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Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Record-Setting DDoS Attacks, Data Breach Costs

Last week, researchers observed a 1.35 Tbps distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) attack targeting GitHub. It was the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, surpassing the 1.2 Tbps attack against DNS provider Dyn in October 2016.

The attack leveraged a newly observed reflection and amplification vector known as memcached. Akamai researchers warned that other organizations experienced similar DDoS attacks using the new method following the GitHub attack and that even larger attacks may be possible in the future.

“Memcached can have both UDP and TCP listeners and requires no authentication,” the researchers wrote. “Since UDP is easily spoofable, it makes this service vulnerable to use as a reflector. Worse, memcached can have an amplification factor of over 50,000, meaning a 203 byte request results in a 100 megabyte response.”

The attack was mitigated within 10 minutes, GitHub said. The following day GitHub was the target of a second DDoS attack that disrupted availability for a 15-minute period, ThousandEyes reported.

“Because of its ability to create such massive attacks, it is likely that attackers will adopt memcached reflection as a favorite tool rapidly,” Akamai researchers wrote. “The good news is that providers can rate limit traffic from source port 11211 and prevent traffic from entering and exiting their networks, but this will take time.”

Wired reported there are approximately 100,000 memcached servers that currently have no authentication protection and can be abused by malicious attackers to carry out similar potentially massive, botnet-free DDoS attacks.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

W-2 information breached: The University of Alaska said that 50 current and former employees and students had their personal information compromised when hackers gained access to their university accounts by answering security questions and resetting their passwords. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development is notifying employees that their W-2 information was compromised due to a spear phishing attack. Wallace Community College Selma said that current and former employees had their W-2 information compromised when an employee fell for a phishing scam. Curtis Lumber is notifying employees that their personal information was stolen in a spear phishing attack, and some of those employees have reported issues related to filing their federal taxes following the incident.
Ransomware infections continue: The Colorado Department of Transportation said that computers had been reinfected with ransomware eight days after an initial attack. Both the Children’s Aid Society of Oxford County and the Family and Children’s Services of Lanark, Leeds and Grenville in Canada were the victims of a ransomware infection. Jemison Internal Medicine is notifying 6,550 patients of a ransomware infection that may have compromised their personal information.
Payment card breaches and service disruptions: A number of Tim Hortons locations in Canada were temporarily shut down or were forced to close their drive-throughs after malware was discovered targeting Panasonic cash registers. NIS America said that customers of its online stores had their information compromised due to being redirected to a malicious site that would harvest their information during the checkout process. North 40 is notifying customers that their payment card information may have been compromised due to unauthorized access to its e-commerce website.
Notable data breaches: A hacker gained access to the intranet of Germany’s government and accessed confidential information. St. Peter’s Surgery and Endoscopy Center is notifying patients that their personal and medical information may have been compromised due to unauthorized access to its servers. Healthcare vendor FastHealth submitted a data breach notification regarding unauthorized access to its web server. Porsche Japan said that the information of customers was exposed due to a hack. Metro Wire Rope Corporation said that an employee email account was compromised after the employee opened a malicious attachment with credential-stealing capabilities. The French news magazine L’Express exposed a database containing the personal information of readers and after being notified of the exposure took a month to secure the data. U.S. Marine Corps Forces Reserve may have compromised the personal information of 21,426 individuals due to sending an unencrypted email with an attachment to the wrong email distribution list.
Other notable events: The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center said that one of its employees was successfully phished, and the compromised email account was used to send further phishing messages to other members, affiliates, and employees. The recent hack of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics that led to Internet disruptions and website downtime was a false-flag operation carried out by Russian military spies to make it appear as if the attack was carried out by North Korea, U.S. intelligence officials said. An Arkansas man who developed the remote-access Trojan NanoCore and marketed it on Hack Forums has been sentenced to 33 months in prison.

SurfWatch Labs collected data on many different companies tied to cybercrime over the past week. Some of the top trending targets are shown in the chart below.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

Equifax was back in the news this week after announcing it had discovered an additional 2.4 million U.S. consumers who were affected by its massive 2017 data breach, bringing the total number of people impacted to 147.9 million.

“This is not about newly discovered stolen data,” said Paulino do Rego Barros, Jr., Interim chief executive officer in a press release. “It’s about sifting through the previously identified stolen data, analyzing other information in our databases that was not taken by the attackers, and making connections that enabled us to identify additional individuals.”

The company also said that it expects breach-related costs to hit $275 million in 2018, which Reuters noted could make the Equifax breach the most costly hack in corporate history:

The projection, which was disclosed on a Friday morning earnings conference call, is on top of $164 million in pretax costs posted in the second half of 2017. That brings expected breach-related costs through the end of this year to $439 million, some $125 million of which Equifax said will be covered by insurance.

Those breach-related costs could rise further once legal actions from consumers and regulators are finally resolved. However, Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently stated that “Equifax is still making money off their own breach” and that even consumers who do not want to do business with them may end up buying credit protection services from another company who “very well may be using Equifax to do the back office part.”

It’s the same criticism she waged in January when introducing a bill with Sen. Mark Warner to address problems related to credit agencies collecting data without strict protections in place to secure that information. As CNET noted, if such a bill was in place at the time of the Equifax breach, the company likely would have faced a fine of at least $14.3 billion.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: More Payment Card Breaches and Dark Web Arrests

Payment card breaches were back in the news again this week as Forever 21 announced that it is investigating a point-of-sale breach (POS) at some of its stores, and several other organizations issued breach announcements related to stolen payment card data.

Forever 21 said that it received a report from a third party about potential unauthorized access to payment cards at some of the company’s stores, and the ongoing investigation is focusing on POS transactions made in stores between March 2017 and October 2017.

“Because of the encryption and tokenization solutions that Forever 21 implemented in 2015, it appears that only certain point of sale devices in some Forever 21 stores were affected when the encryption on those devices was not in operation,” the company wrote.

In addition, organizations continue to submit breach notification letters to various state attorneys general regarding the previously disclosed breach involving Sabre Hospitality Solutions SynXis Central Reservations system, including The Whitehall Hotel and JRK Hotel Group, both of which were impacted from August 10, 2016, through March 9, 2017. The Register also reported that Jewson Direct is notifying customers that their personal and payment card information may have been compromised due to the discovery of unauthorized code on its website. However, the company said the inclusion of card data in the notification was only “an advisory measure” as the investigation is ongoing.

