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The Costs of Cyberattacks Are Real

February 13, 2019 — by Radware — 0

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Customers put their trust in companies to deliver on promises of security. Think about how quickly most people tick the boxes on required privacy agreements, likely without reading them. They want to believe the companies they choose to associate with have their best interests at heart and expect them to implement the necessary safeguards. The quickest way to lose customers is to betray that confidence, especially when it comes to their personal information.

Hackers understand that, too. They quickly adapt tools and techniques to disrupt that delicate balance. Executives from every business unit need to understand how cybersecurity affects the overall success of their businesses.

Long Lasting Impacts

In our digital world, businesses feel added pressure to maintain this social contract as the prevalence and severity of cyberattacks increase. Respondents to Radware’s global industry survey were definitely feeling the pain: ninety-three percent of the organizations worldwide indicated that they suffered some kind of negative impact to their relationships with customers as a result of cyberattacks.

Data breaches have real and long-lasting business impacts. Quantifiable monetary losses can be directly tied to the aftermath of cyberattacks in lost revenue, unexpected budget expenditures and drops in stock values. Protracted repercussions are most likely to emerge as a result of negative customer experiences, damage to brand reputation and loss of customers.

Indeed, expenditures related to cyberattacks are often realized over the course of several years. Here, we highlight recent massive data breaches–which could have been avoided with careful security hygiene and diligence to publicly reported system exploits:

The bottom line? Management boards and directorates should understand the impact of cyberattacks on their businesses. They should also prioritize how much liability they can absorb and what is considered a major risk to business continuity.

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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What Do Banks and Cybersecurity Have in Common? Everything.

February 7, 2019 — by Radware — 0

New cyber-security threats require new solutions. New solutions require a project to implement them. The problems and solutions seem infinite while budgets remain bounded. Therefore, the challenge becomes how to identify the priority threats, select the solutions that deliver the best ROI and stretch dollars to maximize your organization’s protection. Consultants and industry analysts can help, but they too can be costly options that don’t always provide the correct advice.

So how best to simplify the decision-making process? Use an analogy. Consider that every cybersecurity solution has a counterpart in the physical world. To illustrate this point, consider the security measures at banks. They make a perfect analogy, because banks are just like applications or computing environments; both contain valuables that criminals are eager to steal.

The first line of defense at a bank is the front door, which is designed to allow people to enter and leave while providing a first layer of defense against thieves. Network firewalls fulfill the same role within the realm of cyber security. They allow specific types of traffic to enter an organization’s network but block mischievous visitors from entering. While firewalls are an effective first line of defense, they’re not impervious. Just like surreptitious robbers such as Billy the Kid or John Dillinger, SSL/TLS-based encrypted attacks or nefarious malware can sneak through this digital “front door” via a standard port.

Past the entrance there is often a security guard, which serves as an IPS or anti-malware device. This “security guard,” which is typically anti-malware and/or heuristic-based IPS function, seeks to identify unusual behavior or other indicators that trouble has entered the bank, such as somebody wearing a ski mask or perhaps carrying a concealed weapon.

Once the hacker gets past these perimeter security measures, they find themselves at the presentation layer of the application, or in the case of a bank, the teller. There is security here as well. Firstly, authentication (do you have an account) and second, two-factor authentication (an ATM card/security pin). IPS and anti-malware devices work in
concert with SIEM management solutions to serve as security cameras, performing additional security checks. Just like a bank leveraging the FBI’s Most Wanted List, these solutions leverage crowd sourcing and big-data analytics to analyze data from a massive global community and identify bank-robbing malware in advance.

A robber will often demand access to the bank’s vault. In the realm of IT, this is the database, where valuable information such as passwords, credit card or financial transaction information or healthcare data is stored. There are several ways of protecting this data, or at the very least, monitoring it. Encryption and database
application monitoring solutions are the most common.

Adapting for the Future: DDoS Mitigation

To understand how and why cyber-security models will have to adapt to meet future threats, let’s outline three obstacles they’ll have to overcome in the near future: advanced DDoS mitigation, encrypted cyber-attacks, and DevOps and agile software development.

A DDoS attack is any cyber-attack that compromises a company’s website or network and impairs the organization’s ability to conduct business. Take an e-commerce business for example. If somebody wanted to prevent the organization from conducting business, it’s not necessary to hack the website but simply to make it difficult for visitors to access it.

Leveraging the bank analogy, this is why banks and financial institutions leverage multiple layers of security: it provides an integrated, redundant defense designed to meet a multitude of potential situations in the unlikely event a bank is robbed. This also includes the ability to quickly and effectively communicate with law enforcement. In the world of cyber security, multi-layered defense is also essential. Why? Because preparing for “common” DDoS attacks is no longer enough. With the growing online availability of attack tools and services, the pool of possible attacks is larger than ever. This is why hybrid protection, which combines both on-premise and cloud-based mitigation services, is critical.

Why are there two systems when it comes to cyber security? Because it offers the best of both worlds. When a DDoS solution is deployed on-premise, organizations benefit from an immediate and automatic attack detection and mitigation solution. Within a few seconds from the initiation of a cyber-assault, the online services are well protected and the attack is mitigated. However, on-premise DDoS solution cannot handle volumetric network floods that saturate the Internet pipe. These attacks must be mitigated from the cloud.

