ICO reports record number of data breaches and fines

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The UK Data Protection privacy watchdog reports that it has dealt with more data breach reports and issued more fines in the past year than ever before.

The UK Data Protection privacy watchdog reports that it has dealt with more data breach reports and issued more fines in the past year than ever before.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has dealt with a record number of data protection incidents, nuisance marketing cases and individual complaints in the past year, according to its latest annual report.

The ICO’s annual performance statistics for 2016/17 also reveal that the regulator received more reported data protection breaches and fined more companies for unlawful activities than any previous year. The rpory can be found at: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/our-information/annual-operational-reports-201617/

It seems that from a hacker perspective, many organisations are still leaving the front door open and the windows unlocked. Failure to protect and handle data correctly can also result in punitive actions for companies participating in the digital economy.

Wake up and get the knowledge to heep your data protected.

The record numbers are in part ascribed to the fact that the ICO’s free telephone helpline, live chat service and online reporting tool all helped make it easier for the public to report their concerns to the regulator, and the fact that audits and new self-assessment tools helped increase organisations’ awareness of their responsibilities.

The statistics show that data protection complaint cases rose to 18,354, around 2,000 more than the previous year. Some 2,565 self-reported data breaches resulted in 16 civil monetary penalties totalling £1,624,500 for serious breaches across a range of public, private and voluntary sectors.

The ICO received more than 166,000 reports about nuisance calls and texts. The ICO issued a record number of 23 fines in this regard, totalling £1,923,000, and issued nine enforcement notices and placed 31 organisations under monitoring.

More than 5,400 freedom of information (FOI) cases were received and 5,100 closed during the year, with 1,351 decision notices, which was “broadly similar” to the previous year, the ICO said.

“We have continued to monitor compliance and raised the threshold for our intervention, taking action if fewer than 90% of their FOI responses fall in the statutory timescale,” the ICO said.

The statistics show the ICO received more enquiries about the legislation it deals with than in the year before.

“Although calls to our helpline were slightly down on last year at 189,942, this was more than made up by new channels including our live chat service, which received 18,864 contacts. Letter and email contacts remained similar to last year,” the ICO said.
People at heart of ICO, says deputy commissioner

The ICO expects its work to intensify next year in the run up to deadline for compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on 25 May 2018.

The GDPR introduces a more rigorous data protection regime and stricter penalties for breaches of up to €20m or 4% of annual global turnover, whichever is greater.

Deputy commissioner Simon Entwisle said: “We have advised and educated organisations to help them work within the law and we have taken action when they’ve fallen short of the mark.”

People will continue to be at the heart of what the ICO does as it looks to the future, he said, with the GDPR giving people greater control over their own data.

“We are working closely with organisations to help them understand their obligations and be ready for the new rules,” he said.

Entwisle said ICO staff at every level deserve credit for the contribution they have and continue to make. “Information commissioner Elizabeth Denham’s programme to strengthen the team – in both numbers and expertise – will equip the ICO to meet the challenges ahead.”

Testifying to the House of Lords EU Home Affairs Sub-Committee in a hearing on the new EU data protection package, Denham planned to expand the ICO’s staff to deal with the extra work burden to be imposed by the GDPR.

This includes plans to recruit 200 additional staff to take the total number to around 700 in the next three years, with the most pressing staff needs being in relation to the increased duties imposed by the GDPR and the need to educate people about the implications of the regulation.

Denham said Brexit had also added work for the ICO’s policy staff to ensure they can give advice to government and to parliament about what the various impacts would be of different regulatory arrangements post-Brexit.

In addition to the new work related to the GDPR and Brexit, Denham said the UK is increasing the work it is doing internationally regarding data protection enforcement.

“The ICO is one of the largest regulators globally. We have 35 years’ experience in this space and we have a newly developed international strategy,” she said.

“We are going to continue to lean in and engage deeply in work with our European colleagues on the implementation of the GDPR, but at the same time we are engaging in global enforcement work beyond Europe, which involves building bridges with other regulators around the world.”

