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GoDaddy found crooks in its network, and kicked them out – but not before they’d been in there for six weeks.

The kingpin domain registrar has logged its fifth cyber-incident since 2018, after an attacker with a compromised password stole email addresses, SSH keys and database logins.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach! Saryu Nayyar, CEO at Gurucul, discusses concerning statistics about skyrocketing online fraud during the festive season.

Exploiting Microsoft Exchange ProxyLogon & ProxyShell vulnerabilities, attackers are malspamming replies in existing threads and slipping past malicious-email filters.

CloudLinux’s security platform for Linux-based websites and web servers contains a high-severity PHP deserialization bug.

I have long been annoyed that the word “crypto” has been co-opted by the blockchain people, and no longer refers to “cryptography.” I’m not the only one.

With the acceleration of cloud migration initiatives—partly arising the need to support a remote workforce during the pandemic and beyond—enterprises are finding that this transformation has introduced new operational complexities and security vulnerabilities. Among these are potential misconfigurations, poorly secured interfaces, Shadow IT (access to unauthorized applications), and an increasing number of connected devices and users. To navigate these challenges, enterprises are relying on managed service providers to monitor and protect their cloud environment.

To better serve its customers and secure its own environments, one global technology provider decided to expand its existing on-premises data loss protection (DLP) and web protection with a comprehensive and robust cloud security strategy based on solutions from the  MVISION portfolio of solutions. Already a long-time user of McAfee Enterprise on-premises solutions, the global technology provider not only secured its internal cloud infrastructure consisting of more than 5,000 endpoints across over 30 locations worldwide, they also applied the same approach to the millions of endpoints they manage for more than 10,000 customers.

Evolving a Modern Cloud Security Approach

A primary objective for the global technology provider is securing data in the cloud in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications (Microsoft Office 365, OneDrive, Salesforce, and others) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms (Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform).

As a first step in its cloud journey, the global technology provider evaluated a number of cloud access security brokers (CASB) solutions. Ultimately, they decided to implement MVISION Cloud for AWS, Office 365, and Shadow IT. In addition to providing comprehensive visibility into cloud app usage, these solutions help with compliance; data loss prevention (DLP) by monitoring the movement of sensitive and confidential data content traveling to or from the cloud, within the cloud, and cloud to cloud; and detection and remediation of threats primarily through user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA).

Moving to a Consolidated Cloud Security Fabric

But the global technology provider didn’t stop there. When we rolled out MVISION Unified Cloud Edge, the global technology provider tested it and enthusiastically adopted it. As defined by Gartner, MVISION Unified Cloud Edge is an industry-leading example of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), a security framework that brings together network connectivity and security into a single, cloud-delivered solution that supports business transformation, edge computing, and workforce mobility.

The global technology provider has reaped multiple advantages from this implementation across its own internal environment and for its customers.

Key advantage #1: Management ease and less overhead

MVISION Unified Cloud Edge combines multiple capabilities under one umbrella: CASB functionality with web proxy and DLP with a single administrative hub,  ePolicy Orchestrator® (ePO) for streamlined management.

MVISION Unified Cloud Edge capabilities and the ease of integration with the McAfee Enterprise ecosystem has made life easier for the global technology provider’s team, saving time and resources. Now they can set consistent policies from device to cloud and provide users with accelerated and secure access to the tools they use every day, such as Box, Dropbox, and others. As the information security operations manager points out: “A single management console reduces overhead as does being able to set policies that we can sync and apply to multiple data sources on multiple cloud solutions, without having to recreate rules.”

Key advantage #2: Data protection policies in the cloud

MVISION Unified Cloud Edge has also enabled the global technology provider to further boost its cloud data protection. For example, it can detect data that is improperly managed and stored. Now the organization can apply their existing on-premises data policies to the cloud. For example, they can prevent certain user behaviors that may put both corporate and customer cloud data at risk. These include copying data to cloud apps or USBs, printing it, taking screen captures, accessing risky websites, and uploading data to unauthorized websites.

Key advantage #3: Improved control over apps

To create a more secure internal environment, MVISION Unified Cloud Edge has been invaluable for the global security provider. They have a better handle on the applications that are being used across their company. The solution also provides risk scores for the cloud apps that are being used to help steer users away from Shadow IT and toward using only authorized apps. When employees propose new apps to help them do their jobs better, the IT security team can check the security of these apps against requirements and make any necessary modifications to ensure compliance.

