Even as cyber-threats circulate, the boards of directors at many enterprises continue to remain out of the loop when it comes to security.

A new study from the Ponemon Institute found that 78 percent of the more than 1,000 CIOs, CISOs and senior IT leaders surveyed had not briefed their board of directors on cyber-security in the last 12 months. In addition, 66 percent said they don’t believe senior leaders in their organization consider security a strategic priority.

The findings follow a recent survey from the National Association of Corporate Directors (NCD) that found that more than half (52 percent) of the 1,013 corporate directors surveyed were not satisfied with the amount of information they were receiving about cyber-security. In addition, 36 percent said they were unsatisfied with the quality of that information.

“For a long time IT issues were seen by Boards of Directors as jammed printers and computer crashes,” said Michael K. Daly, CTO of Raytheon’s cyber-security business. “Showing the threat to brand and reputation – and ultimately shareholder value – has taken time. The Global Megatrends Survey showed that only 22 percent of respondents have briefed the board on the organization’s cyber-security strategy in the past 12 months and only 21 percent of say the board actually requested a briefing. In fact, one of the driving factors behind Raytheon’s desire to do this study was to elevate the information security point of view into the C-suite.”

One of the best ways to communicate with the boardroom is by reporting simple metrics that matter to the business, said Daly.

“Telling a board how many times a firewall blocked an attack doesn’t mean anything – they are left to wonder if it is good or bad that we are seeing attacks,” he said. “At Raytheon we report one number, dwell-time – the amount of time an attacker is able to use a computer before being stopped. Our goal is to keep that number as close to zero as possible by preventing their ability to communicate, move or do harm. For our board members, the trending of that one number allows them to determine the company’s exposure to risk and whether the right investments are being made, whether it is in analytics, talent, employee training, or new tools.”

Less than half of the respondents believe their organizations take appropriate steps to comply with leading cyber-security standards, and just 47 percent said their organizations have sufficient resources to meet cyber-security requirements.

Still, the majority of respondents believe their cyber-security postures will improve due to the following reasons: cyber intelligence will become more timely and actionable, more funding will be made available to invest in people and technologies, technologies will become more effective in detecting and responding to cyber threats, more staffing will be available to deal with the increasing frequency of attacks and employee-related risks will decline.

“High-profile cyber-security breaches are closing the gap between CISOs and CEOs by forcing meaningful security discussions into corner offices and boardrooms,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of Ponemon Institute, in a statement. “In the meantime, our study found there is still a large delta between resources and needs, as security leaders lack both funding and manpower to adequately protect assets and infrastructure.”

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• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Security Infrastructure

Security firm Gemalto released a report on 2014 data breaches recently and the news was not good.

In its latest Breach Level Index report, the company revealed that one billion records were compromised last year in more than 1,500 data breaches worldwide. Compared to 2013, those numbers are an increase of nearly 80 percent in terms of data records and more than 40 percent in terms of breaches overall.

Gemalto’s Breach Level Index calculates the severity of data breaches across multiple dimensions based on breach disclosure information. Among the notable attacks included in the report are the Home Depot breach, the attack on JP Morgan Chase and the attack on eBay. 

“Easily at the top of the list in terms of the number of breaches was North America with 1,164 breaches, accounting for about three quarters of all breaches (76%),” according to the report. “Those attacks involved more than 390 million records, or 38% of the total.”

According to the data in the BLI, the main motive for cyber-criminals in 2014 was identity theft. Fifty-four percent of all data breaches were identity-theft related – more than any other category, including access to financial data. In addition, identity theft breaches accounted for one-third of the most serious incidents. Incidents where the compromised data was encrypted in part or in full increased from one percent to four percent.

“We’re clearly seeing a shift in the tactics of cybercriminals, with long-term identity theft becoming more of a goal than the immediacy of stealing a credit card number,” said Tsion Gonen, vice president of strategy for identity and data protection at Gemalto, in a statement. “Identity theft could lead to the opening of new fraudulent credit accounts, creating false identities for criminal enterprises, or a host of other serious crimes. As data breaches become more personal, we’re starting to see that the universe of risk exposure for the average person is expanding.” 

