WannaCry biggest incident to date for National Cyber Security Centre

May 18, 2017June 3, 2017 By Cyber SecurityNo Comments

The WannaCry ransomware attack that started on 12 May 2017 is the biggest single incident that the new UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has faced.

Although the global ransomware attack that heavily affected the NHS was unwelcome, it has provided an opportunity to test systems and raise awareness on key issues, according to Alex Dewdney, director for engagement and advice at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

“If you wanted to mount a national communications programme to make people sit up and take notice, you couldn’t have designed one better than this,” he told the Security Innovation Network (Sinet) Global Cybersecurity Innovation Summit in London.

“I never thought I would hear so many ministers using the word ‘patch’, which has now become part of everyday conversation, so we need to take that opportunity and to build on that.”

Dewdney emphasised that the NHS was not targeted specifically, although NHS networks were affected significantly in the UK. Other UK organisations were affected, but the diversity of victim organisations was much greater in other countries around the world, including Russia.

Although the spread of the ransomware has slowed, it spread initially very quickly by using a specific vulnerability in the Microsoft file sharing protocol sever message block known as SMB to propagate in and between networks.

“In March 2017, Microsoft issued a patch for supported operating systems, and following the attack they issued emergency patches for unsupported operating systems as well,” said Dewdney, noting that while these patches prevent the spread of the infection, they do not help organisations to get back encrypted data.

Dewdney confirmed that the attackers behind the ransomware are still unknown, but he said the level of sophistication is well within the reach of “criminal entities” requiring the NCSC to work at an extremely high tempo. “It is easily the biggest and most complex cyber incident the NCSC has had to manage so far,” he said.

In response to the attacks, the NCSC’s incident management function was called into action. The initial focus was on understanding the technical characteristics of the attack, how it was spreading, and who the victims were.

The incident management team was also working to establish who was behind the attack and what the initial attack vector was, but these questions remain unanswered to a high level of confidence five days after the attack.

The NCSC also started looking at ways to protect victims and potential victims in terms of publishing advice on how to immunise against the ransomware and contain its spread, as well as what to do if already a victim. The NCSC was also working directly with some victim organisations to help put guidance into practice and help remediate.

The incident underlined the importance of partnerships for the NCSC, said Dewdney, including partnerships that were formed to scale the response and make inroads into this problem in a way that the NCSC could not have done on its own.

“We are still working very closely with the National Crime Agency (NCA), which has staff embedded in our teams. The NCA was able to deploy on the ground with victims at scale. They are also a vital source of information and forensic data, as well as analytic and investigative effort,” he said.

The NCSC is also still working with NHS digital and Care Cert. “The size and complexity of the health sector meant that we needed that central docking point to work with, and they did a fantastic job under very difficult circumstances,” said Dewdney.

The role of the NCSC’s industry partners was also absolutely critical, he said. “I cannot emphasise enough how grateful we are for the extent to which our partners in the cyber security industry really leaned in to help and pool the information they were gathering.”

According to Dewdney, the Cisp cyber information sharing platform “really came into its own”, both as a platform for sharing information and for discussion. “We need to build on that as a really key way of getting stakeholders to have live discussions about this kind of problem,” he said.

There was an international aspect too, said Dewdney, including the information that was provided to the international computer emergency response network and collaboration with the US.

At the same time, he said it was a truly national response, with the NCSC quickly establishing contact with authorities in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland.

Dewdney also highlighted the importance and the challenges of the media. “I think we did pretty well at pace in briefing senior politicians to speak, preparing ourselves directly in broadcast media, and using our web presence and social media to get the right messages across at the right time.

“LinkedIn proved to be a really important and useful platform, but we didn’t really engage in that, and that is an important lesson for us,” he said.

Overall, Dewdney said the NCSC bringing various organisations together under one roof also really proved its worth.

“There was a lot of consistency in what government was saying – officials, ministers and across our platforms. We achieved a greater consistency and therefore a greater sense of authoritativeness in what we were saying than we would have achieved before the NCSC was set up. We were able to get the messages out quite quickly and provide the assurance that patients’ confidential data had not been stolen,” he said.

However, he admitted that producing specific, usable and helpful guidance was a challenge. “How do you get messages across that are sufficiently technically detailed to be of practical use, but also easy to understand and follow.”

The NCSC decided therefore to publish a set of guidance for enterprises and another set for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and consumers, which is continually being refined and updated in response to feedback from those communities.

“We are really in the market for feedback around how we are getting those messages across and how they can be improved and made more useful,” said Dewdney.

One of the key lessons learned, he said, was about the power as well as the limitation of advice and guidance.

Dewdney said people are continually told to patch and update the systems, “but the fact is that people don’t always do it, so what we have got to realise as cyber security practitioners is that advice and even instruction is much easier to give than it is to follow”.

“We have to recognise that in the real world competing pressures and hard choices can easily get in the way. So we will continue with those exhortations, but as we mobilise campaigns to really make this happen across government, business, critical infrastructure and for consumers, we need to find the right mix of the ‘stick’ on the one hand and help to overcome those hurdles on the other,” said Dewdney.

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 NOW

ICO reports record number of data breaches and fines

May 12, 2017June 3, 2017 By Cyber SecurityNo Comments

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.”

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Russian cyber espionage highlights need to improve email security

May 6, 2017June 3, 2017 By Cyber SecurityNo Comments

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.

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How cyber warfare is escalating- machines v hackers

April 25, 2017June 3, 2017 By Cyber SecurityNo Comments

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.