So if you want to save yourself stress, money and a damaged reputation from a cyber incident please ring us now on 01242 521967 or email assist@cyber139.com or complete the form on our contact page NOWContact Cyber 139

Russian cyber espionage highlights need to improve email security

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Security experts are advising political parties and businesses to pay more attention to email security after the latest revelations about a Russian cyber espionage group.

Security experts are advising political parties and businesses to pay more attention to email security after the latest revelations about a Russian cyber espionage group

Email’s renewed popularity as a means of attack is driven by the fact that it does not rely on vulnerabilities and uses simple deception to lure victims into opening attachments, clicking links or disclosing credentials, according to Symantec’s latest threat report.

In particular, credential phishing has been a key part of many cyber attacks by Pawn Storm on armed forces, the defence industry, news media, politicians and dissidents, according to a report by security researchers at Trend Micro.

They have found that the group is creating phishing emails that are highly sophisticated, almost perfectly replicating legitimate URLs and using a technique called “tabnabbing” which swaps inactive open tabs with a phishing site.

Pawn Storm was widely linked to cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 US presidential election, and more recently was found to be targeting French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron, the report said.

Pawn Storm is also believed to have targeted the German political party Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Turkish parliament, the parliament in Montenegro, and the World Doping Agency (WADA).

These activities have raised concerns about the cyber security of political parties, with several elections due across Europe in 2016, including the UK in June.

At a minimum, there is no excuse not to implement the Dmarc (domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance) email authentication policy to help identify and block malicious emails impersonating trusted domains.

Implementation of Dmarc is mandatory for public sector bodies as part of the active cyber defence programme led by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

However, other advanced precautions also need to be taken, with an emphasis on verifying the identity of the sender.

Candidates for public office and political parties, like businesses, create and store a lot of data in vulnerable places, he said.

According to the 2017 Varonis Data Risk Report, on average organisations have 20% of folders open to every employee, and 47% have at least 1,000 or more files containing sensitive personal or financial data accessible to every user.

One compromised account or system can compromise a massive amount of data, and possibly an election.

If the highly targeted phishing attacks on French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign had been successful in stealing credentials, the attackers would have become virtual “insiders”, gaining access to files and emails that could influence the election.

The Trend Micro report on Pawn Storm recommends that organisations improve the security of their email and defend against credential theft by considering the following:

Even though two-factor authentication improves security, it does not make social engineering impossible because all temporary tokens can be phished by an attacker.
Even when two-factor authentication is used, an attacker only has to phish for the second authentication token once or twice to get semi-permanent access to a mailbox. They can set up a forwarding address or a token that allows third-party applications full access to the system.
Mandatory logging in to a company VPN network does raise the bar for an attacker. However, VPN credentials can also be phished, and targeted attackers may specifically go after VPN access credentials.
Authentication with a physical security key makes credential phishing virtually impossible unless the attacker has physical access to the target’s equipment. When a target uses a physical security key, the attacker either has to find an exploit to get unauthorised access, or has to get physical access to the security key and the target’s laptop.
To add to authentication methods that are based on what you know and what you have, authentication can be added is based on what you are: fingerprints or other biometric data. Biometrics have already been used by some laptops and phone suppliers, and have also been a common authentication method in datacentres for more than a decade.

So if you want to save yourself stress, money and a damaged reputation from a cyber incident please ring us now on 01242 521967 or email assist@cyber139.com or complete the form on our contact page NOWContact Cyber 139

How cyber warfare is escalating- machines v hackers

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There is a gaping hole in the digital defences that companies use to keep out cyber thieves.

There is a gaping hole in the digital defences that companies use to keep out cyber thieves.

 

The hole is the global shortage of skilled staff that keeps security hardware running, analyses threats and kicks out intruders.

Currently, the global security industry is lacking about one million trained workers, suggests research by ISC2 – the industry body for security professionals. The deficit looks set to grow to 1.8 million within five years, it believes.

The shortfall is widely recognised and gives rise to other problems, says Ian Glover, head of Crest – the UK body that certifies the skills of ethical hackers.

“The scarcity is driving an increase in costs,” he says. “Undoubtedly there’s an impact because businesses are trying to buy a scarce resource. And it might mean companies are not getting the right people because they are desperate to find somebody to fill a role.”