Broken down by industry, retail and financial services experienced the most activity compared to other sectors. Retail companies saw an increase in data breaches compared to 2013, and accounted for 11 percent of all breaches in 2014, according to the report. However, in terms of data records compromised, the percentage of retail records jumped drastically, from 29 percent to 55 percent. This was due in large part to attacks on point-of-sale systems, according to the report. 

In the case of the financial sector, the number of breaches remained relatively unchanged, though the average number of records lost per breach increased ten-fold. Overall, the number of data breaches involving more than 100 million compromised data records doubled compared to 2013. Most of the time, the malicious activity was traced to an outsider (55 percent), though 25 percent of incidents were tied to accidental loss. Fifteen percent were linked to a malicious insider. 

“Not only are data breach numbers rising, but the breaches are becoming more severe,” said Gonen. “Being breached is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when.’  Breach prevention and threat monitoring can only go so far and do not always keep the cyber criminals out. Companies need to adopt a data-centric view of digital threats starting with better identity and access control techniques such as multi-factor authentication and the use of encryption and key management to secure sensitive data. That way, if the data is stolen it is useless to the thieves.” 

The full report can be read here.

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• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Cybercrime

During the White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford University on Friday, President Barack Obama signed an executive order to promote cybersecurity information sharing between private sector companies and the U.S. Government.

The executive order, signed by the President on stage after addressing a large audience, outlines an information sharing framework that would help companies work together, along with the federal government, to more effectively identify and protect against cyber threats.

“This has to be a shared mission,” Obama said during his speech. “So much of our computer networks and critical infrastructure are in the private sector, which means government cannot do this alone. But the fact is that the private sector can’t do it alone either, because it’s government that often has the latest information on new threats.”

Overall, industry professionals applauded the steps by the White House, but indicated this is just a small step in addressing serious threats. An executive order can only go so far and more is needed than just information sharing to combat sophisticated cyber attacks, experts said.

And the feedback begins…

Phil Smith, SVP of Government Solutions and Special Investigations at Trustwave:

“The President’s remarks at today’s summit are a great beginning, especially when he explained today’s threat landscape as a ‘cyber arms race.’ That statement is significant because it puts organizations and individuals on notice that cybersecurity is a national security and public safety issue. Sharing threat intelligence across government agencies, law enforcement and the private sector is a critical component of strengthening data protection however it will not work without safe harbor protections for companies that participate.

An executive order can only go so far. It takes Congressional action to mandate information sharing on a national level that includes liability protection. Without that protection, we will not see the level of participation required for information sharing to be successful.

When organizations share information they produce actionable threat intelligence that helps them stay ahead of the criminals and build defenses to block their next move.”

 Ken Xie, CEO of Fortinet:

“During the White House’s Cybersecurity Summit, there was a lot of great discussion around information sharing. The biggest obstacle is that our industry is extremely shorthanded: it’s estimated we can only fulfillne in every 20 technology positions needed in the cybersecurity space. Who will mitigate the threat? Where and who are the cyber swat teams? Who will train the responders? Answers to these questions remain unanswered, though the conversation is a step in the right direction.”

Nate Fick, CEO of Endgame:

“Much of the talk in the room is about information sharing. In security, the advantage often goes to the team with better, more usable data. So any steps to encourage faster sharing are meaningful progress.”

Tomer Weingarten, CEO of SentinelOne:

“Information sharing is a good start. However, it needs to be handled in a way that preserves the privacy of affected organizations and prevents data from being “leaked”. In the wrong hands, this intelligence would let attackers know that their operation has been compromised, could reveal attack binaries that can be re-used and expose companies that have been breached which may lead to more attacks against them. Also, sharing data and intelligence will do little to mitigate carefully crafted attacks since they often do not demonstrate any previously seen indicators.”

Mike Brown, VP and GM Public Sector for RSA:

“It isn’t just information sharing that is needed. We have some valuable avenues to share information. What we need is liability relief and clarity about the type and format of information that needs to be shared. That is also critical so that information that is shared is actually actionable.”

Tal Klein, CMO for Adallom:

“The fact that the President is addressing the issues of cyber security is a good thing – we definitely need more awareness. That stated, I am less excited about specific directives that may offset the financial incentive for companies to be in the business of cyber security. Information sharing is good, but if a security company makes their money researching threats and then is expected to turn over their research to the public domain as soon as its complete, then the value of that research diminishes.

