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Cyber Security Roundup for April 2019

by SecurityExpert on May 1, 2019

The UK government controversially gave a green light to Huawei get involved with the building of the UK’s 5G networks, although the Chinese tech giant role will be limited to non-sensitive areas of the network, such as providing antennas. This decision made by Theresa May came days after US intelligence announced Huawei was Chinese state funded, and amidst reports historical backdoors in Huawei products, stoking up the Huawei political and security row even further this month, and has resulted in the UK Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, being sacked.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) launched a free online tool called “Exercise in a Box“, designed by the UK cyber intelligence boffins to help organisations prepare in managing major cyber attacks. The premise, is the tool will help UK organisations avoid scenarios such as the 2017’s Wannacry attacks, which devastated NHS IT systems and placed patient lives at risk.

German drug manufacturing giant, Beyer, found a malware infection, said to originate from a Chinese group called “Wicked Panda”. The malware in question was WINNIT, which is known in the security industry and allows remote access into networks, allowing hackers to deliver further malware and to conduct exploits. In my view, the presence of WINNIT is a sure sign a covert and sustained campaign by a sophisticated threat actor, likely focused on espionage given the company’s sector. Beyer stressed there was no evidence of data theft, but were are still investigating.

Another manufacturing giant severely hit by a cyber attack this month was Aebi Schmidt. A ransomware outbreak impacted its business’ operations globally, with most of the damage occurring at their European base. The ransomware wasn’t named, but it left multiple Windows systems, on their presumably flat network infrastructure, paralyzed.

Facebook may have announced the dawn of their “privacy evolution” at the end of April, but their privacy woes still continue, after Upguard researchers found and reported 540 Million Facebook member records on an unsecured AWS S3 bucket. The “Cultura Colectiva” dataset contained 146GB of data with 540 million records showing comments, likes, reactions, account names, Facebook IDs and more. Looks like Facebook really have their work cut in restoring their consumer’s faith in protecting their privacy.

UK businesses saw a significant increase in cyber attacks in 2019 according to a report by insurer Hiscox, with 55% of respondents reporting they had faced a cyber attack in 2019, up from 40% from last year.

A survey by the NCSC concluded most UK users are still using weak passwords. Released just before CyberUK 2019 conference in Glasgow, which I was unable attend due work commitments, said the most common password on breached accounts was”123456″, used by 23.2 million accounts worldwide. Next on the list was “123456789” and “qwerty”, “password” and “1111111”. Liverpool was the most common Premier League Football team used as a password, with Blink 182 the most common music act. The NCSC also published a separate analysis of the 100,000 most commonly re-occurring passwords that have been accessed by third parties in global cyber breaches. So password still remains the biggest Achilles’ heel with our security.

The UK hacktivist threat came back to the fore this month, after the Anonymous Group took revenge on the UK government for arresting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, by attacking Yorkshire Councils. I am not sure what Yorkshire link with Assange actually is, but the website for Barnsley Council was taken down by a DDoS attack, a tweet from the group CyberGhost404 linked to the crashed Barnsley Council website and said “Free Assange or chaos is coming for you!”. A tweet from an account called ‘Anonymous Espana’ with an image, suggested they had access to Bedale Council’s confidential files, and were threatening to leak them.

Microsoft Outlook.com, Hotmail and MSN users are reported as having their accounts compromised. TechCrunch revealed the breach was caused due to the hackers getting hold of a customer support tech’s login credentials. Over two million WiFi passwords were found exposed on an open database by the developer of WiFi Finder. The WiFi Finder App helps to find and log into hotspots. Two in every three hotel websites leak guest booking details and personal data according to a report. Over 1,500 hotels in 54 countries failed to protect user information.

Finally, but not lest, a great report by Recorded Future on the raise of the dark web business of credential stuffing, titled “The Economy of Credential Stuffing Attacks“. The report explains how low-level criminals use automated ‘checkers’ tools to validate compromised credentials, before selling them on.

I am aware of school children getting sucked into this illicit world, typically starts with them seeking to take over better online game accounts after their own account is compromised, they quickly end up with more money than they can spend. Aside from keeping an eye on what your children are up to online as a parent, it goes to underline the importance of using unique complex passwords with every web account (use a password manager or vault to help you – see password security section on the Security Expert website). And always use Multi-Factor Authentication where available, and if you suspect or have are informed your account ‘may’ have compromised, change your password straight away.