Day: November 14, 2016

ISACA’s inaugural CSX Europe conference convened last week in London, and I had the privilege of serving as emcee. During a panel discussion on the second day of the conference, Mark Sayers of the UK’s Cabinet Office discussed the announcement that morning of the UK Government’s £1.9bn investment in a national cybersecurity strategy—a strategy that makes clear the UK’s preparedness for cyber attacks and will include a cyber security skills strategy. Sayers made it clear that organizations like ISACA are extremely important to further the initiative.

The cyber security event left a strong impression on attendees, including several critical takeaways:

•  Collaboration is critical. Intel’s Raj Samani emphasized collaboration and communication to best contend with today’s threat landscape. Professionals on the more technical side need to be able to communicate with business decision-makers and other stakeholders to effectively solve problems. As speaker Aviram Zrahia notes, “one company’s detection become another’s protection.”
•  Internet of Things devices pose new security challenges. Security professionals are capable of preventing attacks, but consumers need to understand that connected devices have security vulnerabilities. Justine Bone, director and CEO, MedSec, presented the findings of ISACA’s new firmware security report, highlighting how easy it is for security to be overlooked when creating IoT devices.
•  New solutions are needed. In closing the conference, technology futurist Simon Moores observed that organisations will no longer be able to handle the scale of cyber threats alone. In many cases, automated, cloud-based solutions involving artificial intelligence (AI) will be part of the solution, though there is no substitute for developing a highly skilled workforce.

The conference also provided another valuable networking opportunity through ISACA’s Connecting Women Leaders in Technologyprogram, which is helping to advance female leadership within the global technology workforce.

Editor’s note: Additional insights from global security experts will be on display at CSX 2016 Asia Pacific, set to make its debut 14-16 November in Singapore. Next year’s CSX Europe conference will take place in London on 30 October-1 November 2017.

Richard Hollis, CISM, CRISC, CPP, PCI, QSA, Chief Executive Officer for Risk Factory Ltd and emcee of CSX 2016 Europe

[ISACA Now Blog]

Smart entrepreneurs have long employed differential pricing strategies to get more money from customers they think will pay a higher price. Cyber criminals have been doing the same thing on a small scale with ransomware: demanding a larger ransom from individuals or companies flush with cash, or organizations especially sensitive to downtime and service disruptions. But now it appears cyber criminals have figured out how to improve their ROI by attaching basic price discrimination to large-scale, phishing-driven ransomware campaigns. So choosing to pay a ransom could come with an even heftier price tag in the near future.

Personalization made easy: no code required
Typically, a ransom payment amount is provided by a command and control server or is hardcoded into the executable. But Malware Hunter Team recently discovered a new ransomware variant called Fantom that uses the filename to set the size of the ransom demand. A post on the BleepingComputer blog explains that this allows the developer to create various distribution campaigns using the same exact sample, but request different ransom amounts depending on how the distributed file is named—no code changes required. When executed, the ransomware will examine the filename and check if it contains certain substrings. Depending on the matched substrings, it will set the ransom to a particular amount.

Businesses beware
The news is salt in the wound for businesses, which have already been targeted by ransomware at a growing pace with higher price demands. A 2016 Symantec survey found that while consumers account for a slight majority of ransomware attacks today, the long-term trend shows a steady increase in attacks on organizations.

Those most vulnerable? Healthcare and financial organizations, according to a 2016 global ransomware survey by Malwarebytes. Both industries were targeted well above the average 39 percent ransomware penetration rate. Over a one-year period, healthcare organizations were targeted the most at 53 percent penetration, with financial organizations a close second at 51 percent.

And while one-third of ransomware victims face demands of $500 or less, large organizations are being extorted for larger sums. Nearly 60 percent of all enterprise ransomware attacks demanded more than $1,000, and more than 20 percent asked for more than $10,000, according to the Malwarebytes survey.

A highly publicized five-figure ransom was demanded of the Los Angeles-based Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in February. A ransomware attack disabled access to the hospital’s network, email and patient data. After 10 days of major disruption, hospital officials paid the $17,000 (40-bitcoin) ransom to get their systems back up. Four months later, the University of Calgary paid $20,000 CDN in bitcoins to get its crippled systems restored.

Now with a new price-discrimination Fantom on the loose, organizations can expect to be held hostage for even higher ransoms in the future.

Susan Richardson

[Cloud Security Alliance Blog]