 

I don’t think the government should be in the business of regulating the information security industry. What I suspect is that we are close to the age of the “cyber lobby” (dare I say “cyber subsidies”) – and I’m not sure that will benefit anyone other than the companies that pay to influence policy. So, I would prefer the President’s agenda would begin and end with “awareness” and avoid tinkering with the economic  dynamics of the information security market.”

Ivan Shefrin, VP of Security Solutions at TaaSera:

“Voluntary sharing of cybersecurity intelligence can be an important step – provided it’s accompanied by appropriate liability and privacy constraints. The benefits are clear: last year’s United Parcel Service breach was in fact discovered as a direct result of threat intelligence sharing between the government and private sector.

 

Sharing cyber intelligence can have a positive impact if information sharing is made actionable. To accomplish this, security professionals should assume they’re already compromised, and implement policies, tools and budgets to balance breach prevention with pre-breach detection and response.”

Marc Gaffan, CEO & Co-Founder of Incapsula:

“President Obama is taking a bold stance be visiting with tech companies in silicon valley this week to talk about his proposed cybersecurity legislation, right on the heels of his cybersecurity agency announcement earlier this week. In the past, the sale and use of botnets, which have the potential to overwhelm a site or network with malicious activity, was surrounded by legal ambiguities and grey areas. Obama’s new legislation removes all ambiguity so for the first time companies can prosecute the so-called “bot-herders” that try to do them harm.”

Ron Gula, CEO, Tenable Network Security:

“It’s important to applaud this administration for its attention to cyber security. It’s been long overdue and at the rapid pace technology is evolving, we are already behind the curve. Executive orders such as this, while not a substitute for good security practices, raise awareness for the need to invest more heavily when it comes to cyber security.

Information sharing won’t solve the bigger problems we face in the industry, but it’s a good place to start. Everyone in IT is realizing the scale and saving from centralizing command and control. Once consolidated, the information shared will provide greater context, allowing for organizations to be more agile in mitigating sophisticated attacks.”

Ryan Shaw, Director of Research and Development at Foreground Security:

“The President’s intention to issue an Executive Order (EO) promoting government and private sector cybersecurity information sharing is an important acknowledgement of the current deficiencies in our country’s current cybersecurity defense capability. Unfortunately, EOs and new agencies will not be able to resolve the sharing challenges that have existed for years.  These challenges include:

· Lack of trust between the parties involved

· COTS cybersecurity tools (e.g. SIEM, NSM, Web Proxies, ID/PS, Next-gen Firewalls) that are ill-equipped to deal with large quantities of multi-source, non-normalized threat indicators

· Shortfall of skilled cyber-threat analysts or source-agnostic platforms to manage the deluge of threat indicators

· Multiple sharing vehicles and taxonomies (these are a portion of the Voluntary Standards for ISAOs that the President will speak of)”

John Dickson, principal at software security firm Denim Group:

 “There is no mention of increased liability protection for companies in the today’s briefing sheet.  Absent of increased protection, or at least clarity, for the corporate liability question will likely result in a lukewarm reception from industry.  Couple that with remaining post-Snowden doubts that remain over working with government and law enforcement, then you have a potential non-starter here.

The focus on strong privacy and civil liberty protections misses the point here – that’s not hurdle in more information sharing, liability protection is. Cooperation with the Congress is an imperative. My contacts in the US Capitol say these initiatives are coming out with little consultation with Congress, which also brings up the question of the measures’ ultimate implementation.”

Jeff Williams, CTO, Contrast Security:

 “I’m encouraged by all the talk about public-private partnerships that bring security to the forefront for government, large businesses, small businesses, and consumers. The panelists were right about the problems of speed and scale that cybersecurity involves.  I was thrilled to see that there is awareness of the complexity and importance of the problem at the highest levels of government and business.

 

However, the overwhelming theme of the summit was that the way forward is to focus on the threats and that communication will enable us to stop attacks.  I have serious doubts as to whether chasing the threat will have any effect whatsoever – the attribution problem is so significant in cyberattacks that after months we still have no resolution to the Sony attack, much less Anthem or others.

