Category Archives: security

Ways to harden your VPN

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Susan Bradley writes today in CSOonline about ways to improve your password hygiene, especially if you are using a VPN to connect to your corporate network. I am horrified to report that I am guilty of doing Bad Things according to Bradley, and what is worse, that I should know better. Let’s review her suggestions:

First, one of the common attacks is taking advantage of password fatigue, whereby someone can gain access to your accounts by trying to figure out your password that was published on the dark web. She writes: “Too many people merely add a letter to a password rather than choosing a better passphrase.” That hand going up in the front of the room is my own. There is no excuse for it — I have a password manager that can make my passwords as complex as need be. Sometimes I add a character in the middle of my previous password. Far better to use multi-factor authentication, she says. I would agree with her, but many of the hundreds of my logins don’t support MFA. That is another travesty, to be sure. But color me lazy.

Another no-no is defending your login by looking for what is called “impossible travel” — whereby your login happens in one place, and your credentials are used in another place halfway across the planet shortly thereafter. VPNs check for this using location tracking. Wait, I thought this was good practice? Not any more: Bradley says this offers a false sense of security and we shouldn’t rely on geolocation blocking. Attackers have figured out ways around the blocks or obscure their locations.

Finally, she offers this wisdom: “It doesn’t hurt to reevaluate your current VPN platforms and consider alternatives such as managed-cloud VPN solutions, bearing in mind that MFA should be mandatory on all accounts.”

Bradley also runs AskWoody, another excellent resource.

On cargo cranes and undersea cables

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What do cargo cranes, drones and undersea cables have in common? This isn’t a trick question. All three have significant intersections with Chinese businesses, and all three could be considered critical infrastructure elements that has got our Congress worried. And while normally I wouldn’t highlight the fear mongering (we have enough of that, especially lately), this seems to merit some attention.

A joint Congressional report was released this week which focuses on Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries, a Chinese company which accounts for roughly 80% of the ship-to-shore port cranes operational in the US, and 70% of the worldwide port cranes. These are those huge structures that take cargo off and on container ships. What has got Congress worried is that the cranes are fitted with cellular modems which may have remote software installed. Much of the control systems used by these cranes is subcontracted to industrial suppliers such as ABB and Siemens. However, their gear is shipped to Shanghai and installed by the Chinese before the crane is sent to the ultimate port destination. The investigation found that these companies allow for their gear to be sitting in China for long periods of time outside of their operational control. As you might have guessed, there are no US-based crane manufacturers.

The report cites that more than a dozen software vulnerabilities from SZHI have been reported to American but not Chinese security regulators, saying that it could be a potential national cybersecurity issue.

Let’s move on to drones. The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Monday to bar new drones from Chinese drone manufacturer DJI from operating in the United States, one of a series of measures aimed at China that lawmakers are considering this week. The bill, which still needs to be approved by the Senate before it could become law, would prohibit the company’s products from operating on U.S. communications infrastructure. It would not prevent existing DJI drones from operating in the United States. DJI has 80% of the US drone market share and 54% of the global drone market. Again, one motivation for this proposed ban is the potential for data collection from their operation. Another is the recent fears about Tik Tok data ownership.

Finally, Tom’s Hardware reports that the US and EU are working on a draft statement about undersea communications cable ownership. The proposed language would intentionally exclude Chinese ownership and ask member countries to only consider “trusted suppliers from allied countries,” and require cable operators to have supply chain and data security measures in place, along with more transparent ownership documentation. The lofty proposed language doesn’t specify any enforcement mechanisms, however. The cable market is not yet dominated by any Chinese supplier and is quite competitive. The major US supplier is SubCom.  You might have guessed that here the US dominates in terms of cable ownership, with Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook/Meta owning or leasing at least half of all undersea bandwidth. I am not sure whether FAANG or China would be more of an issue to our regulators.

It is hard to sort out the technology issues from the political, something we have seen with the various Tik Tok screeds. it is clear that figuring out what is happening, understanding the extent of Chinese market control, and understanding whether insidious remote control software is actually present or could be present is a difficult lift.