While many nations have taken steps to attract people in to the security industry, Mr Glover warns that those efforts will not be enough to close the gap.

Help has to come from another source: machines.

That is a problem when the analysts expected to defend companies are “drowning” in data generated by firewalls, PCs, intrusion detection systems and all the other appliances they have bought and installed, he says.

Automation is nothing new, but now machine learning is helping it go much further.

The analytical power of machine learning derives from the development of algorithms that can take in huge amounts of data and pick out anomalies or significant trends.

These “deep learning” algorithms come in many different flavours.

Some, such as OpenAI, are available to anyone, but most are owned by the companies that developed them. So larger security firms have been snapping up smaller, smarter start-ups in an effort to bolster their defences quickly.

Simon McCalla, chief technology officer at Nominet, the domain name registry that oversees the .uk web domain, says machine learning has proven its usefulness in a tool it has created called Turing.

This digs out evidence of web attacks from the massive amounts of queries the company handles every day – queries seeking information about the location of UK websites.

Mr McCalla says Turing helped analyse what happened during the cyber-attack on Lloyds Bank in January that left thousands of customers unable to access the bank’s services.

The DDoS attack generated a huge amount of data to handle for that one event, he says.

“Typically, we handle about 50,000 queries every second. With Lloyds it was more than 10 times as much.”

Once the dust had cleared and the attack was over, Nominet had handled a day’s worth of traffic in a couple of hours.

Turing absorbed all the information made to Nominet’s servers and used what it learned to give early warnings of abuse and intelligence on people gearing up for a more sustained attack.

It logs the IP addresses of hijacked machines sending out queries to check if an email address is “live”.

“Most of what we see is not that clever, really,” he says, but adds that without machine learning it would be impossible for human analysts to spot what was going on until its intended target, such as a bank’s website, “went dark”.

The analysis that Turing does for Nominet is now helping the UK government police its internal network. This helps to block staff accessing dodgy domains and falling victim to malware.

There are also even more ambitious efforts to harness the analytical ability of machine learning.

At the Def Con hacker gathering last year, Darpa, the US military research agency, ran a competition that let seven smart computer programs attack each other to see which was the best at defending itself.

The winner, called Mayhem, is now being adapted so that it can spot and fix flaws in code that could be exploited by malicious hackers.

Machine learning can correlate data from lots of different sources to give analysts a rounded view of whether a series of events constitutes a threat or not, says Mr Tavakoli.

It can get to know the usual ebbs and flows of data in an organisation and what staff typically get up to at different times of the day.

So when cyber thieves do things such as probing network connections or trying to get at databases, that anomalous behaviour raises a red flag.

But thieves have become very good at covering their tracks and, on a big network, those “indicators of compromise” can be very difficult for a human to pick out.

UK businesses need to up cyber security with one in five hit by attacks

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Big UK businesses are targeted by cyber attacks more heavily, but all need to improve cyber security with one in five UK firms falling victim in the past 12 months.

Big UK businesses are targeted by cyber attacks more heavily, but all need to improve cyber security with one in five UK firms falling victim in the past 12 months  

Out of the 20% of UK businesses hit by cyber attacks in the past year, 42% were companies with more than 100 staff, compared with 18% with fewer than 99 employees, according to the survey of more than 1,200 businesses by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC).

The results indicate that 63% of businesses are reliant on IT providers to resolve issues after an attack, compared with just 12% of banks and financial institutions and 2% of police and law enforcement organisations.

