There
were some very interesting events occurring over the past week on the
Information Security front. More specifically, we saw Russia
preparing for an enormous attack on Ukraine using a massive botnet
of IoT devices. Anyone who watched the UEFA Champions League final in
Kiev over the weekend should be thankful the FBI stepped in and took
control of the botnet before any damage could be done. See below for
some of the notable InfoSec events from the past week.
Russia is infecting thousands of home routers with a new IoT malware named VPNFilter. The resulting effects could incapacitate a substantial portion of Ukraine's Internet infrastructure.
Malicious actors, such as the actors behind the SamSam and CryptON Ransomware strains, are still actively and easily compromising machines with open and unsecure RDP ports. If you want to avoid the pains and costs of dealing with Ransomware remediation, close off any unnecessary open ports, or at the very least, lock their access down to specific IP addresses.
A malicious actor made over $18 Million by combining two attacks on the Bitcoin Gold cryptocurrency exchanges. The two attacks leveraged by the actor are a 51% attack and a double spend attack. This is an interesting event, since a 51% attack defeats an essential characteristic of blockchain, which is to be distributed in nature.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hacker-makes-over-18-million-in-double-spend-attack-on-bitcoin-gold-network/
Mozilla
is rolling out multi-factor authentication for Firefox accounts. For
anyone who syncs their browser settings, bookmarks, etc. across
multiple devices, multi-factor authentication is a must. Additionally,
many users store passwords in their browsers, which makes the added
security of multi-factor authentication via an app, such as Google
Authenticator, even more critical.
The
General Data Protection Regulation officially went into effect on
Friday, May 25, 2018. Adhering to this regulation is critical for any
organization who collects personal data on European Union citizens. In
the context of the GDPR, personal data includes items such as name,
physical address, IP address, and digital cookies. If you suspect you
may need to comply with the GDPR, I encourage you to reach out to an
organization who can help guide you through this process.