The recent breaches, as well as other breaches such as Sonic, may have led to an increase in payment card fraud activity in the third quarter of 2017. Fraud activity is also expected to increase as consumers buy gift cards and other items over the holiday shopping season.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Organizations expose data: Researchers discovered a publicly exposed Apache Hive database belonging to ride-hailing company Fasten that contained the personal information of approximately one million users as well as detailed profiles of its drivers. A researcher said the Chinese drone maker DJI has exposed a variety of sensitive information via GitHub for up to four years, in addition to exposing customer information via insecure Amazon S3 buckets. Researchers discovered two insecure Amazon S3 buckets appearing to belong to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s commercial division, including information regarding production services and stock files. The Maine Office of Information Technology said that approximately 2,100 residents who receive foster care benefits had their personal information temporarily posted to a public website after an employee at contractor Knowledge Services uploaded a file containing their data to a free file-comparison website without realizing that the information would become publicly accessible. Dignity Health is notifying employees that some of their personal information was accidentally exposed to other employees.
Employee email accounts compromised: ClubSport San Ramon and Oakwood Athletic Club is notifying employees that their W2 and tax statements were sent to a malicious actor following a phishing attack impersonating an executive. ABM Industries Incorporated is notifying employees that their personal information may have been compromised due a phishing attack that led to multiple email accounts being compromised. Saris Cycling Group is notifying employees that their personal information may have been compromised due a phishing email that led to an employee email account being compromised.
Extortion-related attacks: The website of Cash Converters was hacked, and the actors behind the attack said they would release the data of thousands of UK consumers unless a ransom is paid. Little River Healthcare Central Texas is notifying patients of a ransomware attack that may have accessed their information and led to some data being irretrievably deleted when the clinic tried to restore the files. Far Niente Winery is notifying individuals of a ransomware attack that may have compromised their personal information.
Other notable incidents: A group associated with Anonymous hacked the email accounts of an employee of Italy’s Defence Ministry and a member of the Italian police and then published a variety of information allegedly obtained from those accounts. Officials from Catawba County, North Carolina, said that malware shut down a number of county servers and caused temporary interruptions in service, as well as a number of spam emails being sent to county residents. Gallagher NAC is notifying individuals that their personal information may have been compromised due to “a small amount of data” being stolen from a database between June 18 and September 19. CafeMom is notifying customers that email addresses and passwords used to create accounts prior to July 2011 were compromised “at some point in the past.” AppDirect said that a phisher has been impersonating members of the company’s human resources, recruiting, and sales teams on job sites, and several people have applied to those fake listings and received fake job offers.

SurfWatch Labs collected data on many different companies tied to cybercrime over the past week. Some of those “newly seen” targets, meaning they either appeared in SurfWatch Labs’ data for the first time or else reappeared after being absent for several weeks, are shown in the chart below.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

Dark Web markets continued to make headlines this week as a key player in AlphaBay’s operations was charged and cyber-attacks against other still-active dark web marketplaces temporarily disrupted operations.

Federal prosecutors allege that Ronald L. Wheeler III, of Streamwood, Illinois, worked as a spokesperson for the now-shuttered Dark Web marketplace AlphaBay. AlphaBay had grown to become the largest-ever Dark Web marketplace before it, along with the popular Hansa Market, were taken offline by law enforcement this past summer.

Wheeler is accused of working alongside Alexandre Cazes, a 25-year-old Canadian who was alleged to be the owner of AlphaBay known as “Alpha02.” Cazes reportedly committed suicide in his Thai jail cell a week after being arrested in July.

The Associated Press reported that Wheeler has pleaded not guilty to the AlphaBay-related charges, but prosecutors allege that he worked with Cazes using the name “Trappy” to moderate the AlphaBay forum on reddit, mediate sales disputes, and provide other non-technical assistance to users.

As SurfWatch Labs previously reported, the downfall of AlphaBay and Hansa Market elevated Dream Market to the temporary king of the Dark Web. However, Dream Market other popular markets have been the target of DDoS attacks over the past few weeks, making the sites difficult to access for some users. Those attacks can delay purchases beyond the already congested list of pending Bitcoin transactions, which is slowing down both legitimate and criminal transactions.

Prior to being seized, AlphaBay had grown to accept multiple payment options, including Ethereum and Monero; however, Dream Market still only accepts Bitcoin, and that restriction may help push some users towards other markets that have more, and quicker, payment options as the Dark Web marketplace continues to evolve in AlphaBay’s absence.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Spain-Catalonia Conflict Goes Digital, Russian Hacking Revealed

The Spanish government was the week’s top trending cybercrime target due to a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and other attacks that were orchestrated by the hacktivist group Anonymous.

The Anonymous’ campaign against the Spanish government comes on the heels of Catalonia’s recent referendum on independence. As Miguel-Anxo Murado wrote in The New York Review last month, the multi-year independence movement finally came to a head in October as secessionists ignored both a ban placed on the vote by the Spanish Constitutional Court as well as the threat of police action and voted for independence.

That vote led to “mayhem,” Murado wrote, resulting in almost nine hundred people being injured throughout Catalonia as Spanish police confronted protesters and stormed polling stations in order to seize the ballot boxes. On Sunday, Reuters reported that Spain had issued arrest warrants for ex-Catalonia leader Carles Puigdemont and four associates due to rebellion and sedition charges related to the push for recession.

The independence movement has also been accompanied by what one Washington Post editorial described as “The great Catalonian cyberwar of 2017.” According to the Post, Spanish courts and authorities have in the past few months ordered telecom companies to shut down websites pertaining to the vote and forced Google Play to remove an app related to the referendum.