CSOonline: AI-SPM buyer’s guide

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Widespread adoption of generative AI across businesses has increased the need for contingencies, including AI security software. It is a tall order because AI’s reach into an organization’s infrastructure and data is enormous, meaning that there is a broad spectrum of protective measures required. This is one of the reasons why attackers are drawn to AI abuses.

I examined nine vendors’ tools that handle AI security posture management (AI-SPM). This is an emerging field and unfortunately that means most products are nowhere near as comprehensive or as integrated as they could be. You can read my buyer’s guide in CSOonline here. For your reference, here are a collection of AI SPM screenshots

The evolution of how brand impersonation attacks use social media

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A new academic study of more than 1.3 million social media accounts was given recently at this month’s Usenix conference in Philadelphia. The paper, entitled The Imitation Game: Exploring Brand Impersonation Attacks on Social Media Platforms, makes for interesting reading and sadly shows just how well developed this ecosystem is. Ironically, as business brands pay more attention to social media interactions with their customers, they also enable imposters to launch attacks because people now expect companies to interact with social media. This means that there are many scam accounts that impersonate the brands to create confusion. These lure customers into providing private data and can result in stolen funds and further attacks. The research claims to be the first large-scale measurement of the social scamming ecosystem.

The research team, which was composed of academics from Germany and the US as well as from Paypal, identified almost 350,000 usernames performing various typosquatting techniques to impersonate more than 2,800 brands across Twitter (I know it is called something else, don’t remind me), Instagram, YouTube and Telegram.

Typosquatting is using deliberate typos in user and domain names to make it appear that paypel_support is really the people answering your connection problems. It is not a new problem when it comes to domain names, but as I wrote earlier this year for DarkReading, its use is proliferating in a variety of ways. One way that I didn’t mention is how fraudsters are using it across social media networks. Twitter “is the primary platform for brand impersonation attacks, with fraudsters frequently using typosquatting in their usernames. Roughly a third of these deceptive profiles also use official logos to appear more legitimate.”

The team found that brand impersonation involves multiple steps: after setting up a fake profile (oftentimes using the real brand’s logo to lend legitimacy), the fraudsters engage with customers through posts and offer phony incentives such as discount cards, free services and the like. But the attackers then collect sensitive data, including identities, credit card numbers and other details that are used to engage them in other fraudulent activities.

The most commonly targeted brand is Netflix, which is troubling because right now Netflix is sending out numerous legit messages heralding a change in their account pricing. Apple is the second most targeted brand.

The researchers have several suggestions to try to stem the tide, but admit these will be tough to implement. One of them is pretty obvious: in their work with Paypal, they found that many brands haven’t done their homework and failed to use Know Your Customer methods and continually scan for stolen identities, monitoring their brand mentions online or check for fraud card usage. One recommendation is to send out a quick autoresponse to a customer query to try to engage them before the scammer does. Another is for social media platforms to validate a brand when a new account is created, so that the owner of the proposed paypel_support account really is someone@paypal.com and not fakeuser123123@gmail.

Tech+Main podcast: The changing role of today’s CISOs

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I spoke to Shaun St. Hill, host of the Tech&Main podcast, about the latest YL Ventures CISO Circuit Report. They have a very strong advisory panel of security professionals and annually poll them about industry trends, what their biggest organizational challenges are, and how they interact with their management and boards of directors to protect their companies.

You can listen to the 30 min. podcast here.

CSOonline: Port shadowing is yet another VPN weakness ripe for exploit

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A new flaw in virtual private networks (VPNs) was reported last week at a security conference. The flaw, discovered by a collection of academic and industry researchers, has to do with a vulnerability in how VPN servers assign TCP/IP communication ports and use this to attack their connection tracking feature. This flaw, called port shadowing, is yet another weakness in VPNs that corporate security managers have to worry about. As you can see from the chart below, it goes to the way modern VPNs are designed and depends on Network Address Translation (NAT) and how the VPN software consumes NAT resources to initiate connection requests, allocates IP addresses, and sets up network routes.

I write about this issue for CSO here.

