There is a significant disconnect between security operations center (SOC) leaders and staff, which is reducing the effectiveness of these teams, according to a new report by Devo Technologies.

The study used insights from over 1000 cybersecurity professionals; 535 leaders (senior executives, vice president, director or manager) and 485 staff/practitioner level (supervisor, technician staff or contractor). Almost 60% of SOC workers gave low grades to their leaders for how well they communicate the SOC strategy to them, with 13% rating their bosses a two or lower on a 10-point scale. Additionally, more than 40% of these respondents said that lack of leadership or executive-level support was a major barrier to success.

This disconnect was highlighted by a significant variation in perceptions of how well SOCs are working between leaders and staff. For example, half of leaders rated their SOC as ‘highly effective’ compared to less than 40% of staff. In addition, over half (51%) of leaders said their SOC effectively mitigates risks after they are identified versus just 35% of staff.

Another worrying finding was that 45% of staff and 37% of leaders did not believe SOC objectives were aligned with business needs.

The report also showed that 72% of all respondents rated the ‘pain’ of their SOC analysts at seven or above on a 10-point scale. The biggest pain points highlighted were burnout (71%), information overload (70%), lack of visibility into the attack surface (67%) and being on call 24/7/365 (63%). Close to two-thirds (63%) of respondents added that on-the-job pain in the SOC has caused them to consider changing careers or leaving their jobs.

The main barriers to successfully operating the SOC were ranked as lack of visibility into the IT security infrastructure (70% of leaders and 58% of staff), silo issues between the organization’s IT security operations and the SOC (64% of leaders and 58% of staff) and lack of available analyst talent (53% of leaders and 51% of staff).

Gunter Ollmann, CSO of Devo, commented: “The growing perception gap over SOC efficiency between operational leaders and practitioners should be seen as a warning sign of simmering frustrations that can have implications on SOC efficacy and analyst retention.”

“Whether complacency or still navigating new modes of work and staffing in the past year, organizations can’t afford to stall in advancing their defenses against what is a growing onslaught of attacks. It would seem that, while they weathered a storm in the past few years, organizations need a leadership and resource ‘booster shot’ to keep building a better defense for what comes next.”

Security experts have warned that the Log4j vulnerability could still enable threat actors to launch attacks years from now, if security teams don’t up their game.

Forrester analyst, Allie Mellen, claimed the sheer scale and potential persistence of the threat was extremely worrying, and urged security teams to act now while awareness of the issue is high. 

“Log4Shell will be exploited for years because of its ubiquity. There are over three billion devices running Java, many of which are using Log4j. Getting every single one of these systems patched is no small feat, and requires a massive awareness campaign and guidance to developers on how to address this vulnerability,” she told Infosecurity.

“As we’ve seen with many vulnerabilities like Heartbleed and Shellshock, some systems and applications just fail to get updated, leaving a hole that attackers can exploit far after the public frenzy has died down.”

A patch for the Apache logging product has been released, but although the vulnerability has a CVSS score of 10, many organizations might struggle to find instances running in their environment.

That’s in part because of the multiple layers of dependencies that exist in enterprise Java environments, in the form of Java archive (JAR) files. Any one of these may be hiding Log4j to help them log data.

BH Consulting founder and Infosecurity Europe Hall of Fame inductee, Brian Honan, agreed that the vulnerability “is likely to be with us for a long time.” He warned organizations to be prepared for a “long drawn-out process” of identifying vulnerable products, waiting for and applying patches, and putting mitigations in place.

“The issue is that many vendors may not know to what extent they are using Log4j, what version of it they are using, or indeed if it is included with their product, as the library may have been included as part of an overall addition and the vendor may not have intended to feature it. In addition, developers may have slightly altered the code in the Log4j library to suit their applications’ particular requirements,” he told Infosecurity.

“All of the above makes it more difficult to determine if a product is vulnerable, as vendors will now have to review their code to determine how exposed they may be. If their products are exposed they will then have to develop a patch and ensure that is issued and applied by their customers.”

Current tooling may not be up to the task, warned Tanium area vice president, Chris Vaughan.