Scattered cyber-attacks have occurred as the issue unfolded over the past couple months; however, attacks ramped up towards the end of October as Anonymous groups on Twitter and elsewhere urged others to join the #FreeCatalonia campaign, which resulted in numerous organizations being targeted with DDoS attacks, website defacements, and other low-level malicious activity.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Extortion attacks: TheDarkOverlord said it hacked the customer database of Hollywood production studio Line 204, and the group is threatening to leak the company’s internal client data, which includes contracts, files, invoices, and more. The group told media outlets that it will leak the data if it does not receive an unspecified ransom, a threat the group has made to numerous other hacked organizations. A malicious actor has released the personal information of 29 University of the Fraser Valley students and is threatening to release more data if the school does not pay a $30,000 ransom.
Data leaked: Information related to 46.2 million Malaysian mobile phone numbers that was taken from Malaysian telephone companies and mobile virtual network operators in 2014 has leaked, and the data appears to have been traded among multiple malicious actors. An unnamed third party contractor for government agencies, a bank, and a utility exposed the details of 48,270 Australian employees due to a publicly accessible Amazon S3 bucket.
Third-party-related breaches: Malicious actors used information apparently stolen in another breach to create Iowa Public Employees Retirement Systems accounts for individuals who had never created one, and they used those accounts to steal pension checks by redirecting them to different bank accounts. Kimberly-Clark is notifying a “small number” of customers that their personal information may have been compromised due to attacks that targeted registered accounts using a list of credentials leaked in other data breaches not related to the company. Midland County in Texas said a third-party payment system used to pay fines may have been compromised resulting in an undisclosed number of individuals having their payment card information stolen.
Other data breaches: North Korean hackers were likely behind an April 2016 hack of Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering that led to the theft of sensitive documents. Catholic Charities for the Diocese of Albany said that the personal information of clients and some employees was compromised due to hackers gaining access to a server. The certified public accountants Chiorini, Hunt & Jacobs are notifying customers that their personal information may have been compromised due to three email accounts being accessed. The Union Labor Life Insurance Company is notifying customers that their information may have been compromised when an unauthorized third-party briefly gained access to an employee’s email account and used that account to send spam messages that contained PDF documents with links to malicious sites.
Other notable incidents: Numerous art galleries confirmed they were targeted by business email compromise scams that hijacked email communications and requested payment details be changed in order to steal amounts up to £1 million. T-Mobile said it has called all of the few hundred customers targeted by malicious actors with attempts to “swap” the victims’ SIM cards and impersonate them. An unspecified cyber attack at the Oklahoma Corporate Commission led to its network being shut down for a week. A former University of Iowa student used keyloggers to steal credentials, access 250 student and faculty accounts, and then change his grades and access his exams early.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

The investigation into Russia’s alleged election-related hacking brought several new developments this past week.

For starters, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice department has identified at least six members of the Russian government connected to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hack, and evidence is being assembled to potentially bring official charges against those individuals next year. The WSJ said that dozens of others may have played a role in the hack; however, it is possible prosecutors may wait to identify some or all of those involved until Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into alleged Russian hacking is complete.

The Mueller investigation has already resulted in several indictments as well as a guilty plea for lying to the FBI from George Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign. The guilty plea has some overlap with the hacked emails, as court documents state that an overseas professor Papadopoulos met with multiple times “told him about the Russians possessing ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails.’”

A Sunday report from the Associated Press lays out the timeline of Russia’s hacking attempts, and that campaign appears to have begun with phishing emails sent to a list of email addresses tied to staffers of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign. Most of those emails bounced back, but one of those staffers who had also joined the 2016 campaign ended up clicking on multiple phishing links — possibly providing the attackers with a fresh batch of email addresses to target. More than a dozen democrats were ultimately hacked, including John Podesta. One of Podesta’s hacked emails was the first document published by Guccifer 2.0, although it was altered. Guccifer 2.0 airbrushed the word “CONFIDENTIAL” onto the document and claimed the document came from the DNC rather than Podesta in order to entice reporters.

APT28, the group tied to the hacks, had wide-reaching targets far beyond the U.S. election, the AP reported. The group targeted the gmail accounts of 4,700 users spread across 116 countries, including Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, U.S. defense contractors, and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin. In the U.S. the targets included diplomatic and military officials; defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, some republicans, and more than 130 democratic party workers.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: DDoS Attacks Hit Sweden, Researchers Warn of ROCA

The Swedish Transportation Administration and other related agencies were among the week’s top trending cybercrime targets due to a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that led to services being disrupted earlier this month.

The DDoS attacks against the Swedish Transportation Administration affected all of its web-based systems, including the IT system that manages train orders, the administration’s email system, Skype, and its website. Officials said the disruption, which led to the driving of trains manually, resulted in the stoppage and delays of some trains.

A spokesperson for the administration said (Swedish) that the DDoS attacks targeted its internet service providers, TDC and DGC; however, the attacks appeared designed to disrupt the administration’s services.

The following day saw additional DDoS attacks against the website of Sweden’s Transport Agency, as well as public transport operators Västtrafik in western Sweden, which briefly crashed the operator’s ticket booking app and online travel planner.

The incident follows warnings from various DDoS mitigation providers about DDoS attacks. CDNetworks – which surveyed organizations in the UK, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland – found that more than half of the organizations were hit by DDoS attacks in the past year. A10 Networks warned that the number of organizations experiencing an average DDoS attack over 50 Gbps has quadrupled in the past two years. In addition, Incapsula researchers recently warned of a new “pulse wave” DDoS attack that provides an “easy way” for attackers to double their attack output. A Neustar report also found that DDoS attacks are frequently accompanied by other malicious activity, such as viruses, malware, ransomware, and lost customer data.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Large data leaks: The Republican phone polling firm Victory Phones had 223 GB worth of data stolen in what appears to be an attack against an unsecured MongoDB database that occurred in January 2017. The incident exposed data on hundreds of thousands of Americans who submitted donations to political campaigns. A researcher has discovered the personal information of millions of South Africans among a large dump of other data breaches. The data includes 30 million unique South African ID numbers, about 2.2 valid email addresses, and other personal information. We Heart It announced a data breach affecting 8 million accounts created between 2008 and November 2013.
Payment card breaches: Pizza Hut is warning that customers who used the company’s website or mobile app to place an order during a 28-hour period in early October may have had their information compromised. The online e-commerce platform Spark Pay is notifying customers of a payment card breach involving merchant websites after discovering malicious code on a server. Citizens Financial Group is notifying customers of an ATM skimming incident that occurred at a Citizens Bank ATM located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Other data breaches: Microsoft’s internal database for tracking bugs was hacked in 2013 revealing descriptions of critical and unfixed vulnerabilities for widely used software such a Windows. Transamerica Retirement Solutions is notifying some customers that it discovered unauthorized access to their retirement plan online account information due to the use of compromised third-party user credentials. Officials said the cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb was targeted with phishing emails containing malware and that led to the personal and financial information of at least 30,000 users being exposed. Chase Brexton Health Care is notifying 16,000 patients of a breach due to a phishing attack that led to the compromise of four employee email accounts and the attackers rerouting the victims’ paychecks to a bank account under their control. Namaste Health Care in Missouri is notifying approximately 1,600 patients of a ransomware infection that may have led to the attacker accessing their information. Rivermend Health is notifying 1,300 patients that their personal information may have been compromised due to a breach of an employee’s email account.
Other notable events: The British TV production firm Mammoth Company was hacked by North Korean hackers after reports the company was creating a TV show about a British nuclear scientist taken prisoner in North Korea. The attack did not cause any harm, but it did cause widespread alarm, the BBC reported. Domino’s Australia said that it is investigating a potential issue with a former supplier’s system after a number of customers received unauthorized spam emails. A University of Kansas student was expelled after using a keylogger device to steal faculty credentials and change his grades.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