The worst part is that spending all this effort chasing our tails takes away from time we should be focused on building secure code and strong defenses. The fact that we are still producing code with SQL injection after almost two decades is embarrassing. The government can and should play a role in encouraging the software market to produce secure code. But with a confusing patchwork of agencies, agendas, and responsibilities, government has fallen far behind the financial industry in their ability to secure their own house.”

Jason Lewis, Chief Collection and Intelligence Officer of Lookingglass Cyber Solutions:

 “The White House is pushing a lot of recommendations that don’t seem to have gone through a vetting process by experienced technologists. The effort to weaken encryption will ultimately have the opposite of the desired effect. There are new rules that impact security researchers and will lead to less secure systems, because it will be illegal for researchers to test those systems.

 

The positive results will be the increased visibility and discussion about these issues. For me, if the US government really wanted to improve security they would be at the forefront of data sharing and making it easier for researchers to contribute, not harder.”

Dan Waddell, Director of Government Affairs, (ISC)2:

“It’s important that the American public put this issue into perspective.  As mentioned by Lisa Monaco, the White House’s top aide for counterterrorism and homeland security, the cyber threat is becoming more diverse, sophisticated and dangerous. The actions of cyber attackers, while seldom seen played out online, are potentially as egregious on many different levels including economically, militarily, and in regards to the public’s day-to-day safety.

Overall, I think it’s a positive sign that we’re having these discussions at the highest levels of both the public and private sectors as well as academia.  CEOs, CISOs, government leaders and educators are all saying the same thing – cybersecurity is an absolute necessity to help protect our nation’s interests. It has an impact on every aspect of our lives – from homeland security, to defense, to the economy, to energy and critical infrastructure, to health, etc.  Everyone shares a common interest: We need to secure information of the people, for the people.”

Chris Wysopal, CTO & co-founder at Veracode:

 “The challenge for the tech industry is they need to retain the trust of their users or they can’t grow their businesses which require more and more intimate data be stored and processed by them.  That is why after many years of security professionals complaining of the lack of SSL usage by majo7r tech companies it wasn’t until the Snowden revelations that it was finally enforced by the big players.  

 

“The federal government has to convince the people using Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc., not the executives from those companies, that their data is safe from wholesale snooping or the information sharing they want is going to be a struggle.” 

Ken Westin, Security Analyst Tripwire:

“This Order and the informatPion sharing initiatives are a step in the right direction, however the challenge will be in the implementation where citizens’ privacy and civil liberties are protected, as well as making any intelligence gathered through these initiatives relevant and actionable for government agencies as well as private industry. In order to make these initiatives effective, secure and manageable, will require strong oversight and properly allocated resources to implement, not just initially, but also over the next few years as the program evolves. There needs to be constant vigilance and review of processes, data collected and effectiveness of the program in order to ensure agencies do not overreach and that the program itself remains useful to industry and agencies alike.

The devil is truly in the details, although I believe the spirit and intentions of the Order is good, it will be critical that there is transparency and oversight regarding its implementation. The government is breaking new ground and it is important to tread carefully, as there is a lot to learn in the process of developing a system of this scale and depth. I sincerely hope that the government will be involving not just law makers and political thinkers, but also technologists and security experts from both private industry and the government to ensure the program is implemented efficiently, securely and meets established requirements for the program.” 

*Additional reporting by Eduard Kovacs

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• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Incident Management
• Risk Management
• Security Architecture
• Management & Strategy

We’ve likely all heard the phrase “complexity is the enemy of security” many times. It’s an oft-used sound bite, but what can we learn from this concept to improve our respective security postures? Although there are many angles one could approach this concept from, I’d like to examine it from a security operations and incident response perspective.

Simplicity in Collection and Analysis

Most enterprises instrument their network to collect many different, highly specialized forms of data. For example, an organization may collect netflow data, firewall logs, DNS logs, and a variety of other specialized forms of data. This creates a stream of various different data types and formats that complicates and clouds the operational workflow. Unfortunately, the first question when performing analysis or incident response is often “Where do I go to get the data I need?” rather than “What questions do I need to ask of the data?”