The findings show that while 21% of businesses believe the threat of cyber crime is preventing their company from growing, only a quarter of businesses have cyber security accreditations in place, such as the UK governmentís Cyber Essentials Scheme or ISO 27001.
Smaller businesses are far less likely to have accreditation, with 10% of sole traders and 15% of those with 1 to 4 employees having accreditations, compared with 47% of businesses with more than 100 employees.
Of the businesses that do have accreditations, nearly half believe it gives their business a competitive advantage over rival companies, and a third consider it important in creating a more secure environment when trading with other businesses.
Businesses that use personal data should be mindful that they will have to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from 25 May 2018.
In October 2016, the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) warned that UK businesses could face up to £122 billion in penalties for data breaches under the GDPR, which will introduce fines for groups of companies of up to Ä20m or 4% of annual worldwide turnover, whichever is greater ñ far exceeding the current maximum of £500,000.
Using UK data breach statistics for 2015 and a maximum fine of 4% of global turnover, the fines paid to the European regulator could see a near 90-fold increase, from £1.4bn in 2015 to £122bn, the PCI SSC calculated.
The cyber threat to UK business is significant and growing, according to a joint report by the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the National Crime Agency (NCA) published in March 2017.
However, the report said UK businesses should not be defeatist. There are ways of mitigating attacks, the report said, adding that the NCSC is working with government agencies, tech companies and industry to fix some lower-level threats automatically and at scale to enable information security professionals to focus on the most damaging threats.
The report also said businesses should improve basic defences. Cyber attack is inevitable, the report said, adding that even basic cyber defences can protect against most of the attacks affecting businesses and that weak defences are likely to invite repeated attacks.
Businesses should handle all data assets as potential targets because there is a market value for all data that can be exploited by criminals, the report said. It also recommended promoting awareness of stronger basic ìcyber hygieneî to customers and employees.
Businesses should be more open to sharing knowledge and expertise, as all businesses can benefit from doing so in a secure, confidential and timely manner through services such as the Cyber-security Information Sharing Partnership (CiSP), the report said.
Developing cyber skills and awareness was another key piece of advice. Partnership work between law enforcement and industry, the report said, has led to the improvement of cyber knowledge for the wider public and industry.
Finally, businesses should report the crime to Action Fraud. If cyber attacks are reported, the report said law enforcement agencies can investigate, arrests can be made and preventative actions can be taken.

So if you want to save yourself stress, money and a damaged reputation from a cyber incident please ring us now on 01242 521967 or email
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What to do first when hit by a cyber attack

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At some point, your business may have to deal with a cyber security incident. But when you are under pressure and your team is stressed, people make mistakes.

At some point, your business may have to deal with a cyber security incident. But when you are under pressure and your team is stressed, people make mistakes.

Delaying too long in making critical response decisions may exacerbate the impact of the incident but, conversely, making knee-jerk decisions can cause further damage to the business or hinder a complete response.
There are many ways you may suspect that a security incident has happened, from detecting unusual activity through proactive monitoring of critical systems or during audits, to outside notification from law enforcement and compromised data located in the wild.
However, indicators such as unusual CPU (central processing unit) and network usage on a server may have multiple potential causes, many of which are not information security incidents. So it is vital to investigate further before jumping to conclusions.
Do you have any corroborating evidence? For example, if the IDS (intrusion detection system) detects a brute force attack against the website, do web logs support this having occurred? Or, if a user reports a suspected phishing attack, has this email been received by other users and did the user click on links or open documents?
You also need to think about answering questions about the nature of the incident. Is it a generic malware infection, or an active system hack?  Is there an intentional denial of service (DoS) attack in progress and is this an incidence of deliberate insider action?
Once you have confirmed an incident has occurred, you need to take time out from initial response activities to prioritise your actions and decide, definitively, what the business objectives are for the response operation. Incident triage generally consists of classifying the incident in terms of impact and urgency and how it should be handled. The incident response team can then use the impact, urgency and priority evaluation to define the objectives for the incident response operation and assign actions or further investigation, as required.
Impact classifications defined by the National Cyber Security Centreís (NCSC) GovCertUK and adopted by Crest, the body that represents the technical security industry, may provide a useful point of reference for initial classification based on the perceived or established impact.

These incidents will usually cause the degradation of vital service(s) for a large number of users, involve a serious breach of network security, affect mission-critical equipment or services or damage public confidence in the organisation.
It is not necessary to report on incidents with little or no impact or those affecting only a few users, such as isolated spam or antivirus alerts, minor computer hardware failure and loss of network connectivity to a peripheral device, such as a printer.

 

Isolated anti-virus alert or spam email.