Researchers have discovered a vulnerability, dubbed “ROCA” (CVE-2017-15361), in the cryptographic smartcards, security tokens, and other secure hardware chips manufactured by Infineon Technologies AG, and that vulnerability could allow an attacker to calculate the private portion of an RSA key.

The vulnerability is due to the way the Infineon Trusted Platform Module firmware “mishandles RSA key generation, which makes it easier for attackers to defeat various cryptographic protection mechanisms via targeted attacks,” the CVE states.

Chips manufactured as early as 2012 are affected by the vulnerability, the researchers said.

“The currently confirmed number of vulnerable keys found is about 760,000 but possibly up to two to three magnitudes more are vulnerable,” the researchers said. “We found and analyzed vulnerable keys in various domains including electronic citizen documents, authentication tokens, trusted boot devices, software package signing, TLS/HTTPS keys and PGP.”

Researchers said that malicious actors could feasibly use what’s known as a “practical factorization attack” against key lengths of up to 2048 bits, and if the attack is improved it could be used against 4096-bit RSA keys in the future. According to the researchers, the time and complexity cost associated with selected key lengths are:

512 bit RSA keys – 2 CPU hours (the cost of $0.06);
1024 bit RSA keys – 97 CPU days (the cost of $40-$80);
2048 bit RSA keys – 140.8 CPU years (the cost of $20,000 – $40,000).

If a vulnerable key is found, organizations should contact their device vendor for further advice, the researchers said. Forbes reported that Fujitsu, Google, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft have all pushed out fixes for their relevant hardware and software. The researchers will present their full findings at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security later this month.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Charlottesville Sparks Hacktivism and Controversy

The politics surrounding the “Unite the Right” rally and its counter-protests in Charlottesville spilled over into the cyber world this week as hacktivists took action against websites and a debate emerged around the ethics of hosting white nationalist websites as well as doxing individuals who attended the rally.

Under the hashtag #OpDomesticTerrorism, hacktivists have urged DDoS attacks against white nationalist websites and posted leaks of some of those websites’ alleged members. In addition, the hacking group known as “New World Hackers” said it carried out a DDoS attack against the Charlottesville city website to “deliver our own version of justice to the KKK and government.”

Other individuals began to search through the many images of the “Unite the Right” rally in order to publicly identify those who attended the event. The man behind the Twitter account “Yes, You’re Racist” called on users to help identify the “nazis marching in #Charlottesville” so he could “make them famous.” However, not all the doxing attempts were accurate. For example, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas was wrongly identified and said he eventually had to call the police due to numerous threats being made against him and his wife as well as their home addresses being posted online. The man behind the Twitter account said he’s received death threats over the doxing as well.

Technology companies were also brought into the debate. GoDaddy, Google, Cloudflare, Zoho, Sendgrid, and Discord all cut services to the Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, USA Today reported. However, those actions led to a rebuke from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for private companies “decid[ing] who gets to speak and who doesn’t.”

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

HBO troubles continue: The hacking group OurMine temporarily hijacked several HBO social media accounts. In addition, the group of hackers that breached HBO in late July has continued to leak stolen episodes and other documents. Authorities also said that four current and former employees at Prime Focus Technologies, which handles Star India’s data, have been arrested on suspicion of leaking a Star India copy of the August 7 episode of Game of Thrones. Finally, a third-party vendor accidentally posted the August 20 episode of Game of Thrones on the HBO Nordic and HBO España platforms, and that episode was quickly pirated.

DDoS attacks make headlines: DDoS attacks against Blizzard disrupted services for several popular games, including Overwatch and World of Warcraft. The website of Ukraine’s national postal service Ukrposhta was the target of a two-day long DDoS attack that caused slowdowns and interruptions for the website and its services.

More ransomware infections: LG Electronics said that the self-service kiosks at some of its service centers were infected with ransomware, causing some access problems. The ransomware appears to have been identical to the WannaCry ransomware that made headlines in May, officials from the Korea Internet & Security Agency said. Pacific Alliance Medical Center said that a June 14 ransomware infection may have compromised the protected health information of patients.

Data inadvertently exposed: Voting machine supplier Election Systems & Software exposed the personal information of more than 1.8 million Illinois residents due to an insecure Amazon Web Services device. ES&S said the exposed server did not include “any ballot information or vote totals and were not in any way connected to Chicago’s voting or tabulation systems.” The Texas Association of School Boards notified some school district employees that a server containing their names and Social Security numbers “inadvertently became visible on the Internet.”

Other notable incidents: Surgical Dermatology Group in Alabama is notifying patients that their personal and healthcare information may have been compromised due to a breach at its cloud hosting and server management provider, TekLinks, Inc. City of Hope said that it is notifying patients that their medical information may have been compromised following an email phishing incident that led to four employee email accounts being compromised. OSHA has suspended access to its new Injury Tracking Application (ITA) after it was notified by the Department of Homeland Security of a potential breach of user information. The Scottish Parliament said it was the target of a brute force cyber-attack and members of parliament and staff with parliamentary email addresses were warned to make sure their passwords were as secure as possible. A former Columbia Sportswear information technology manager was charged with one count of computer fraud for allegedly accessing the company’s computer systems for more than two years after leaving the company.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

One of the week’s most notable advisories involved the software vendor NetSarang and a backdoor dubbed “ShadowPad” that was shipped out with a July version of the company’s products.