In addition to the variety and complexity of these specialized forms of data, the volume of data they create often overwhelms enterprises. These huge quantities of data result in shorter retention periods and longer query times. This perfect storm of circumstances creates a very real operational challenge.

Fortunately, organizations can address this challenge by seeking out fewer, more generalized collection technologies that provides the required level of visibility with greatly reduced complexity and volume. Continuing with the above example, in lieu of many different highly specialized network data sources, an organization could consider one layer 7 enriched meta-data source.

Simplicity in Detection

Wikipedia defines an Indicator of Compromise (IOC) as “an artifact observed on a network or in an operating system that with high confidence indicates a computer intrusion.” Associated contextual information is also usually included along with the artifact and helps an organization to properly leverage the IOC. Context most often includes, among other things, information regarding to which attack stage an indicator is relevant. Attack stages can be broken up into three main families, each of which contains one or more attack stages:

• Pre-infection: reconnaissance, exploit, re-direct

• Infection: payload delivery

• Post-infection: command and control, update, drop, staging, exfiltration

It is well known that many organizations struggle with excessive amounts of false positives and low signal-to-noise ratios in their alert queues. There are several different angles from which an organization can approach this problem, and in fact, I have previously written about some of them. Another such approach, which can be used in combination with the others, is to go for the “money shot”.

At some point, when an organization wants to watch for and alert on a given attack, intrusion, or activity of concern, that organization will need to select one or more IOCs for this purpose. Going for the “money shot” involves selecting the highest fidelity, most reliable, least false-positive prone IOC or IOCs for a given attack, intrusion, or activity of concern. For example, if we look at a typical web-based re-direct attack, it may involve the following stages:

• Compromise of a legitimate third party site to re-direct to a malicious exploit site

• Exploitation of the system from the malicious exploit site

• Delivery of the malicious code

• Command and control, along with other post-infection activity

Although it is possible to use IOCs from all four of the above attack stages, using IOCs from the first three stages presents some challenges:

• Compromised legitimate third party sites likely number in the millions, meaning we would need millions of IOCs to identify just this one attack at this stage. Further, there is no guarantee that the attempted re-direct would succeed (e.g., if it were blocked by the proxy). An unsuccessful re-direct means that there was no attempt to exploit. In other words, for our purposes, a false positive.

• Exploits don’t always succeed, and as such, alerting on attempted exploits can often generate thousands upon thousands of false positives.

• If we see a malicious payload being delivered, that is certainly of concern. But what if the malicious payload does not successfully transfer, install, execute, and/or persist? We have little insight into whether a system is infected, unless of course, we see command and control or other post-infection activity.

Command and control (C2) and other post-infection activity, on the other hand, is always post-infection. That means that if we can distill a high fidelity, reliable IOC for this attack stage, we can identify malicious code infections immediately after they happen with a very low false positive rate. Obviously, preventing an attack is always preferable, but as we all know, this is not always possible. The next best option is timely and reliable detection.

Simplicity in O&M

When people began moving from the cities to the suburbs in the post-war United States in the 1950s, new infrastructure was built to serve the shifting population. The infrastructure served its population well for 50 years or so, until the 2000s, when the physical lifetime of water mains, electric power lines, and other infrastructure was reached. What people quickly realized is that although money and resources had been allocated to build and deploy infrastructure, money and resources had not been allocated to operate and maintain the infrastructure for the long term. In other words, O&M would be required to repair or replace the aging infrastructure, but the resources for that O&M would have to be found elsewhere.

Similarly, in the information security realm, as new business needs arise, new security technologies are often deployed to address them. Enterprises often forget to include O&M when calculating total cost. Another way to think of this is that each new security technology requires people to properly deploy, operate, and maintain it. If head count were increased each time a new security technology was deployed, the model would work quite well. However, as those of us in the security world know, head count seldom grows in parallel with new business needs. This presents a big challenge to the enterprise.

O&M cost (including the human resources required to properly deploy, maintain, and operate technology) is an important cost to keep in mind during the technology lifecycle. O&M cost is a large part of the overall cost of technology, but it is one that is often overlooked or underestimated. In an effort to lower total overall O&M costs, and building on the collection and analysis discussion above, it pays to take a moment to think about the purpose of each technology. Is this specific technology a highly specialized technology for a highly specialized purpose? Could I potentially retain the functionality and visibility provided by several specialized technologies through the use of a single, more generalized technology?