The urgency of an incident should also be assessed along with the impact. Some incidents are unlikely to worsen over time, such as the discovery of a historical compromise by a former employee. But in other cases, such as a ransomware outbreak, it may be absolutely critical to respond rapidly to isolate the infection.
Mobilising full emergency incident response capabilities may not be applicable or appropriate in every situation. You need to understand as much about what you are dealing with as you can. For example, who is the attacker? How was the attack introduced? When did the attack occur? What data or systems have been compromised? Is the attack ongoing? Why were we the target of the attack?

The goal of triage is to understand the methodology and the extent of the attack as fully as possible, in the shortest possible time.

Information about the incident, the impact, urgency and business impact analysis for the affected data or systems will guide the incident response operation. If possible, the business priorities should be pre-determined and documented in incident response plans.
For organisations with known advanced threat actors, continued covert observation of an attacker to determine their goals and modus operandi may be an objective of the incident response operation for intelligence-gathering purposes, even if the urgency for containment is high. Experienced internal or external incident handlers should be used to inform these decisions.
Once the priority of the incident and the objectives of the response have been defined, it is time to act and allocate activities to the incident response teams.

So if you want to save yourself stress, money and a damaged reputation from a cyber incident please ring us now on 01242 521967 or email
assist@cyber139.com or complete the form on our contact page NOWContact Cyber 139

GCHQ-developed phone security open to surveillance

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A security researcher has said software developed by the UK intelligence agency GCHQ contains weaknesses making it possible to eavesdrop on phone calls.

A security researcher has said software developed by the UK intelligence agency GCHQ contains weaknesses making it possible to eavesdrop on phone calls.

The security protocol is used to encrypt Voice Over Internet Protocol (Voip) calls.
In a blog, University College London researcher Steven Murdoch said the encryption process was vulnerable.
GCHQ said it was “totally wrong” to suggest there was a “backdoor” into conversations.
Dr Murdoch did not say that the vulnerability would give direct access to conversations, but that it would make it possible to undermine the system’s security.
The network operator could listen in to calls, or authorise someone else to, and anyone who hacked the system would be able to eavesdrop, he said.

One of Dr Murdoch’s chief concerns was that the security standard has “key escrow” by design – meaning, for example, that a third party has access to data sent between two people in a conversation.

This, he said, is an example of a backdoor. In this case, it could allow an intelligence agency, or the organisation which is using the standard, to intercept phone calls, Dr Murdoch said.
“I think this comes from a conflict of interest within GCHQ in that they are there to prevent spying but they are also there to spy – so they facilitate spying,”
Dr Murdoch added that he was aware of two products which use the standard, both of which are government certified. “They could be in use inside government,” he said.

The protocol in question is known as Mikey-Sakke (Sakai-Kasahara key encryption in multimedia internet keying).

It works by generating encryption keys that are used to encrypt and decrypt voice conversations. Although it is technically possible to create these keys on two separate computers and only share part of those keys publicly, the Mikey-Sakke protocol does not do this.
Instead, keys are distributed by a third party to the conversation participants – the process known as key escrow – meaning that they are much more vulnerable to interception.
It was up to GCHQ, he said, to make the scope of the protocol clear.
“If you don’t explain how you’re going to use it, what systems it’s going to be used in, what the scope and limit of the escrow facility is, then you’re going to get bad publicity,” he said.
A spokesman for GCHQ said: “We do not recognise the claims made in this paper.
“The Mikey-Sakke protocol enables development of secure, scalable, enterprise grade products.”
In a statement, GCHQ added: “Organisations using Mikey-Sakke do not share a common Key Management Server, so it is totally wrong to suggest there is a secret master key or ‘backdoor’ that would allow GCHQ or any other third party to access real time or historic conversations.

What to do first when hit by a cyber attack

By Cyber SecurityNo Comments

At some point, the chances are growing that your business will have to deal with a cyber security incident.

At some point, the chances are growing that your business will have to deal with a cyber security incident.
But when you are under pressure and your team is stressed, people make mistakes.

Crisis patterns over the past decade have changed dramatically. 10 years ago elements such as civil war and oil prices were the top global risks to take into account. Now we see water crisis and extreme weather events taking control of keeping us up at night.