How to stop face fraud schemes

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The latest in face fraud has little to do with AI-generated deep fake videos, according to new research this week from Joseph Cox at 404 Media. It involves a clever combination of video editing, paying unsuspecting people to record their faces and holding up to the camera blank pieces of paper. Sites such as Fotodropy and others have sprung up that have real people (as shown here) that are the face models, moving their heads and eyes about at random during the course of the video.

This goes beyond more simplistic methods of holding up a printed photograph or using a 3D-printed mask of a subject, what was known as face spoofing. That produced a static image, but many financial sites have moved to more complex detection methods, requiring a video to show someone is an actual human. These methods are called document liveness checks, and they are increasingly being employed as part of know-your-customer (KYC) routines to catch fraudsters.

The goal is not to have your actual face on a new account but someone that is under the control of the hacker. Once the account is vetted, it then can be used in various scams, with a “verified” ID that can lend the whole scam more believable.

Back in the pre-digital days, KYC often meant that a potential customer would have to pay an in-person visit to their local bank or other place of business, and hand over their ID card. A human employee would then verify that the ID matched the person’s face and other details. That seems so quaint now.

The liveness detection does more than have a model mug before the camera, and requires a customer to follow stage directions (look up, look to your left) in real time. This avoids any in-person verification in near-real-time and shifts the focus from physical ID checks to more digital methods. Of course, these methods are subject to all sorts of attacks just like anything else that operates across the internet.

There are several vendors who have these digital liveness detection tools, including Accurascan, ShuftiPro, IDnow.IO and Sensity.AI, just to name a few that I found. Some of these features can measure blood flow across your face and capture other live biometric data. This post from IDnow goes into more detail about the ways facial recognition has been defeated in the past. It is definitely a cat-and-mouse game: as the defenders come up with new tools, the fraudsters come up with more sophisticated ways around them. “This had led to growing research work on machine learning techniques to solve anti-spoofing and liveness checks,” they wrote in their post.

The one fly in these liveness routines is that to be truly effective, they have to distinguish between real and fake ID documents. This isn’t all that different from the in-person KYC verification process, but if you paste in a fake driver’s license or passport document into your video, your detection system may not have coverage on that particular document. When you consider that there are nearly 200 countries with their own passports and each country has dozens if not hundreds of potential other ID documents, that is a lot of code to train these recognition systems properly.

Note that the liveness spoofing methods are different from deepfake videos, which basically attach someone’s face to a video of someone else’s body. They are also a proprietary and parallel path to the EU’s Digital Wallet Consortium, which attempts to standardize on a set of cross-border digital IDs for its citizenry.

CSOonline: CISOs must move quickly to resolve Kaspersky software ban

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The US government enacted new restrictions on Kaspersky’s customers, indicting 12 of its executives and prohibiting further sales of its software and services in June. The regulations augment existing bans from using its software by US federal agencies that began several years ago and have spread to similar bans by federal agencies in places such as Lithuania and the Netherlands.

The action coordinated efforts by both the Commerce and Treasury departments, based on national security risks about any potential cooperation with Russian intelligence agents.

You can read my analysis for CSO here and what IT managers need to do if they are still using their software tools. 

CSOonline: What prevents SMBs from adopting SSO

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A new report by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is the latest research to point out the “Barriers to Single Sign-On (SSO) Adoption for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses” – which is the report’s title. While the listed reasons aren’t new or even unexpected, it is a good summary of the steep climb that many SMBs have in implementing SSO. CISA convened a series of focus groups of various stakeholders, including the SSO vendors and their SMB customers and channel providers, along with network auditors.

CISA’s report cites several reasons why SSO hasn’t been deployed by smaller organizations, including greater administrative implementation burdens, lack of technical know-how within SMB IT departments, and incomplete support documentation. You can read my analysis about the report in CSOonline here.

Big if true: creating bespoke online realities is dangerous

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Jack Posobiec, Mike Benz, Justine Sacco, Samara Duplessis. If you have never heard of any of these people, this post might be illuminating about how online conspiracies are created and thrive. It is based on a new book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality,” by Renee DiResta, a computer science researcher whom I have followed over many years. DiResta has been involved in debunking various memes, such as Pizzagate, “stolen” elections, anti-vaxxers, Wayfair selling kids inside their filing cabinets and numerous other cabals. It is now quite possible to mass-produce unreality.