If the answer to these two questions is yes, it pays to think about consolidating security technologies through an exercise I like to call “shrinking the rack”. Shrinking the rack can be a great option, provided it doesn’t negatively affect security operations. Fewer specialized security technologies mean fewer resources to properly deploy, maintain, and operate them. That, in turn, means lower overall O&M costs. Lower O&M costs are always a powerful, motivating factor to consider.

The concept of simplicity is one that we can apply directly to security operations and incident response. This piece touches on just some of the variety of lessons we can learn from this topic. Although the phrase “complexity is the enemy of security” is a popular sound bite, if we dig a level deeper, we see that there is a great deal we can learn from the concept.

Tags:

• INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
• Network Security
• Security Infrastructure

Tokyo – A cyber security competition began Saturday in Tokyo, with organizers aiming to show off the skills of young Japanese hackers by testing them against international rivals.

The final rounds of the Security Contest 2014, or SECCON, brought together 90 participants in 24 teams from seven nations and regions: China, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States.

The winners of the Tokyo competition will advance to the prestigious Def Con CTF (Capture the Flag) competition, slated for later this year, organisers said. SECCON was designed to allow young Japanese technology engineers to show off their skills on the world stage, while also encouraging more to get into the field of cyber security.

Teams compete for points by hacking six virtual servers to discover particular keywords, and can also intervene to stop their rivals’ cyberattacks.

“There is a need for a forum where fledgling, young… hackers can grow and gain understanding of their families, schools and the outside world,” said Yoshinori Takesako, the head of the SECCON organising committee.

“This is important in order to keep them away from being pulled into the underground world,” he said in a statement to AFP.

The Japan-based event has drawn a total of 4,186 participants from 58 countries through various qualifying rounds.

Takesako said the organizers, supported by government agencies, tech firms, and scholars, also want to change the media image that Japan lags other nations in the cyber security field.

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• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Training & Certification

An overwhelming majority of brokerage and investment advisory firms examined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have been the subject of a cyber-attack.

In its recent ‘Cybersecurity Examination Sweep Summary‘ report, the SEC took a look at 57 registered broker-dealers and 49 registered investment advisors. Eighty-eight percent of the broker-dealers and 74 percent of the advisers stated that they have experienced cyber-attacks either directly or through one or more of their vendors.

The majority of the cyber-related incidents are related to malware and fraudulent email. In fact, more than half of the broker-dealers (54 percent) and 43 percent of the advisers reported receiving fraudulent emails seeking to transfer client funds. More than a quarter of those broker-dealers reported losses in excess of $ 5,000 related to these emails, with no single loss being greater than $ 75,000. Twenty-five percent of the broker-dealers confessing losses related to the emails said the damage was the result of employees not following their firm’s identity authentication procedures.

<a href="http://redirect.viglink.com?key=11fe087258b6fc0532a5ccfc924805c0&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.securityweek.com%2Fcybersecurity-healthcare-retail-sectors-lags-behind-utility-and-financial-industries-report%22%3E"Brokers and advisors, especially those who handle very wealthy clients, are used to dealing with substantial sums of money, but they’re also human beings who can be duped by a well-crafted phishing scam,” said Tim Erlin, director of IT security and risk strategy at Tripwire. “Not all of these brokerages are as big as Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley. Small and medium financial firms are gaining visibility because criminals are walking away with meaningful sums of money. The criminals are becoming more savvy about which kinds of transactions remain under the radar, and the more success they have with these targets, the more of these businesses they go after.”

The good news is the vast majority of examined broker-dealers (93 percent) and advisers (83 percent) have adopted written information security policies, and 89 percent of the broker-dealers and 57 percent of the advisers conduct periodic audits to determine compliance with these policies. For the majority of both broker-dealers (82 percent) and the advisers (51 percent), these written policies discuss mitigating the effects of a cyber-security incident and/or outline the plan to recover from such an incident. These policies however generally did not address how firms determine whether they are responsible for client losses associated with cyber incidents.