“Regretfully, the Build release of our full line of products on July 18, 2017 was unknowingly shipped with a backdoor, which had the potential to be exploited by its creator,” NetSarang said in a statement. “The fact that malicious groups and entities are utilizing commercial and legitimate software for illicit gain is an ever-growing concern and one that NetSarang, as well as others in the computer software industry, is taking very seriously.”

The issue was first discovered by a financial institution partner of Kaspersky Lab — which described the backdoor as “one of the largest known supply-chain attacks” — after discovering suspicious DNS requests originating on a system involved in the processing of financial transactions. Those requests were later discovered to be the result of a malicious module hidden inside a recent version of NetSarang software.

“If the attackers considered the system to be ‘interesting,’ the command server would reply and activate a fully-fledged backdoor platform that would silently deploy itself inside the attacked computer,” Kaspersky wrote. “After that, on command from the attackers, the backdoor platform would be able to download and execute further malicious code.”

That malicious module has been activated at least once in Hong Kong, but it is possible that other organizations have been infected, the researchers said. NetSarang said that the affected builds are Xmanager Enterprise 5.0 Build 1232, Xmanager 5.0 Build 1045, Xshell 5.0 Build 1322, Xftp 5.0 Build 1218, and Xlpd 5.0 Build 1220. Organizations using those builds should cease using the software until an update can be applied.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Banks Threatened with DDoS Attacks and Researchers Investigate NotPetya

South Korean financial institutions dominated the week’s top trending targets due to a series of extortion demands that have threatened distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks unless those institutions pay between 10 and 15 bitcoins ($24,000 to $36,000) in ransom each.

At least 27 financial institutions received the extortion demands from a group claiming to be the Armada Collective, including major banks, security companies, and the Korea Exchange, the Korea Joongang Daily reported. It is unclear if the group behind the threats is associated with the real Armada Collective, or if it is yet another group that is attempting to leverage the popular extortionists identity in order to gain credibility. In early 2016, a group was able to successfully extort more than $100,000 by threatening DDoS attacks under the Armada Collective name — but researchers concluded that specific threat was empty and the group never actually carried out any attacks — despite being profitable.

According to The Korea Times, the group carried out a small attack last Monday on the Korea Financial Telecommunications & Clearings Institute (KFTC), Suhyup Bank, DGB Daegu Bank, and JB Bank — with a promise of more powerful attacks to come in the future if the institutions do not pay their ransoms by the July 3 deadline. The DDoS attacks did not disrupt any services, the Times reported, and the small DDoS attack against KFTC last Monday lasted for only 16 minutes. Previous extortion campaigns have seen groups using a similar tactic of small DDoS attacks to prove they have some capability and lend credibility to their threats; however, the full capabilities of the group behind the most recent demands is unclear.

It is possible that the group is simply looking for easy blackmail targets following the recent $1.1 million dollar ransom payment that was made by South Korean web hosting firm Nayana. Researchers had previously speculated that the large ransom payment could lead to more South Korean organizations being targeted.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Attackers target government: Dozens of email accounts belonging to members of parliament and peers were breached during “a sustained and determined attack on all parliamentary user accounts in an attempt to identify weak passwords.” A hacker going by the name “Vigilance” said that he gained access to 23 state of Minnesota databases and was able to steal 1,400 email addresses and some corresponding “weakly encrypted” passwords. The hacker then published the information in protest of the police officer charged with killing Philando Castile being found not guilty. Multiple government websites were defaced with pro-ISIS propaganda and a logo saying the hack was carried out by “Team System DZ.”

Organizations expose more data: The personal information of 2,200 Aetna customers in Ohio and Texas was compromised due to their data being “inappropriately available for a period of time.” Corpus Christi Independent School District said that it is notifying 6,100 individuals that employee names and Social Security numbers from late 2016 through early 2017 were inadvertently made visible online. The Campbell River School District is warning parents and guardians of Timberline Secondary students that their personal information may have been “inappropriately accessed” due to a file being left on a shared drive that students and staff could access. Users of the UK government’s data dashboard, data.gov.uk, were asked to change their passwords after a file containing their names, email addresses, and hashed passwords was left publicly accessible on a third-party system.

Disgruntled employees harm employers: A Pennsylvania man has been sentenced to one year and one day in prison for hacking and damaging the IT networks of several water utility providers across the U.S. East Coast. A disgruntled employee led to a breach of Professional Counseling and Medical Associates’ electronic health records system. The FBI said a former employee of Transformations Autism Treatment Center tried to hack into the company’s computer system and steal the personal information of autistic children.

Other notable incidents: Internet radio service 8tracks said that a copy of its user database has been leaked, including usernames, email addresses, and SHA1-hashed passwords. The full leaked dataset includes around 18 million accounts. Information security consultant Paul Moore reported a data breach involving Kerv after he received both an email from an “anonymous” Kerv user that “had inside information which wouldn’t otherwise be available” and admin credentials from a Tor address. Acting State Supreme Court Justice Lori Sattler told police that she was scammed out of $1,057,500 when she responded to an email impersonating her real estate lawyer and wired the money to an account at the Commerce Bank of China. Two men who are suspected to be part of an international group that hacked into Microsoft’s network in early 2017 have been arrested by British police.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

One of the biggest stories that occurred last week was the spread of a ransomware/wiper malware known as NotPetya.

The outbreak was similar to May’s quick spread of the WannaCry ransomware, and those that were infected across the Ukraine, the UK, the Netherlands, India, Spain, Denmark, and elsewhere were shown a ransom demand asking for $300 in bitcoin along with contact details. However, various researchers quickly concluded that the intention behind the attack was likely disruption, not monetary gain.

Previous versions of similar ransomware like Petya used a personal infection ID that contained crucial information for the key recovery, Kaspersky explained in its analysis. However, the NotPetya malware uses randomly generated data in place of that personal key. That means that the attackers have little hope of actually recovering their data, even if they wanted to do so.

As Ars Technica noted, other researchers have come to similar conclusions about NotPetya. Matt Suiche of Comae Technologies concluded that the ransomware aspect of NotPetya may a have been a front to push the media narrative towards the attacker being an unknown cybercriminal group rather than a nation-state attacker with data destruction in mind.