Her book describes the toxic mixture of influencers, algorithms and crowd responses to construct various intricate and believable online conspiracies. She calls this unholy trinity a bespoke reality, used as a self-reinforcing mechanism that has been constructed over the years to cause a lot of pain and suffering for unsuspecting people. “Platforms have imbued crowds with new qualities. They are no long fleeting and local but persistent and global,” she writes. She herself has been the target of a few internet mobs, getting sued, doxxed, misquoted and more. Earlier this summer, she lost her job at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a research outfit she ran with Alex Stamos, who left last year. That link describes what SIO will become without their leadership, and it is debatable if the operation still really exists.

Clearly, “it is not a good time to be in the content moderation industry,” said 404 Media’s Jason Koebler. Trust and safety moderation teams are all but disbanded, and big consulting contracts to comb through the millions of toxic posts on various social networks aren’t being renewed. Facebook announced earlier this year they were shutting down CrowdTangle, its major research tool, to be replaced by something that may or not actually be useful.  We all know what happened over at Twitter when it was bought by a billionaire man-boy, such as repricing API access to the Twitter APIs. What used to be free back in the Before Times now costs $42,000 a month. And new research from CheckMyAds indicate that advertisers there are returning back, only this time being shoehorned into comments, including comments of posts that violate its own content rules about hate speech.

@checkmyads

Elon Musk’s X placed ads for dozens of brands in the replies below posts that violate the X Rules against hateful content. Here’s what we found when we looked of a sampling of posts.

♬ original sound – Check My Ads

It seems all social media have adopted a model of toxic influencer-as-a-service. “What matters is keeping fans engaged, aggrieved and subscribed,” says DiResta. She talks about how the influencer is not just telling the story, but becomes part of the story itself. They can adopt one of several roles or personas: the Entertainer, the Explainer, the Bestie, Idols, and Gurus. There are generals, who keep the mob all in a lather, and Reflexive Contrarians, a particular type of explainer that tell you why everything you know is wrong, and Propagandists, and the Perpetually Aggrieved. This latter type have a solid understanding of how platform algorithms amplify their content, and yet also can avoid their moderation efforts, when they cry “censorship” if they run afoul of them.

No matter what type of influencer one is, the real measure of success is when they amass a large enough audience they become like Enron, “too big to cancel.” At that point, truth and interest all become relative, and almost irrelevant, what she calls the Fantasy Industrial Complex, the cinematic universe that is no different from the comics.

But the cinematic universe has to have its villains to succeed. If you create an online service that focuses on a particular self-selected audience (say Parler as an example), you lose the ability to fight the others, and your perpetual complaints don’t land. “There is no opportunity to spin up an aggrievement fest over being wrongfully moderated,” she writes. By design, you can’t own your enemies. So sad.

The title of this post — “big if true” — refers to what influencers say in their rush to publish some content. “Experts may wait to be sure of something,” says DiResta. “But not influencers. And if this turns out to be false? Oh, well, they were just sharing their opinion and just asking questions.”  Trolling is fun, and quite profitable, it turns out ” And it almost doesn’t matter if the statements actually advance a cause or prove anything. “The point is the fight. Winning insights, in fact, negatively impacts the influencer because resolution would reduce the potential for future monetizable content,” she writes.

This has several implications. We are no longer in the arena of freedom of speech: instead, we debate the freedom of reach. It isn’t about hosting content on a particular platform, but how it is promoted and packaged. We aren’t talking about the marketplace of ideas, but the way those ideas are manipulated.

DiResta’s book should be required reading for all PR and marketers. The last portion of her book has some very concrete suggestions on how to turn down the toxicity, and try to return to a bespoke world that actually has some basis in truth. If you don’t want to read it, I suggest watching the middle third or so of her interview with Quentin Hardy.And maybe re-evaluate your social media presence. “If we want virtual town squares” in our online world, she says “we have to act like the people on them are our actual neighbors.”