replaced by a role that’s explicitly relied on to address risk in a much broader, holistic way for organizations.”

Security experts are warning of a new COVID-19 vaccine phishing scam, this time using NHS-branded emails to trick users into handing over their personal and financial details.

The latest campaign informs recipients they have been selected for a jab based on family and medical history, using the trusted brand of the Health Service and the promise of protection from the deadly virus to socially engineer victims.

Information including name, date of birth and credit card details handed over by any unsuspecting recipients can then be sold on the dark web and/or used in follow-on fraud, according to Mimecast.

The email security company claimed that the threat actor behind the campaign has ramped up email volumes by 350% on their usual levels, to take advantage of widespread public awareness of the national NHS vaccination effort.

Head of e-crime at the vendor, Carl Wearn, argued that the pandemic is forcing organized crime groups to find new ways to make money.

“The majority of online scams rely on some form of human error, as it is far easier to compromise a single user than a whole system. Threat actors know this well and are continuing to exploit the human factor by tailoring scams to target current events and the fears of their victims,” he added.

“Cyber-criminals are clever and continuously adapting their tactics. Don’t click on suspicious links and never open unexpected email attachments. If you are concerned about whether vaccine information is legitimate, call your GP or take an independent route to check the website.”

The current campaign is just the latest in a long line of COVID-themed phishing threats. Early last year the majority were news updates spoofed to appear as if sent by official sources like the World Health Organization (WHO), but increasingly the focus today is on vaccine-themed campaigns.

In April last year, Google claimed to be blocking over 240 million COVID-themed spam messages each day, and 18 million malware and phishing emails.

YouTube has taken down almost 3000 channels and accounts deemed to part of separate Chinese and Russian state coordinated influence operations.

The vast majority of the work involved the removal of 2946 YouTube channels deemed to be part of a Chinese influence operation, according to Google’s Threat Analysis Group director, Shane Huntley.

“These channels mostly uploaded spammy content in Chinese about music, entertainment and lifestyle,” he explained in a TAG bulletin for Q1 2021. “A very small subset uploaded content in Chinese and English about the US response to COVID-19 and growing US political divisions.”

Much of the rest of the TAG’s work so far this quarter has been focused on Russia.

It includes the termination of three YouTube channels, two accounts and one mobile developer account as part of campaigns which uploaded content on US current events and political rallies held by opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

A further two channels and one advertising account were removed for uploading content about historical events in Afghanistan, Armenia and Ukraine, while five more channels published videos on the annexation of Crimea and the Syrian civil war.

Another channel was taken down for uploading content about current events in Ukraine, deemed to be part of coordinated influence operations.

All of these channels and accounts broadcast content in Russian, highlighting that the Kremlin’s attempts to influence public opinion focus not only on geopolitical foes but also its own people.

The Putin regime is particularly anxious about the influence of popular politician Navalny, who was recently jailed on trumped up charges after surviving an apparent state-backed assassination attempt, and returning to the motherland to face his tormenter.

Google also took action against a handful of channels and accounts run by governments and their proxies in Brazil, Morocco, Kyrgyzstan, Egypt and Ukraine which were deemed to be part of coordinated influence operations.

French software provider Centreon has hit back at a report from the country’s cybersecurity agency that its products were hijacked in a Russian cyber-campaign, claiming that no paying customers were affected.

The firm, which produces IT monitoring software not unlike SolarWinds, was at the center of a report from the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI) this week.

It claimed that the infamous Sandworm group, responsible for destructive attacks against Ukrainian energy providers in prior years, had targeted IT and web hosting firms from 2017 to 2020.

The group is said to have dropped a version of the P.A.S. web shell and the Exaramel backdoor Trojan to obtain remote control of “several Centreon servers exposed to the internet.”

However, in an update yesterday, the IT vendor clarified that the campaign only targeted legacy open source versions of its software, at around 15 organizations.

“The campaign described by ANSSI exclusively concerns obsolete versions of Centreon’s open source software. Indeed, the ANSSI specifies that the most recent version concerned by this campaign is version 2.5.2, released in November 2014,” it said.

“This version is not only no longer supported for more than five years, but has apparently also been deployed without respect for the security of servers and networks, including connections outside the entities concerned. Since this version, Centreon has released eight major versions.”

Centreon also made it clear that it had not been responsible for unwittingly distributing malicious code itself in a supply chain-style attack similar to SolarWinds.

As well as the BlackEnergy attacks in Ukraine, Sandworm has in the past been linked to cyber-espionage campaigns against NATO members and European governments in 2019. More relevant still were the attacks it launched against Exim email servers last year.

North Korea has attempted to hack into COVID-19 vaccine data from US pharma giant Pfizer, it has been claimed. As reported by the BBC, South Korea’s National Intelligence Agency has briefed law makers about the alleged cyber-attack, although it is unclear whether any data has been stolen.

Pfizer is one of several pharma companies that have developed and received approval for a vaccine designed to protect against coronavirus in recent months. However, the development and roll-out of vaccines have been extensively targeted by nation state actors determined to steal information or derail vaccine programs.

In November, Microsoft revealed that three state-sponsored threat groups from Russian and North Korea have been targeting seven companies developing COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. Additionally, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) recently suffered a cyber-attack following which a number of documents “related to COVID-19 medicines and vaccines belonging to third parties” were leaked online.

The latest incident highlights the constant threats being faced across the vaccine supply chain as countries rush to get their populations injected.

Commenting, Miles Tappin, VP of EMEA at ThreatConnect, said: “With coronavirus vaccines being rolled out worldwide, there should be a collective sigh of relief among all countries. However, over the last year there has been an evident increase in state actors using cyber-attacks for nation state and geopolitical gain, as seen with North Korea attempting to steal vaccine technology from US pharmaceutical company Pfizer.”

George Daglas, COO, Obrela Security Industries, stated: “The COVID-19 vaccine is currently one of the most desired assets on the planet, so it is not surprising it is considered a cyber-attack target. Pharmaceutical companies must take the necessary steps to protect not only their intellectual property but more importantly the vaccine production safety and their vaccine supply chain by enforcing rigorous cyber and physical security controls in every step of the production-supply lifecycle. It is also important for pharmaceutical companies to foster a security aware culture amongst their staff, to effectively reduce the attackers’ likelihood of success when targeting staff as an entry point in the organization.”

Infosecurity will be exploring this important topic in the upcoming webinar Securing the COVID-19 Vaccine & Supply Chain on March 30. Register for free now.