Wednesday 1 April 2020

Cyber Security Roundup for April 2020

A roundup of UK focused Cyber and Information Security News, Blog Posts, Reports and general Threat Intelligence from the previous calendar month, March 2020.

The UK went into lockdown in March due to the coronavirus pandemic, these are unprecedented and uncertain times. Unfortunately, cybercriminals are taking full advantage of this situation, both UK citizens and 
businesses have been hit with a wave of COVID-19 themed phishing emails, and scam social media and text messages (smishing). Which prompted warnings by the UK National Cyber Security Centre and UK Banks, and a crackdown by the UK Government.
Convincing COVID-19 Scam Text Message (Smishing)

I have not had the opportunity to analyse a copy of the above scam text message (smishing), but it looks like the weblink displayed is not as it appears. My guess is the link is not part of the gov.uk domain, but the attacker has used an international domain name homograph attack, namely using foreign font characters to disguise the true address of a malicious website that is linked.

I was privileged to be on The Telegraph Coronavirus Podcast on 31st March, where I was asked about the security of video messaging apps, a transcript of what I advised is here. Further coronavirus cybersecurity advice was posted on my blog, on working from home securely and to provide awareness of coronavirus themed message scams.  It was also great to see the UK payment card contactless limit increased from £30 to £45 to help prevent coronavirus spread.

March threat intelligence reports shone a light to the scale of the cybercriminal shift towards exploiting COVID-19 crisis for financial gains. Check Point Global Threat Index reported a spike in the registration of coronavirus themed domains names, stating more than 50% of these new domains are likely to be malicious in nature. Proofpoint reports for more 80% of the threat landscape is using coronavirus themes in some way.  There has been a series of hacking attempts directly against the World Health Organisation (WHO), from DNS hijacking to spread a malicious COVID-19 app to a rather weird plot to spread malware through a dodgy anit-virus solution

Away from the deluge of coronavirus cybersecurity news and threats, Virgin Media were found to have left a database open, which held thousands of customer records exposed, and T-Mobile's email vendor was hacked, resulting in the breach of their customers and employees personal data.  

International hotel chain Marriot reported 5.2 million guest details were stolen after an unnamed app used by guests was hacked. According to Marriots online breach notification, stolen data included guest name, address, email address, phone number, loyalty account number and point balances, employer, gender, birthdays (day and month only), airline loyalty program information, and hotel preferences. It was only on 30th November 2018 Marriott disclosed a breach of 383 million guestsTony Pepper, CEO at Egress said “Marriott International admitted that it has suffered another data breach, affecting up to 5.2 million people. This follows the well-documented data breach highlighted in November 2018 where the records of approximately 339 million guests were exposed in a catastrophic cybersecurity incident. Having already received an intention to fine from the ICO to the tune of £99m for that, Marriott will be more than aware of its responsibility to ensure that the information it shares and stores is appropriately protected. Not only does this news raise further concerns for Marriott, but it also serves as a reminder to all organisations that they must constantly be working to enhance their data security systems and protocols to avoid similar breaches. It will be interesting to see if further action is taken by the ICO”

Five billion records were found to be exposed by UK security company Elasticsearch.  Researchers also found an Amazon Web Services open MongoDB database of eight million European Union citizen retail sales records was left exposed, which included personal and financial information.  And Let’s Encrypt revoked over 3 million TLS certificates due to a bug which certification rechecking

March was another busy month for security updates, patch Tuesday saw Microsoft release fixes for 116 vulnerabilities and there was an out-of-band Microsoft fix for 'EternallDarkness' bug on 10th March, but a zero-day exploited vulnerability in Windows remained unpatched by the Seattle based software giants.  Adobe released a raft of security patches, as did Apple (over 30 patches), Google, Cisco, DrayTek, VMware, and Drupal.

Stay safe, safe home and watch for the scams.

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      1 comment:

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