Delaying too long in making critical response decisions may exacerbate the impact of the incident but, conversely, making knee-jerk decisions can cause further damage to the business or hinder a complete response.

There are many ways you may suspect that a security incident has happened, from detecting unusual activity through proactive monitoring of critical systems or during audits, to outside notification from law enforcement and compromised data located in the wild.

However, indicators such as unusual CPU (central processing unit) and network usage on a server may have multiple potential causes, many of which are not information security incidents. So it is vital to investigate further before jumping to conclusions.

Do you have any corroborating evidence? For example, if the IDS (intrusion detection system) detects a brute force attack against the website, do web logs support this having occurred? Or, if a user reports a suspected phishing attack, has this email been received by other users and did the user click on links or open documents?

You also need to think about answering questions about the nature of the incident. Is it a generic malware infection, or an active system hack? Is there an intentional denial of service (DoS) attack in progress and is this an incidence of deliberate insider action?

Once you have confirmed an incident has occurred, you need to take time out from initial response activities to prioritise your actions and decide, definitively, what the business objectives are for the response operation. Incident triage generally consists of classifying the incident in terms of impact and urgency and how it should be handled. The incident response team can then use the impact, urgency and priority evaluation to define the objectives for the incident response operation and assign actions or further investigation, as required.

Impact classifications defined by the National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) GovCertUK and adopted by Crest, the body that represents the technical security industry, may provide a useful point of reference for initial classification based on the perceived or established impact.

Many minor types of incident can be capably handled by internal IT support and security. All events should be reported back to the information security team who will track occurrences of similar events. This will improve understanding of the IT security challenges and may raise awareness of new attacks.

It is not necessary to report on incidents with little or no impact or those affecting only a few users, such as isolated spam or antivirus alerts, minor computer hardware failure and loss of network connectivity to a peripheral device, such as a printer.

The urgency of an incident should also be assessed along with the impact. Some incidents are unlikely to worsen over time, such as the discovery of a historical compromise by a former employee. But in other cases, such as a ransomware outbreak, it may be absolutely critical to respond rapidly to isolate the infection.

Mobilising full emergency incident response capabilities may not be applicable or appropriate in every situation. You need to understand as much about what you are dealing with as you can. For example, who is the attacker? How was the attack introduced? When did the attack occur? What data or systems have been compromised? Is the attack ongoing? Why were we the target of the attack?

The goal of triage is to understand the methodology and the extent of the attack as fully as possible, in the shortest possible time.

Information about the incident, the impact, urgency and business impact analysis for the affected data or systems will guide the incident response operation. If possible, the business priorities should be pre-determined and documented in incident response plans.

Objectives for the incident response team could include:

Resumption of service as quickly as possible, where the affected system is critical in terms of availability for the business.
Rapid ring-fencing and protection of confidential information, where the affected system or network is critical in terms of confidentiality for the business.
Integrity checking of the affected systems, where integrity of data is critical for the business.
Preservation of evidential integrity, where criminal activity is suspected and prosecution is likely to be an outcome of the incident, or where culpability must be established definitively.
Identification of the origin of the threat and gathering intelligence about the activities being conducted during the incident.

For organisations with known advanced threat actors, continued covert observation of an attacker to determine their goals and modus operandi may be an objective of the incident response operation for intelligence-gathering purposes, even if the urgency for containment is high. Experienced internal or external incident handlers should be used to inform these decisions.

Once the priority of the incident and the objectives of the response have been defined, it is time to act and allocate activities to the incident response teams.

So if you want to save yourself stress, money and a damaged reputation from a cyber incident please ring us now on 01242 521967 or email assist@cyber139.com or complete the form on our contact page NOWContact Cyber 139

Average DDoS attacks fatal to most businesses, report reveals

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Criminal activity is top motivation for DDoS attacks as average attacks become strong enough to down most businesses.

Criminal activity is top motivation for DDoS attacks as average attacks become strong enough to down most businesses.

Average intensity distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are now great enough to knock most businesses offline, a report has revealed.
According to Arbor Networksí annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, the largest attack reported in the past year was 500Gbps, representing a 60 times increase in 11 years.