While firms identified misconduct by employees and other authorized users of their networks as a significant concern, only a small proportion of the broker-dealers (11 percent) and the advisers (four percent) reported incidents in which insiders engaged in misconduct resulting in the misappropriation of funds, securities, sensitive client or firm information, or damage to the firms’ networks. 

The vast majority of examined firms conduct firm-wide risk assessments on a periodic basis to identify cybersecurity threats, vulnerabilities and any potential impact to business. While most of the broker-dealers (93 percent) and advisers (79 percent) reported considering such risk assessments in establishing their cybersecurity policies and procedures, fewer firms applied these requirements to their vendors. While 84 percent of the brokerage firms require cyber-security risk assessments of vendors with access to their firm’s networks, only 32 percent of the advisers do so.

“Cybersecurity threats know no boundaries,” said SEC Chair Mary Jo White, in a statement. “That’s why assessing the readiness of market participants and providing investors with information on how to better protect their online investment accounts from cyber threats has been and will continue to be an important focus of the SEC. Through our engagement with other government agencies as well as with the industry and educating the investing public, we can all work together to reduce the risk of cyber attacks.”

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• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Vulnerabilities

About.com, the online resource website visited by tens of millions of users each month, is plagued by several types of potentially dangerous vulnerabilities, a researcher revealed on Monday.

According to Wang Jing, a PhD student at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, a large majority of the pages on About.com are vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-frame scripting (XFS/iFrame injection) attacks.

The expert tested close to 95,000 About.com links with a script he developed and determined that at least 99.88% of them are vulnerable. The search field on the website’s homepage is also plagued by an XSS flaw which, according to Jing, means that all the domains related to about.com are vulnerable to XSS attacks.

In order to exploit XSS vulnerabilities, an attacker needs to convince the victim to click on a specially crafted link. XSS attacks can be used to alter the appearance of a website, access potentially sensitive information, and spy on users.

XFS attacks can be used to steal data from websites accessed by the victim. For the attack to work, a malicious actor must get the user to access a Web page he controls. Such vulnerabilities can also be exploited for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, the expert noted.

Jing has also identified open redirect bugs on several About.com pages. The vulnerabilities can be leveraged to trick users into visiting phishing and other malicious websites by presenting them with a link that apparently points to an about.com page.

“The vulnerabilities can be attacked without user login. Tests were performed on Microsoft IE (10.0.9200.16750) of Windows 8, Mozilla Firefox (34.0) & Google Chromium 39.0.2171.65-0 ubuntu0.14.04.1.1064 (64-bit) of Ubuntu (14.04)，Apple Safari 6.1.6 of Mac OS X Lion 10.7,” the researcher said in a blog post.

About.com was notified of the existence of the vulnerabilities back in October 2014, but so far the company hasn’t done anything to address them, the researcher said. About.com hasn’t responded to SecurityWeek’s requests for comment.

Poof-of-concept (PoC) videos for the XSS vulnerability on the About.com homepage and the open redirect flaw have been published by the researcher. 

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• NEWS & INDUSTRY
• Vulnerabilities

Paris – After having used the Internet profusely for propaganda and recruitment, jihadist organizations have realized that investigators are gleaning crucial information online and are increasingly concealing their web presence, experts say.

Apart from recent orders given to fighters to limit their exposure, erase the footprint of their online activity and avoid revealing too many place names or faces, the Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front groups are increasingly using the “Dark Web” — the hidden part of the Internet protected by powerful encryption softwares.

“Sometimes we get the geographical location of some fighters thanks to Facebook,” Philippe Chadrys, in charge of the fight against terrorism at France’s judicial police, said earlier this week.

“Some even publish it on the public part of their account. That gives us elements to build a case. Because of course we don’t go to Syria, we have no one on the ground, and we lack proof.”

In November, Flavien Moreau, a 28-year-old jihadist who travelled to Syria and then returned to France, was jailed for seven years exclusively on the basis of what he posted online.

And those who just months ago had happily posted videos, photos of themselves holding Kalashnikovs or of beheadings on Facebook have now realised that they were single-handedly building a case against themselves, if they ever decided to come home.

“We are starting to notice the beginnings of disaffection with Facebook — they have understood that’s how we get incriminating evidence,” said Chadrys.