The head of the Center for Cyber Protection within Ukraine’s State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection agreed with that assessment, saying “I think this [NotPetya malware] was directed at us” and that the event was definitely not a criminal attack, but likely a state-sponsored one carrying over from Ukraine’s ongoing cyberwar with Russia. That theory is not confirmed, but as SurfWatch Labs noted, “strong evidence points to the attack beginning with the hacking of the Ukrainian accounting software MeDoc where the automatic update feature was used to download the worm.”

Ukraine’s security service SBU announced that a number of international organizations are helping to investigate the NotPetya attacks and identify the culprits, so more information about the attacks will likely be announced in the near future.

Fake Extortion Demands and Empty Threats on the Rise

I’ve previously written about the rise of extortion as an emerging trend for 2017, but if you didn’t want to take my word for it, you should have listened to the numerous warnings shared at this year’s RSA 2017. Cyber-extortion has become one of the primary cybersecurity-related issues facing organizations — and it appears to be here to stay.

My analyst team has researched cyber extortion and have found that malicious actors are not only engaging in these threat tactics, but they’re using the surging popularity of extortion and ransomware to target organizations with a variety of fake extortion demands and empty threats. We cover this topic in depth in our latest report, The Extortion Epidemic: Fake Threats on the Rise as Ransoms and Blackmail Gain Popularity.

In the graphic below I’ve noted some popular extortion threats, how actors carry out the threats and the impending results. Essentially they’re following the path of least resistance and most profit.

The Many Faces of Extortion: Popular Threats

2017-02-28_extortionittbyyearupdated — The number of organizations publicly associated with ransom and extortion continues to grow, and 2017 is on pace to see the highest number yet, based on data from the first two months of the year.

The gist of it all is that organizations have real fear around these threats and trust that bad actors have the ability to carry out these threats. Putting trust in bad guys is a bad idea!

The fake ransoms are successful in large part because their real counterparts have impacted so many organizations. We’re already on pace to have more organizations publicly tied to ransoms and extortion in 2017 than any other year.

FBI officials have estimated the single subset of extortion known as ransomware to be a billion-dollar-a-year business, and fake ransomware threats have sprung up in the wake of that growth. A November 2016 survey of large UK businesses found that more than 40 percent had been contacted by cybercriminals claiming a fake ransomware infection. Surprisingly, two-thirds of those contacted reportedly paid the “bluff” ransom.

DDoS extortion threats are similarly low-effort cybercriminal campaigns, requiring only the sending of a threatening email. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that extortionists using the name “Armada Collective” had threatened Taiwanese brokerages with DDoS threats. Several of the brokerages experienced legitimate attacks following the threats; however, 2016 saw several campaigns leveraging the Armada Collective name where the threats were completely empty. One campaign generated over $100,000 in payments despite researchers not finding a single incident where a DDoS attack was actually made.

A portion of the extortion email sent to the owner of Alpha Bookkeeping Services in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in September 2016.

Extortion is also frequently tied to data breaches — both real and fake — as it is an another simple and direct avenue for cybercriminals to monetize stolen data. In January 2017 the E-Sports Entertainment Association (ESEA) was breached and the actor demanded a ransom payment of $100,000 to not release or sell the information on 1.5 million players.

ESEA said in its breach announcement that it did not pay the ransom because “paying any amount of money would not have provided any guarantees to our users as to what would happen with their stolen data.”

That is what reportedly happened to many of the victims who paid ransoms to have their hijacked MongoDB and other databases restored: they found themselves out both the data and the ransom payment. As noted in our report, it’s hard to have faith in cybercriminals, and organizations who do pay ransoms should be aware that in many cases those actors may not follow through after receiving extortion payments.

For more information on extortion threats and how to keep your organization safe, download the free report: The Extortion Epidemic: Fake Threats on the Rise as Ransoms and Blackmail Gain Popularity.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: DDoS Attacks Disrupt Services and SEC Probes Yahoo

A series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against financial institutions led to customers of Lloyds Banking Group experiencing intermittent outages over a 48-hour period and was the top trending cybercrime event over the past week.

The Guardian reported that the attacks hit Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland from January 11 to January 13. IBTimes reported that other unnamed lenders were targeted, but experienced no down time. Motherboard spoke to a hacker who claimed to be behind the attack and allegedly tried to ransom Lloyds over the incident. However, Lloyds issued a statement saying it was able to provide normal service for “the vast majority” of customers and that “only a small number” experienced any issues during the attack.

In other DDoS news, the ticketing systems for the Sundance Film Festival were taken offline due to a cyber-attack on January 21. “We have been subject to a cyberattack that has shut down our box office,” the festival tweeted. “Our artist’s voices will be heard and the show will go on.” According to The Hollywood Reporter, “although the festival was able to get its ticketing systems back online within an hour of the Saturday breach, multiple other denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Sundance’s IT infrastructure followed.”

Finally, the Korea Internet & Security Agency recently issued a report echoing concerns shared by other security professionals, including SurfWatch Labs Adam Meyer: expect DDoS attacks leveraging Internet-of-Things devices to rise in 2017. South Korea has recently faced political turmoil, and in December the country’s Constitutional Court began its first hearings on the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. The agency report predicted that DDoS attacks may occur against key government agencies and social infrastructure-related facilities with the goal of stirring the political and social instability brought on by the impeachment proceedings and potential upcoming election. According to SurfWatch Labs’ data, government was the third highest trending sector related to DDoS attacks in 2016, behind only information technology and consumer goods.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Another year of W-2 breaches begins: Approximately 1,400 Campbell County Health employees had their W-2 information stolen when an employee fell for a phishing email impersonating a hospital executive. Eight Missouri school districts were targeted with identical phishing messages impersonating the superintendent and requesting employee W-2 information, and an employee at the Odessa School District fell for the scam and forwarded the information. The Argyle Independent School District in Texas and the Tipton County School District also reported breaches due to similar phishing emails.

Media outlets hit with political attacks: The Twitter accounts of BBC Northampton and The New York Times video were both hijacked and used to spread fake messages saying that President Donald Trump was injured in the arm by gunfire at his inauguration and that Russia was planning to attack the U.S. with missiles. Crescent Hill Radio WCHQ said its FM feed was hacked and a song titled “Fuck Donald Trump” was played on repeat for 15 minutes before the station could shut down the broadcast.