There were also reports of attacks of 450Gbps, 425Gbps and 337Gbps, but these are fairly rare, said Gary Sockrider, principal security technologist at Arbor Networks.

Another significant change, he said, is that for the first time in several years criminal activity has replaced hacktivism and vandalism as the top motive for DDoS attacks.

DDoS attacks are being used mostly by cyber criminals to demonstrate attack capabilities, mainly for extortion purposes.
A growing number of businesses are also seeing DDoS attacks being used as a distraction or smokescreen for installing malware and stealing data.
Arbor Networksí survey of more than 350 network operators, including service providers and enterprises, also revealed that complex attacks are increasing.
More than half of respondents reported multi-vector attacks that targeted infrastructure, applications and services simultaneously, up from 42% the previous year.
A third of respondents saw attacks targeting their cloud-based services, up from 19% in 2013 and 29% in 2014, while just over half of datacentre operators saw DDoS attacks saturate their internet connectivity. There was also a 10% increase from 2014 in datacentres seeing outbound attacks from servers within their networks to 34%.
According to the report, firewalls continue to fail during DDoS attacks, with more than half of enterprise respondents reporting a firewall failure as a result of a DDoS attack, up from a third the year before.
Firewalls add to the attack surface and are prone to becoming the first victims of DDoS attacks as their capacity to track connections is exhausted, the report said.
The proportion of enterprise respondents seeing malicious insiders is up on the previous year, from 12% to 17%, and the proportion of respondents reporting security incidents relating to employee-owned devices more than doubled from the previous year to 13%.
However, nearly 40% of all enterprise respondents still do not have tools deployed to monitor employee-owned devices on the network, the report said.
Response to attacks improving
On the positive side, the survey showed an increasing focus on better response, with 57% of enterprises looking to deploy systems to speed the incident response process.
Also, a third of service providers have reduced the time taken to discover an advanced persistent threat (APT) in their network to under one week, and 52% stated their discovery to containment time has dropped to under one month.
Advanced threats are one of the top concerns for enterprise organisations, the survey revealed. Loss of personal information and/or disruption of business processes are perceived as the top business risks from an advanced threat.
2015 also saw an increase in the proportion of enterprise respondents who had developed formal incident response plans, and dedicated at least some resources to respond to such incidents, up from around two-thirds to 75%.
However, it remains a challenge for companies to recruit people with the right cyber security skills to enable them to improve incident preparedness and response, with only 38% of respondents looking to expand their internal teams, down from 46% the year before.
As a result, the report showed an increasing reliance on managed services and outsourced support, with 50% of enterprises and 60% of service providers having contracted an external organisation for incident response and 74% seeing more demand from customers for managed services.

Nearly 30pc SME staff lack cyber threat training

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Some 27% of small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are failing to educate staff on the threat of a cyber attack.

Some 27pc of small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are failing to educate staff on the threat of a cyber attack.

According to research by cyber insurance provider CFC this is despite the fact that nearly fourty per cent of CFC’s claims in 2016 were caused by phishing attacks that could have been avoided with better education and training.

According to CFC, the main reason given for this it that SMEs are “not sure where to start”, which could be a result of not understanding their cyber risk profile, with 20% of SMEs never assessing the business exposure to cyber risk.

In September 2016, a Juniper Research report revealed that 74% of UK SMEs think they are safe from cyber attack, despite half of them admitting having suffered a data breach.

There is still naivety about the significance of a data breach, according to the report, which showed that although 69% of respondents would contact someone immediately if they discovered a cyber breach, 18% would wait until the next working day if they did not consider it a big problem.

CFC reported a 78% rise in cyber claims from 2015 to 2016, with 90% of claims by volume coming from businesses with less than £50 million in revenue, highlighting just how vulnerable SMEs are to relatively unsophisticated cyber attacks.

When SMEs were asked what poses the biggest threat to their business, cyber crime came in second, topped only by Brexit.