“The Shadow IT CASB automatically blocks all cloud services that are deemed high risk, both at our on-premises Web Gateway and the built-in cloud web gateway manager. So, when users attempt to use an unsanctioned SaaS application, they see a message explaining that the app is not safe,” notes the information security operations manager.

The global technology provider also sells SaaS solutions to its clients. With MVISION Unified Cloud Edge, the global technology provider can protect data on any newly sanctioned SaaS applications at no extra cost.”

A resounding endorsement

After a successful experience with McAfee Enterprise overall and specifically with the implementation of MVISION Unified Cloud Edge, the information security operation manager recommends the solution to any organization beginning or in the midst of migrating to the cloud.

“I would advise other companies thinking about their cloud transformation journey to seriously consider MVISION Unified Cloud Edge . . . It has a very user-friendly interface and does so much out of the box,” he asserts. “The level of granularity in policy setting lets you do things you don’t think possible or are much easier to accomplish than you realize. . . I don’t think any other vendor offers such a complete package.”

The post Global Technology Provider Looks to MVISION Unified Cloud Edge appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

Cloud Security Gateways (CSGs) are one of the hottest and most sought-after technologies in the market today, driven by the adoption of cloud services for business transformation and the acceptance of hybrid workforce policies. CSGs, also commonly known as Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs), are responsible for enforcing security policies to protect cloud-hosted corporate assets from advanced threats, while enabling seamless and secure access to these assets from any location and device.  

We have witnessed an exponential growth in cloud usage in the past two years, primarily driven by remote workforce adoption. Based on the data collected by our research team from millions of connected McAfee Enterprise users across the globe, the overall usage of enterprise cloud services spiked by 50% across all industries, while the collaboration services witnessed an increase of up to 600% in usage. This led to an astonishing 630% increase in external attacks on the cloud accounts. Taking all these factors and trends into consideration, CSGs have become a highly essential element of any organization’s cloud security strategy, playing the most critical role for enabling data protection, threat prevention and compliance in the cloud. 

McAfee Enterprise continues to innovate in the cloud security space with a laser-focused strategy towards empowering our customers with the best-in-class cloud security solution. MVISION Cloud, recognized as the industry’s leading CSG solution, has become a vital part of enterprise security, allowing organizations to safely migrate to the cloud while protecting their “crown jewels” – the data. A huge testament to our cybersecurity vision is the IDC MarketScape Worldwide Cloud Security Gateways 2021 Vendor Assessment (Doc # US48334521, November 2021), and we are proud to announce that McAfee Enterprise has been recognized as a leader in the report. 

According to the report, “McAfee has a strong ecosystem of security solutions, including Secure Web Gateway, CSG, and endpoint security that it can integrate to enable customers in their data loss prevention, User Behavior Analytics, XDR, and threat prevention goals. McAfee has focused on providing robust protection and DLP, with the scale and speed necessary to support large user bases.” 

McAfee Enterprise’s multi-vector data protection capabilities go beyond the cloud to uniquely discover and protect sensitive assets on managed endpoints, in-network shares, and on-premises databases, enabling full scope of data protection from device-to-cloud. The industry-leading data protection and threat protection capabilities are tightly integrated with a unified policy framework that allows policy enforcement, data classification and incident management from a centralized console, reducing the cost and complexity of managing hybrid IT deployments, while improving the user experience. 

Figure 1: McAfee Enterprise Multi-Vector Data Protection 

MVISION Cloud is an integral component of our Unified Cloud Edge (UCE) solution, and together with McAfee Enterprise’s Next-Gen Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and MVISION Private Access (ZTNA) delivers the industry’s most comprehensive Security Services Edge (SSE) solution – the security element of the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework. With McAfee Enterprise’s DLP technology being the common denominator across all the core SSE components, organizations can seamlessly utilize a unified, data-centric framework for centralized visibility and control over their entire digital footprint, while riding on an accelerated path for digital transformation and workplace mobility. 

Figure 2: MVISION Unified Cloud Edge (UCE) 

Our mission towards building a unified security platform for protecting data from device-to-cloud and defending against advanced threats and adversaries has established McAfee Enterprise as a leader in cybersecurity across multiple forums, and the 2021 IDC MarketScape report is another distinguished feather in our decorated cap. 

