Ira Winkler, president of Secure Mentum, is both annoyed and disappointed about the state of cyber security landscape. He acknowledges that enterprises know there is an issue, and they are starting to address. But the piecemeal approach has resulted in a near predictable rate of breaches.
This is evidenced in the newest the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2020 which highlighted how cybercriminals’ techniques have evolved after decades of access to tens of billions of corporate and personal records and hundreds of thousands of software flaws. The report noted that 60% of initial entries into victims’ networks leveraged either previously stolen credentials or known software vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to rely less on deception to gain access.
Now why enterprises continue to pay top dollar for maintenance, or subscription, support if the software, on-prem or in the cloud, is so buggy? The CIO of a tobacco company in the US could not justify the 22% of original cost to license the software as annual maintenance fee.
But that’s a story for another time. Let’s go back to breaches.
The X-Force Threat Intelligence Index listed the top three initial attack vectors as:
Phishing was a successful initial infection vector in less than one-third of incidents (31%) observed, compared to half in 2018.
Scanning and exploitation of vulnerabilities resulted in 30% of observed incidents, compared to just 8% in 2018. Older, known vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office and Windows Server Message Block remain popular exploits in 2019. Are the patches not working or no one is patching?
The use of previously stolen credentials is gaining ground as a preferred point-of-entry 29% of the time in observed incidents. In 2019 more than 8.5 billion records were compromised — resulting in a 200% increase in exposed data reported year over year, adding to the growing number of stolen credentials that cybercriminals can use as their source material.
“Attackers won’t need to invest time to devise sophisticated ways into a business; they can deploy their attacks simply by using known entities, such as logging in with stolen credentials,” said Wendi Whitmore, vice president, IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence.
She suggested that protection measures, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO), are important for the cyber resilience of organizations and the protection and privacy of user data.
The other question is how many of organisations using both MFA and SSO have been hacked in 2019. Are they doing something wrong?
Other highlights
Failed configuration — Of the more than 8.5 billion breached records reported in 2019, seven billion of those, or over 85%, were due to misconfigured cloud servers and other improperly configured systems — a stark departure from 2018 when these records made up less than half of total records.
Are the misconfiguration screw-ups the responsibility of internal IT or the cloud service provider?
Banking on Ransomware — Some of the most active banking trojans found in this year’s report, such as TrickBot, were increasingly observed to set the stage for full-on ransomware attacks. Novel code used by banking trojans and ransomware topped the charts compared to other malware variants discussed in the report.
Tech Trust Takeover for Phishing — Tech, social media and content streaming household brands make up the “Top 10” spoofed brands that cyber attackers are impersonating in phishing attempts. This demonstrates the increasing trust put in technology providers over historically trusted retail and financial brands. Favourite brands in squatting schemes include Google, YouTube and Apple.
Ransomware Attacks Evolve — The report revealed trends in ransomware attacks worldwide, targeting both the public and private sectors. An uptick in ransomware activity was evident in 2019 across 13 different industries worldwide, reaffirming that these attacks are industry agnostic. There were significant attacks against retail, manufacturing and transportation — which are known to either hold a surplus of monetizable data or rely on outdated technology and, thus, face the vulnerability sprawl.
In 80% of observed ransomware attempts, attackers were exploiting Windows Server Message Block vulnerabilities, the same tactic used to propagate WannaCry across 150 countries in 2017.
Cost to business
With ransomware attacks costing organizations over US$7.5 billion in 2019, adversaries are reaping the rewards and have no incentive to slow down in 2020. In collaboration with Intezer, the report states that new malware code was observed in 45% of banking trojans and 36% of ransomware. This suggests that by creating new code attackers are continuing to invest in efforts to avoid detection.
There is a strong relationship between ransomware and banking trojans with the latter being used to open the door for targeted, high-stakes ransomware attacks, diversifying how ransomware is being deployed.
For example, the most active financial malware according to the report, TrickBot, is suspected of deploying Ryuk on enterprise networks, while various other banking trojans, such as QakBot, GootKit and Dridex are also diversifying to ransomware variants.
Social media – springboard for cybercriminals
As consumers become more aware of phishing emails, phishing tactics themselves are becoming more targeted.
Nearly 60% of the top 10 spoofed brands identified were Google and YouTube domains, while Apple (15%) and Amazon (12%) domains were also spoofed by attackers looking to steal users’ monetizable data. These brands were targeted primarily due to the monetizable data they hold.
Facebook, Instagram and Netflix also made the list of top 10 spoofed brands observed but at a significantly lower use rate. This may be due to the fact that these services don’t typically hold directly monetizable data. As attackers often bet on credential reuse to gain access to accounts with more lucrative payouts, It is suggested that frequent password reuse may be what potentially made these brands targets.
Students of human behaviour already know that humans have difficulty remembering passwords and despite the warning labels do not feel incentivize to create complex passwords and keep changing these frequently (more than once a year).
Discerning spoofed domains can be extremely difficult, which is exactly what attackers bet on. With nearly 10 billion accounts combined, the top 10 spoofed brands listed in the report offer attackers a wide target pool, increasing the likelihood that an unsuspecting user clicks an innocent-seeming link from a spoofed brand.
More bad news
Banks and consumers are not the only targets these days.
Retail are back as targets: Retail has jumped to the second most attacked industry in this year’s report, in a very close race with financial services which remained at the top for the fourth year in a row.
Magecart attacks are among the most prominent attacks observed against retail, impacting a reported 80 e-commerce sites in the summer of 2019.
Cybercriminals seem to have set their sights on consumers’ personal identifiable information (PII), payment card data and even valuable loyalty program information. Retailers also experienced a large amount of ransomware attacks.
Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Operational Technology (OT) attacks bonanza: In 2019, OT targeting increased 2000% year over year with more attacks on ICS and OT infrastructure than any of the prior three years.
Most observed attacks involved a combination of known vulnerabilities within SCADA and ICS hardware as well as password-spraying. Asia experienced the highest number of observed attacks as well as suffered the largest reported data losses over the past year, over 5 billion and 2 billion records exposed respectively.
So what now?
But all my discussions with security professionals at both enterprises and the vendor community suggests that we are in a state of escalating cyber security warfare. As vendors and the IT community work to create more secure infrastructure, criminal elements through platforms like the dark web are themselves upping the ante by investing in ways to attack old and new technology.
Afterall they are in the business of exploiting vulnerabilities. It’s just a matter of who does a better job of securing or de-securing (is that even a word?) the network.