Some 31% of IT companies report cyber crime as the main threat, followed by 25% in the manufacturing sector. By comparison, just 8% overall are concerned about traditional crime. Despite these worries, 80% of SMEs still do not buy cyber insurance.

At CFC’s recent Cyber Symposium, Inga Beale, CEO of Lloyd’s, said: “It’s one of the most high profile risks businesses are facing at the moment, and yet CEOs seem to be in denial about its impacts and their ability to deal with it.

“Businesses are either not looking for solutions, or if they are, they don’t know where to find them or understand the value of them. Insurers need to explain the benefits cyber insurance can bring.”

Graeme Newman, chief innovation officer at CFC, said it was worrying to see that 56% of SMEs do not have an incident response plan in place that outlines roles and responsibilities in the event of a cyber attack.

“SMEs must take a two-pronged approach to guarding against an attack – implementing good security and risk management practices along with a strong cyber insurance policy,” he said.

“For SMEs that are time-poor and cash-strapped, cyber insurance policies exist not only to pay for financial losses should their systems be compromised, but also to help them handle and resolve incidents quickly and effectively.”

However, Newman predicted that although only 9% of SMEs are worried about regulatory fines as a result of a cyber attack, that figure is likely to increase once companies are required to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from 25 May 2018.

Whereas the UK’s privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, is currently able to issue penalties of up to £500,000, the GDPR will introduce fines of up to €20 million or 4% of an organisation’s annual global turnover, whichever is greater.

This means that if data breaches remain at 2015 levels, the fines paid to the European regulator could see a near 90 fold increase, from £1.4 billion in 2015 to £122 billion, the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) has calculated, based on the maximum fine of 4% of global turnover.

For UK SMEs, this could see regulatory fines for data breaches rise to £52 billion, a 57 fold increase, averaging £13,000 per SME.

So if you want to save yourself stress, money and a damaged reputation from a cyber incident please ring us now on 01242 521967 or email assist@cyber139.com or complete the form on our contact page NOWContact Cyber 139

Kreb’s Immutable Truths About Data Breaches

By Cyber SecurityNo Comments

Cyber 139 have been following Brian Kreb’s writings for a while and his Dilbert style post below caught our imagination:

Cyber 139 have been following Brian Kreb's writings for a while and his Dilbert style post below caught our imagination:

I’ve had several requests for a fresh blog post: A list of immutable truths about data breaches, cybersecurity and the consequences of inaction.

“There are some fairly simple, immutable truths that each of us should keep in mind, truths that apply equally to political parties, organizations and corporations alike:

-If you connect it to the Internet, someone will try to hack it.

-If what you put on the Internet has value, someone will invest time and effort to steal it.

-Even if what is stolen does not have immediate value to the thief, he can easily find buyers for it.

-The price he secures for it will almost certainly be a tiny slice of its true worth to the victim.

-Organizations and individuals unwilling to spend a small fraction of what those assets are worth to secure them against cybercrooks can expect to eventually be relieved of said assets.”

They may not be complete, but as a set of truisms these tenets probably will age pretty well. After all, taken as a whole they are practically a model Cybercriminal Code of Ethics, or a cybercrook’s social contract.

Nevertheless, these tenets might be even more powerful if uttered in the voice of the crook himself. That may be more in keeping with the theme of this blog overall, which seeks to explain cybersecurity and cybercrime concepts through the lens of the malicious attacker (often this is a purely economic perspective).

So let’s rifle through this ne’er-do-well’s bag of tricks, tools and tells. Let us borrow from his literary perspective. I imagine a Cybercriminal Code of Ethics might go something like this (again, in the voice of a seasoned crook):

-If you hook it up to the Internet, we’re gonna hack at it.

-If what you put on the Internet is worth anything, one of us is gonna try to steal it.

-Even if we can’t use what we stole, it’s no big deal. There’s no hurry to sell it. Also, we know people.

-We can’t promise to get top dollar for what we took from you, but hey — it’s a buyer’s market. Be glad we didn’t just publish it all online.

-If you can’t or won’t invest a fraction of what your stuff is worth to protect it from the likes of us, don’t worry: You’re our favorite type of customer!

From: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/krebss-immutable-truths-about-data-breaches/