What to do first when hit by a cyber attack

April 2, 2017June 3, 2017 By Cyber SecurityNo Comments

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 NOW

Average DDoS attacks fatal to most businesses, report reveals

April 2, 2017May 17, 2017 By Cyber SecurityNo Comments

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.

Glos Police warn cyber crime is more dangerous than streets at midnight

January 16, 2017 By Cyber SecurityNo Comments

Gloucestershire Police said in Dec 2016 that within our county 54 % of all reported crime was cyber related.

In other words, you have a much higher chance of being mugged online in your home or work place than you do wandering around any of our high streets at midnight at the weekend.

According to the latest report by the Office of National Statistics (ONS), there were 5.8 million incidents of cyber crime and fraud in the 12 months up to March 2016, affecting one in 10 people in England and Wales.

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) found last month that small firms are unfairly carrying the cost of cyber crime in an increasingly vulnerable digital economy being collectively attacked seven million times per year, costing the UK economy an estimated £5.26 billion.

Despite the vast majority of small firms (93%) taking steps to protect their business from digital threats, two thirds (66%) have been a victim of cyber crime in the last two years. Over that period, those affected have been victims on four occasions on average, costing each business almost £3000 in total.

The types of cyber crime most commonly affecting small businesses are phishing emails (49%), spear phishing emails (37%), and malware attacks (29%).

Small firms are also concerned about hacking and fraud when the card is not present, with the average information breach setting them back 2.2 days.

However just a quarter of smaller businesses (24%) have a strict password policy, but only four per cent have a written plan of what to do if attacked online, and just two per cent have a recognised security standard such as ISO27001 or the Government’s Cyber Essentials scheme.

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 safe@cyber139.com or complete the form on our contact page NOW

Cyber 139 wishes you a secure and prosperous New Year

January 2, 2017 By Cyber SecurityNo Comments

Cyber 139 wishes you a secure and prosperous New Year for 2017.

Cheltenham based cyber security and protection firm Cyber 139 wishes you a secure and prosperous New Year for 2017.

Overall 24% of ALL businesses surveyed in 2016 had had one or more cyber security breaches in the past 12 months- so please don’t let you be a victim in 2017.

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 safe@cyber139.com or complete the form on our contact page NOW

Camelot’s National Lottery accounts are hacked

November 30, 2016 By Cyber SecurityNo Comments

It could be you- as tens of thousands of online lottery Camelot players’ accounts are hacked.

National Lottery operator Camelot says the login details of thousands of people who do the lottery online have been stolen.

There are 9.5 million national lottery players registered online, but Camelot said only around 26,500 accounts were accessed. It added that fewer than 50 accounts have had suspicious activity, such as personal details being changed, since the breach.

The company said it unearthed “suspicious activity on a very small proportion of our players’ online National Lottery Accounts” during its online security monitoring on 28 November 2016.

It added that there has been no unauthorised access to core systems. “In addition, no money has been deposited or withdrawn from affected player accounts,” said Camelot.

“However, we do believe that this attack may have resulted in some of the personal information that the affected players hold in their online account being accessed.”

The company said it is now trying to find out what happened, but it believes that “the email address and password used on the National Lottery website may have been stolen from another website where affected players use the same details”.

The affected accounts have been suspended and Camelot will contact the account holders to re-activate them. Camelot added that it is working with the National Cyber Security Centre on the incident.

Are you an online lottery player?

If so, just crossing your fingers is not enough. To mitigate risks in the short term, account holders should update passwords and avoid using the same password across multiple sites.

Why are businesses ignoring cybercrime and cyber risks?

November 21, 2016 By Cyber SecurityNo Comments

How can cyber security professionals help businesses to understand the cyber risks?

Business owners don’t like spending money on anything that doesn’t make them more money. Even insurance is a grudge purchase. I’m never fond of paying a high premium, but if there’s a risk that I could lose my livelihood and house if I fail to get the right insurance cover, then I accept that.

Mitigating cyber risk is exactly the same. If companies don’t do it, then they could go out of business.

But there’s definitely over-confidence in the space, and I often hear “well, it will never happen to us, we’ve just installed anti-virus on all of our laptops”.

So exactly how do you give the business that niggling feeling that encourages them to mitigate security risks? The reactive approach definitely isn’t the right way, demanding cash after something has happened to plug a hole.

The sales led approach isn’t the right way, where security suppliers force silver bullets down your throat and you end up buying something to help them meet their sales targets, regardless of how nice it makes your treasured server rack look.

It’s about taking a proactive stance, and dealing with cyber security before something happens; and being prepared to tell security suppliers where to stick their hardware if it doesn’t fit into your security programme.

I’ve never seen a business turn down a carefully prepared cyber security risk mitigation programme that fits the business. Fortunately, creating one is remarkably simple. Define scope. Carry out a security audit on said scope. Conduct a gap analysis, work out three costed options with pros and cons to address each gap, and present to the business.

But that still doesn’t mean the business will buy in. We’re missing that niggling feeling. Much as I dislike scare tactics, now would probably be a good time to think about them, with a short, sharp exercise that demonstrates to the business exactly what could go wrong in their cyber world.

Simulate a phishing email. It’s easy enough. Put an EICAR (European expert group for IT-security) malware test file on your CEO’s laptop. Take your CFO’s laptop away for an hour and simulate critical hardware theft. Leave a suspicious package in the mail room. Simulate a web server hack.

These exercises would take less than an hour of the board’s time and, while they won’t get the cheque book out, they will raise awareness over time. Throw in a few fire drills to keep their minds off cyber for a bit. Simulate a flood. The point being, over time, your business can become cyber-aware; and ultimately this loosens the purse strings and gets you that next hire and support for implementing change.