The post McAfee Enterprise Continues to be a Leader in CASB and Cloud Security appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

The time to repurpose vulnerabilities into working exploits will be measured in hours and there’s nothing you can do about it… except patch

By Fred House

2021 is already being touted as one of the worst years on record with respect to the volume of zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in the wild. Some cite this as evidence of better detection by the industry while others credit improved disclosure by victims. Others will simply conclude that as the “upside” grows (e.g., REvil demanding $70M or Zerodium paying $2.5M for exploits) so too will the quantity and quality of players. But the scope of these exploitations, the diversity of targeted applications, and ultimately the consequences to organizations were notable as well. As we look to 2022, we expect these factors to drive an increase in the speed at which organizations respond.

If we look back at the past 12 months, we have seen notable breaches that highlight the need for organizations to improve response times:

ProxyLogon. When we first learned in 2020 that roughly 17,000 SolarWinds customers were compromised, many reacted in shock at the pure scope of the compromise. Unfortunately, 2021 brought its own notable increase in volume. Two weeks after Microsoft released a patch for ProxyLogon they reported that 30K Exchange servers were still vulnerable (less conservative estimates had the number at 60K).

ProxyShell. ProxyShell, a collection of three separate vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-31207, CVE-2021-34473 and CVE-2021-34523), was Exchange’s second major event of the year after ProxyLogon. In August, a Black Hat presentation outlining Exchange Server vulnerabilities was followed the next day by the release of an exploit POC, all of which had been patched by Microsoft months earlier in April/May. This analysis of data captured by Shodan one week after the exploit POC was released concluded that over 30K Exchange servers were still vulnerable, noting that the data may have underrepresented the full scope (i.e., Shodan hadn’t had time to scan the full Internet). In summary: patched in the Spring, exploited in the Fall. So, what happened in the interim you ask? The vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Client Access Service were exploited by threat actors who deployed web shells to execute arbitrary code on compromised mobile devices and web browsers.

vCenter Server. Another notable example occurred in May when VMWare released a patch for a remote code execution vulnerability in vCenter Server. This subsequent analysis concluded that over 4,000 systems remained vulnerable one week after the patch was released. Much like Exchange servers, where a typical company will only host a handful of servers, 4,000 vulnerable vCenter servers likely represents thousands of distinct companies.

Kaseya VSA. One bright spot may in fact be the Kaseya VSA breach. On July 2, REvil launched an unprecedented (anyone else tired of that word?) ransomware campaign against public facing VSA servers. Within two days the DIVD CSIRT reported that the number of exposed VSA servers had dropped from 2,200 to 140. Some estimates suggested that around 50 MSPs were compromised, affecting between 800 and 1500 business. While this doesn’t sound like much of a bright spot, patching 94% of the affected systems in two days surely helped reduce the success of REvil copycats.

So, what can we take away from all of this? Well, attackers and security researchers alike will continue to hone their craft until weaponized exploits and POCs are expected within hours of vulnerability disclosure. In turn however, and largely driven by the increased consequences of compromise, we can also expect renewed diligence around asset and patch management. From identifying public facing assets to quickly deploying patches despite potential business disruption, companies will have a renewed focus on reducing their “time to patch.”

Still not convinced? Well, the US government is. Checkout Binding Operational Directive 22-01 published on November 3^rd which compels all federal agencies to remediate known exploited vulnerabilities in two weeks or sooner “in the case of grave risk to the Federal Enterprise”. It’s no coincidence that CISA’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog, which catalogues the vulnerabilities that must be remediated, includes every one of our examples above with a two-week remediation deadline. If the US government can do it, you can too!

The post Zero Care About Zero Days appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

In August, KrebsOnSecurity warned that scammers were contacting people and asking them to unleash ransomware inside their employer’s network, in exchange for a percentage of any ransom amount paid by the victim company. This week, authorities in Nigeria arrested a suspect in connection with the scheme — a young man who said he was trying to save up money to help fund a new social network.

The brazen approach targeting disgruntled employees was first spotted by threat intelligence firm Abnormal Security, which described what happened after they adopted a fake persona and responded to the proposal in the screenshot above.