Related Content: ISIS Cyber Ops: Empty Threat or Reality?

“They are resorting more and more to Skype or WhatsApp, software that is much harder to intercept. “We realise that the people we are interested in are increasingly specialised in computing. They master encryption software and methods to better erase data.”

‘Cyber-surveillance’ key

Chadrys also said that jihadists were increasingly using the “Dark Web.”

“That makes our probes much more complicated. The terrorists are adapting, they understand that the telephone and Internet are handy, but dangerous.

He pointed to Mehdi Nemmouche, saying last year’s alleged Brussels Jewish museum killer had no mobile phone and no Facebook account.

Faced with this problem, police are resorting to calling in cryptography and computing experts, but there are never enough, which slows down investigations.

Last autumn, the Islamic State group (IS) published guidelines for its members, asking fighters not to tweet precise location names, to blur faces or stop giving too many details about on-going operations.

“Security breaches have appeared, which the enemy has taken advantage of,” read the text, written in Arabic.

“The identity of some brothers has been compromised, as have some sites used by mujahedeen. We know that this problem does not only involve photos, but also PDF, Word and video files.”

In a recent report, Helle Dale of the US-based Heritage Foundation think-tank wrote that cyber-surveillance was key to the fight against IS “as human intelligence is hardly available on the ground, especially in Syria, and the number of unmanned drones is limited.”

But, she added, the group “is changing is communications strategy. It is encrypting its electronic communications, limiting its presence online and using services that delete messages as soon as they are sent.”

Related: ISIS Cyber Ops: Empty Threat or Reality?

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InfoArmor, a provider of fraud and identify theft protection services, has acquired cybercrime research firm IntelCrawler for an undisclosed sum.

With IntelCrawler under its belt, Scottsdale, Arizona-based InfoArmor plans to form a new Enterprise Threat Intelligence unit that will help customers discover and block attacks targeting intellectual property.

Founded in 2013 by Dan Clements and Andrew Komarov, IntelCrawler offers threat intelligence, data and security research services to large corporate and government clients.

Komarov previously worked for Russian cybercrime research firm Group-IB.

“InfoArmor is thrilled about joining forces with Dan, Andrew and the IntelCrawler team,” said John Schreiber, InfoArmor’s president, adding that IntelCrawler’s data, intelligence and research capabilities are beneficial for its clients, who are pushing for threat identification, assessment, and attribution. 

“Using IntelCrawler’s context-aware intelligence and operative human intelligence, we will now be able to connect even more dots between cyber intelligence and emerging enterprise threats,” said Drew Smith, CEO of InfoArmor.

The cash and stock transaction was completed on Jan. 23, 2015.

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The Malaysia Airlines website was commandeered Monday by hackers who referenced the Islamic State jihadists and claimed to be from the “Lizard Squad”, a group known for previous denial-of-service attacks.

The website’s front page was replaced with an image of a tuxedo-wearing lizard, and read “Hacked by LIZARD SQUAD — OFFICIAL CYBER CALIPHATE”.

It also carried the headline “404 – Plane Not Found”, an apparent reference to the airlines’ puzzling loss of flight MH370 last year with 239 people aboard.

Media reports said versions of the takeover in some regions included the wording “ISIS will prevail”.

The airline did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Lizard Squad is a group of hackers that has caused havoc in the online world before, taking credit for attacks that took down the Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live network last month.

The Islamic State, an extremist Sunni Muslim group, has seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq, where it has declared an Islamic “caliphate”.

It has drawn thousands of fighters from across the globe to its anti-Western cause, and shocked the world with its video-taped executions of journalists and other foreigners it has captured, the most recent being a Japanese security contractor it claimed Sunday to have beheaded.

A second Japanese captive being held by the militants has also been threatened with execution.

The IS group, which uses social media in recruiting and spreading its message, is believed to harbour ambitions of launching a cyber-war against the West.

It is unclear why Malaysia Airlines was targeted.

But concern has been rising in Malaysia after scores of its citizens were lured to the IS cause in the Middle East. Malaysian authorities last week said they have detained 120 people suspected of having IS sympathies or planning to travel to Syria.

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• Cybercrime