Exposed databases reveal sensitive data: Security researchers have found nearly 400,000 audio recordings belonging to VICI Marketing exposed to the Internet, and as many as 17,649 of those recordings include customer payment card numbers and private customer information. The other 375,368 audio recordings are “cold calls,” some of which contain personal information. A misconfigured database used by The Candid Board, a subscription website dedicated to images and video of women who appear unaware they are being recorded, led to the leak more than 178,000 members’ information. The source also said that he or she is in possession of “a large chunk of data from multiple boards operated by this group,” which IBTimes explained was in reference to another leaked database holding tens of thousands of records from a website called NonNudeGirls.

Arrests and charges: A former employee of First Niagara call center admitted to using his position to steal callers’ personal information and then using that information to transfer $15,492.59 from customer accounts to his own. An IT worker employed by the New York Police Department accessed personnel files of police officers and then attempted to sell that information to an undercover informant. A 32-year old Russian programmer suspected of developing the NeverQuest banking Trojan was arrested in Barcelona, according to Spanish authorities.

Other cybercrime announcements: A hacker gained access to a server for the National Aids Research Institute in India and was able to access an archive containing the results of dozens of HIV tests. Malware was found on computers at 21 locations of Bowlmor AMF, the world’s largest bowling center operator, leading to a point-of-sale breach. Cockrell Hill Police Department in Texas lost some digital videos and documents dating back to 2009 after ransomware encrypted the departments files and those encrypted files were then saved to the automatic backup system. Other breach announcements include the South Washington County School district in Minnesota, MultiCare Health System, Ohio State Veterinary Medical Center at Dublin, Catholic Charities of Baltimore, and Wisconsin Democratic Party websites.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

The fallout over two massive data breaches at Yahoo continued this past week as it was reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) opened an investigation into the timeline of Yahoo’s data breach disclosure and that the sale of Yahoo’s main web operations to Verizon has been delayed until the next quarter.

Sources told The Wall Street Journal that the SEC issued a request for documents from Yahoo in December and is looking into whether Yahoo’s breach disclosures may have violated civil securities laws. The investigation will likely focus on Yahoo’s 2014 data breach affecting 500 million users, which was announced in September 2016. Yahoo is said to have linked the 2014 breach to state-sponsored actors two years before the public disclosure. In December 2016 Yahoo disclosed a separate breach affecting more than one billion users.

The SEC has never brought a case against a company for failing to disclose a data breach, the Wall Street Journal reported, but experts said the SEC has been looking for a case to clarify guidance issued in 2011. That guidance requires the disclosure of material information about cybersecurity risks and incidents if it could affect investors, but what is “material” is still a question – a question that this case may potentially help answer.

Those two data breaches have led to speculation over the past few months of how they may impact Verizon Communication’s acquisition of Yahoo, which was valued at $4.83 billion last July. Yahoo said it is “working expeditiously” to finish the deal; nevertheless, the sale has been pushed back until next quarter.

“Yahoo has been an interesting process,” Verizon Chief Financial Officer Matt Ellis said in an interview last Tuesday with Bloomberg. “There’s been good progress, but we are still awaiting the final reports and therefore we haven’t reached any conclusions yet.”

2017 Cyber Forecast: The IoT Problem is Going to Get Worse

The new year is underway, and one of the biggest causes of concern carrying over into 2017 is the threat posed by the growing number of compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. As I stated in my previous cyber forecast blog on extortion, I prefer to base my “predictions” around actual intelligence and verifiable data. IoT-related security threats have been talked about for the past few years, but they have been relegated to the periphery of the cybercrime conversation due to the fact there wasn’t much threat data around real-world attacks. However, the second half of 2016 saw those concerns move front-and-center due to a series of incidents tied to the Mirai botnet:

In September, both KrebsOnSecurity and French hosting provider OVH were hit with massive DDoS attacks, reportedly hitting 620 Gbps attack and 1 Tbps in size.
Those attacks were quickly tied the Mirai botnet, the source code of which was subsequently released by a user on Hackforums.
A few weeks after the source code went public, DNS provider Dyn was hit with what appears to have been an even larger DDoS attack – causing major sites such as Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify and others to be disrupted across the U.S. and Europe.

Those attacks will certainly lead to increased scrutiny within the IoT marketplace both now and in the future, but in the meantime cybercriminals are focusing their attention on finding new ways to leverage the numerous vulnerable IoT devices for their own malicious purposes. The past few months have seen various hacking groups fighting to take control over their share of those compromised devices, as well as companies such as Deutsche Telekom and others suffering outages as those groups tried to expand their botnets by attempting to infect customers’ routers with Mirai. One group has even been observed selling IoT-powered DDoS services that claim to provide as much as 700 Gbps in traffic.

All of that activity has led to one of the clearest trends in SurfWatch Labs’ data over the past few months: an enormous rise in threat intelligence surrounding the “service interruption” category.

serviceinterruption_cfs — This chart from SurfWatch Labs’ 2016 Cyber Threat Trends Report shows a sharp increase in the amount of threat intelligence related to the service interruption category in Q4 2016.

“Over the past two years, the ‘service interruption’ tag has typically appeared in approximately 16% of the negative CyberFacts collected by SurfWatch Labs,” SurfWatch Labs noted in its annual cyber trends report, Rise of IoT Botnets Showcases Cybercriminals’ Ability to Find New Avenues of Attack. “However, that number jumped to more than 42% over the last half of the year due to growing concern around IoT-powered botnets such as Mirai.”

The problem of botnets powered by compromised IoT devices goes beyond just service interruption. It reflects many of the larger cybersecurity issues facing organizations in 2017:

an expanding number of vulnerable devices
the problem of default or easy-to-guess credentials
the difficulty of identifying vulnerabilities and patching them in a timely manner
questions of who along the supply chain is responsible for security
and issues outside your organization’s direct control that impact your cyber risk

Compromised IoT devices are a perfect example of the interconnectedness of cybercrime and how the poor security of one component by one manufacturer can led to hundreds of thousands of devices being vulnerable.