“According to this actor, he had originally intended to send his targets—all senior-level executives—phishing emails to compromise their accounts, but after that was unsuccessful, he pivoted to this ransomware pretext,” Abnormal’s Crane Hassold wrote.

Abnormal Security documented how it tied the email back to a Nigerian man who acknowledged he was trying to save up money to help fund a new social network he is building called Sociogram. In June 2021, the Nigerian government officially placed an indefinite ban on Twitter, restricting it from operating in Nigeria after the social media platform deleted tweets by the Nigerian president.

Reached via LinkedIn, Sociogram founder Oluwaseun Medayedupin asked to have his startup’s name removed from the story, although he did not respond to questions about whether there were any inaccuracies in Hassold’s report.

“Please don’t harm Sociogram’s reputation,” Medayedupin pleaded. “I beg you as a promising young man.”

After he deleted his LinkedIn profile, I received the following message through the “contact this domain holder” link at KrebsOnSecurity’s domain registrar [curiously, the date of that missive reads “Dec. 31, 1969.”]. Apparently, Mr. Krebson is a clout-chasing monger.

Mr. Krebson also heard from an investigator representing the Nigeria Finance CERT on behalf of the Central Bank Of Nigeria. While the Sociogram founder’s approach might seem amateurish to some, the financial community in Nigeria did not consider it a laughing matter.

On Friday, Nigerian police arrested Medayedupin. The investigator says formal charges will be levied against the defendant sometime this week.

KrebsOnSecurity spoke with a fraud investigator who is performing the forensic analysis of the devices seized from Medayedupin’s home. The investigator spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for his physical safety.

The investigator — we’ll call him “George” — said the 23-year-old Medayedupin lives with his extended family in an extremely impoverished home, and that the young man told investigators he’d just graduated from college but turned to cybercrime at first with ambitions of merely scamming the scammers.

George’s team confirmed that Medayedupin had around USD $2,000 to his name, which he’d recently stolen from a group of Nigerian fraudsters who were scamming people for gift cards. Apparently, he admitted to creating a phishing website that tricked a member of this group into providing access to the money they’d made from their scams.

Medayedupin reportedly told investigators that for almost a week after he started emailing his ransom-your-employer scheme, nobody took him up on the offer. But after his name appeared in the news media, he received thousands of inquiries from people interested in his idea.

George described Medayedupin as smart, a quick learner, and fairly dedicated to his work.

“He seems like he could be a fantastic [employee] for a company,” George said. “But there is no employment here, so he chose to do this.”

What’s interesting about this case — and indeed likely why anyone thought this guy worthy of arrest — is that the Nigerian authorities were fairly swift to take action when a domestic cybercriminal raised the specter of causing financial losses for its own banks.

After all, the majority of the cybercrime that originates from Africa — think romance scams, Business Email Compromise (BEC) fraud, and unemployment/pandemic loan fraud — does not target Nigerian citizens, nor does it harm African banks. On the contrary: This activity pumps a great deal of Western money into Nigeria.

How much money are we talking about? The financial losses from these scams dwarf other fraud categories — such as identity theft or credit card fraud. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), consumers and businesses reported more than $4.2 billion in losses tied to cybercrime in 2020, and BEC fraud and romance scams alone accounted for nearly 60 percent of those losses.

If the influx of a few billion US dollars into the Nigerian economy each year from cybercrime seems somehow insignificant, consider that (according to George) the average police officer in the country makes the equivalent of less than USD $100 a month.

Ronnie Tokazowski is a threat researcher at Agari, a security firm that has closely tracked many of the groups behind BEC scams. Tokazowski maintains he has been one of the more vocal proponents of the idea that trying to fight these problems by arresting those involved is something of a Sisyphean task, and that it makes way more sense to focus on changing the economic realities in places like Nigeria.

Nigeria has the world’s second-highest unemployment rate — rising from 27.1 percent in 2019 to 33 percent in 2020, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The nation also is among the world’s most corrupt, according to 2020 findings from Transparency International.

“Education is definitely one piece, as raising awareness is hands down the best way to get ahead of this,” Tokazowski said, in a June 2021 interview. “But we also need to think about ways to create more business opportunities there so that people who are doing this to put food on the table have more legitimate opportunities. Unfortunately, thanks to the level of corruption of government officials, there are a lot of cultural reasons that fighting this type of crime at the source is going to be difficult.”