“One mistake that I’ve seen organizations make when going through this process of fixing the issue is that they are leaning too heavily on traditional vulnerability management tools,” he argued.

“These tools scan installed applications for any problems, but if a framework like Log4j has been renamed or installed in a non-default path then it’s likely that vulnerability management tools will miss them. For this reason, using a solution that analyses configuration strings within files is preferable.”

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published a new web page for vulnerability guidance and a community-sourced GitHub repository of publicly available information and vendor-supplied advisories about the incident. Both will be regularly updated, it said.

CISA director, Jen Easterly described the bug, also known as Log4Shell, as an “urgent challenge” and a “severe risk” for organizations. Federal agencies are mandated to patch or remediate it immediately and all enterprises are urged to do the same.  

HR software giant UKG has been hit with a ransomware attack which may take the organization weeks to recover from, potentially imperilling festive season pay packets.

The firm — whose workforce and HR management solutions power countless organizations including Unilever, Marriott, Sainsbury’s and Hermes — said it was struck last week.

“Late on Saturday, December 11, 2021, we became aware of unusual activity impacting UKG solutions using Kronos Private Cloud. We took immediate action to investigate and mitigate the issue, and have determined that this is a ransomware incident affecting the Kronos Private Cloud — the portion of our business where UKG Workforce Central, UKG TeleStaff, Healthcare Extensions, and Banking Scheduling Solutions are deployed,” said EVP Bob Hughes in a community post.

“At this time, we are not aware of an impact to UKG Pro, UKG Ready, UKG Dimensions, or any other UKG products or solutions, which are housed in separate environments and not in the Kronos Private Cloud.”

The firm is working with third-party security experts and has notified the authorities. However, the above Kronos Private Cloud solutions could remain unavailable for some time.

“Given that it may take up to several weeks to restore system availability, we strongly recommend that you evaluate and implement alternative business continuity protocols related to the affected UKG solutions,” Hughes concluded.

“Support is available via our UKG Kronos Community and via our UKG Customer Support Team to provide input on your business continuity plans.”

A series of angry customers took to the community page to ask for more information and complain about a lack of support and contingency planning on the part of UKG.

“For a company your size and for the data being handled, shouldn’t Kronos have a contingency plan in case this happened,” asked one.

“Where are the backups, can’t the backups be restored? Are the backups stored in the same ‘cloud/space’ as production, that doesn’t make sense? A few weeks to be back up and running is unacceptable.”

There have also been reports of payroll disruption among UKG clients, which, given the time of the year, will be a major blow to these companies and their employees.

European and US law enforcers have joined forces to arrest a suspected ransomware affiliate member who targeted firms in an IT supply chain attack.

Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) supported the FBI and Romanian National Police in making the arrest at the suspect’s home in Craiova, Romania, in the early hours of yesterday morning.

He’s suspected of targeting a large Romanian IT company that provides services to corporate customers in the retail, energy and utilities sectors.

The individual used this access to deploy crypto-ransomware and steal files from many of those customers located both in Romania and abroad, according to Europol.

Among the data was financial information, personal information on employees and customers, and other important documents.

Using classic double extortion techniques, he then threatened to publish the information on a data leak site unless a ransom was paid. It’s not clear, however, if each individual company was blackmailed or just the original IT provider.

EC3 said it provided analytical, cryptocurrency tracing, malware analysis and forensic support, and sent two experts to Romania to help with seizing cryptocurrency assets and carrying out forensic work.

In May last year, police swooped on a Romanian gang suspected of preparing to launch ransomware attacks on hospitals, with Locky or BadRabbit variants hidden in phishing emails, using COVID-19 information as a lure.

Just last month, Romanian police arrested two individuals suspected of involvement in an affiliate group associated with the infamous REvil gang.

Officers claimed they had been responsible for 5000 attacks which netted half a million euros.

“All these arrests follow the joint international law enforcement efforts of identification, wiretapping and seizure of some of the infrastructure used by Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware family, which is seen as the successor of GandCrab,” said Europol at the time.