The sudden surge in concern around IoT devices reminds me of similar cyber risk discussions that have occurred around ICS/SCADA over the last few years. In both cases, the devices were often designed without cybersecurity in mind and those cybersecurity implications are now leading to serious potential consequences. However, unlike ICS/SCADA devices, IoT devices are primarily consumer focused. As we noted in the 2016 Cyber Trends Report, the potential of having multiple devices per household for any developed nation means that collectively these vulnerable devices are the largest digital footprint in the world not under proper security management.

DDoS attacks have always been a staple of cybercrime, but the expanding number of potentially compromised devices, along with cybercriminal tools designed to easily exploit those devices, has created growing concern around the tactic. Due to these concerns, I forecast with moderate confidence that IoT-driven botnets will affect a greater number organizations in 2017 as suppliers, manufacturers, regulators and the security community all continue to wrestle with this ongoing issue.

Weekly Cyber Risk Roundup: Another Botnet and the Gamification of Cybercrime

Botnets were once again front-and-center this past week as new developments were announced by security researchers, malicious actors and government officials.

To start, CloudFlare observed a ten-day long series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that have generated as much as 400 Gbps in traffic, sparking fears of yet another massive botnet that can disrupt organizations. The attacks “are not coming from the much talked about Mirai botnet,” the researchers wrote. “They are using different attack software and are sending very large L3/L4 floods aimed at the TCP protocol.”

Following that announcement, the hacker known as BestBuy, who had previously begun advertising a Marai-based DDoS service, claimed to have taken control of 3.2 million routers. He told Motherboard that a server he set up automatically connects to vulnerable routers and pushes a malicious firmware update to them. “They are ours, even after reboot. They will not accept any new firmware from [Internet Service Provider] or anyone, and connect back to us every time :),” he said in an online chat. “Bots that cannot die until u throw device into the trash.”

If true, those developments are certainly worrisome for organizations like Deutsche Telecom, the UK Postal Office, TalkTalk, and Kcom ISP – all of which have seen customer outages due to attempted Marai infections – not to mention the businesses that may be targeted with DDoS attacks from all those compromised devices.

One piece of good news on the botnet front: the cybercriminal network known as Avalanche was dismantled in what authorities are describing as the largest-ever use of sinkholing to combat botnet infrastructures. Europol said that the four-year investigation with global partners resulted in over 800,000 domains being seized, sinkholed or blocked. Although exact calculations are difficult, monetary losses associated with attacks conducted over the Avalanche network are estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.

Other trending cybercrime events from the week include:

Massive thefts announced: Technical trade secrets were stolen from ThyssenKrupp, one of the world’s largest steel makers, in what the company described as a “massive cyber attack.” The theft occurred at the steel production and manufacturing plant design divisions, the company said. Two billion rubles ($31 million) was stolen from banking clients that hold accounts at Russia’s central bank, according to a bank spokesperson. The hackers attempted to steal approximately five billion rubles, but the bank managed to recover some of the money. Reuters reported that hackers broke into accounts at the bank by faking a client’s credentials, citing a report issued by the bank.

Ransomware updates: The ransomware attack that affected about 900 computers at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency cost the agency an estimated $50,000 in lost fares due to passengers being unable to pay. Ransomware behind the infection that caused an NHS hospital trust to shut down systems and cancel 2,800 patient appointments in early November has been confirmed as Globe2. Allegheny County district attorney Stephen Zappala Jr. admitted that his office was hit in January 2015 and that the office paid nearly $1,400 in ransom. The announcement came after several victims of the Avalanche network were revealed via court documents.

Malicious insiders face consequences: A former computer support technician employed at Experian subsidiary Hotwire.com pleaded guilty to accessing the emails of executives and using that non-public information to illegally profit from trading Expedia stock. The man accessed documents and emails on the devices of the Chief Financial Officer and the Head of Investor Relations. A former employee of Internet service provider Pa Online was sentenced to 24 months in prison and ordered to pay $26,000 in restitution for hacking into Pa Online’s network after being fired and installing malware that caused files and directories to be erased and the network to crash.

Third-party breaches: More than 43,000 Indian patient pathology reports, including those of HIV patients, were left publicly exposed by Health Solutions. Security researcher Troy Hunt said the information is now removed from public view after a lengthy process to track down and motivate those behind the leak and that the incident appears to be the result of shockingly poor security. A breach of a contractor’s email account exposed the information of individuals who participated in the U.S. Olympic Committee’s 100-Days Out event in April 2016. Members of the Scotland Supporters Club were sent phishing emails from the Scottish Football Association’s official email account after a third-party email database was compromised.

Other data breaches: An Intranet server for South Korea’s cyber command was contaminated with malware, and the attack appears to have come from North Korea, the South Korean military said. An official said that some military documents had been hacked, including confidential information, but that they have yet to determine the full extent of the leak. Around 420,000 customers may have had their personal information leaked due to a data breach at an online store run by IPSA, a subsidiary of Japanese cosmetics maker Shiseido. A University of Wisconsin–Madison law school database was breached, resulting in 1,213 applicants having their names and Social Security numbers compromised.

Cyber Risk Trends From the Past Week

One of the more interesting developments over the past week is the new tactics being used by malicious actors in order to spread malware and encourage cyber-attacks. For example, a new ransomware called “Popcorn Time” is encouraging victims to spread ransomware by offering them options when it comes to decrypting their files. They can go the usual route of paying the 1 bitcoin ransom, or they can go the “nasty way” and infect other users in order to avoid payment.

“Send the link below to other people, if two or more people will install this file and pay, we will decrypt your files for free,” the malware authors wrote. This is the first time SurfWatch Labs has observed ransomware developers using the tactic of leveraging victims in order to intentionally spread the malware.

Another interesting cybercriminal tactic is being used by a DDoS collaboration service called “Surface Defense.” A set of Turkish hackers is using gamification to encourage others to attack political organizations are not in line with Turkey’s government. They provide a point system for attacks, rewards that can be earned, and a live scoreboard. Rewards include cybercriminal tools such as click-fraud bots and the Sledgehammer DDoS tool. Two dozen organizations are being targeted by the gamified-DDoS service, including the German Christian Democratic Party, The People’s Democratic Party of Turkey, the Armenian Genocide Archive, and the Kurdistan Workers Party. Users can also suggest new targets.

Malicious actors are continuing to experiment with new ways to expand their reach. It is difficult to judge how successful these types of tactics will be, but expect other actors to incorporate similar features in the future if they are proven to be successful.