Hybrid DDoS protections aspire to offer best-of-breed attack mitigation by combining on-premise and cloud mitigation into a single, integrated solution. The hybrid solution chooses the right mitigation location and technique based on attack characteristics. In the hybrid solution, attack detection and mitigation starts immediately and automatically using the on-premise attack mitigation device. This stops various attacks from diminishing the availability of the online services. All attacks are mitigated on-premise, unless they threaten to block the Internet pipe of the organization. In case of pipe saturation, the hybrid solution activates cloud mitigation and the traffic is diverted to the cloud, where it is scrubbed before being sent back to the enterprise.

An ideal hybrid solution also shares essential information about the attack between on-premise mitigation devices and cloud devices to accelerate and enhance the mitigation of the attack once it reaches the cloud.

Inspecting Encrypted Data

Companies have been encrypting data for well over 20 years. Today, over 50% of Internet traffic is encrypted. SSL/TLS encryption is still the most effective way to protect data as it ties the encryption to both the source and destination. This is a double-edged sword however. Hackers are now leveraging encryption to create new, stealthy attack vectors for malware infection and data exfiltration. In essence, they’re a wolf in sheep’s clothing. To stop hackers from leveraging SSL/TLS-based cyber-attacks, organizations require computing resources; resources to inspect communications to ensure they’re not infected with malicious malware. These increasing resource requirements make it challenging for anything but purpose built hardware to conduct inspection.

The equivalent in the banking world is twofold. If somebody were to enter wearing a ski mask, that person probably wouldn’t be allowed to conduct a transaction, or secondly, there can be additional security checks when somebody enters a bank and requests a large or unique withdrawal.

Dealing with DevOps and Agile Software Development

Lastly, how do we ensure that, as applications become more complex, they don’t become increasingly vulnerable either from coding errors or from newly deployed functionality associated with DevOps or agile development practices? The problem is most cyber-security solutions focus on stopping existing threats. To use our bank analogy again, existing security solutions mean that (ideally), a career criminal can’t enter a bank, someone carrying a concealed weapon is stopped or somebody acting suspiciously is blocked from making a transaction. However, nothing stops somebody with no criminal background or conducting no suspicious activity from entering the bank. The bank’s security systems must be updated to look for other “indicators” that this person could represent a threat.

In the world of cyber-security, the key is implementing a web application firewall that adapts to evolving threats and applications. A WAF accomplishes this by automatically detecting and protecting new web applications as they are added to the network via automatic policy generation. It should also differentiate between false positives and false negatives. Why? Because just like a bank, web applications are being accessed both by desired legitimate users and undesired attackers (malignant users whose goal is to harm the application and/or steal data). One of the biggest challenges in protecting web applications is the ability to accurately differentiate between the two and identify and block security threats while not disturbing legitimate traffic.

Adaptability is the Name of the Game

The world we live in can be a dangerous place, both physically and digitally. Threats are constantly changing, forcing both financial institutions and organizations to adapt their security solutions and processes. When contemplating the next steps, consider the following:

Use common sense and logic. The marketplace is saturated with offerings. Understand how a cybersecurity solution will fit into your existing infrastructure and the business value it will bring by keeping yourorganization up and running and your customer’s data secure.
Understand the long-term TCO of any cyber security solution you purchase.
The world is changing. Ensure that any cyber security solution you implement is designed to adapt to the constantly evolving threat landscape and your organization’s operational needs.

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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Looking Past the Hype to Discover the Real Potential of AI

January 22, 2019 — by Pascal Geenens — 0

How can organizations cut through the hype around AI to understand the most important issues they should be addressing? How can they incorporate AI into their security strategies now to take advantage of the technology’s ability to detect and mitigate attacks that incorporate the same capabilities? Pascal Geenens, Radware’s EMEA security evangelist, weighs in.

What is the threat landscape, and how disruptive is it likely to be?

In the near term, cybercriminals will mainly use AI to automate attacks and improve evasion capabilities against detection systems and to increase the scale and reach of the threats. Expect to see AI used to automatically breach defenses and generate more sophisticated phishing attacks from information scraped from publicly accessible web sources. The scale of attacks will quickly escalate to volumes that we have never experienced before.

On the evasive side, machine-learning systems such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) can automatically create malware that is harder to detect and block. This technique has already been demonstrated by researchers. The MalGAN research project proposed a GAN to create evasive malware that goes undetected by all modern anti-malware systems, even the systems based on deep learning.

In the first phase, AI will be used to improve current attack tools to make them more harmful and difficult to detect.

Machine learning and automation can be leveraged to find new vulnerabilities, especially in large public clouds where cloud native systems are being built based on widely reused open-source software frameworks. Platforms running this software will become primary targets for vulnerability scanning.

Given that open-source code is readable and accessible by both criminals and security researchers, this platform may become the next battlefield with an associated “arms race” to discover, abuse or fix vulnerabilities. Deep learning will provide an advantage in discovering new vulnerabilities based on code. While open source is an easier target, even closed-source software will not escape automated attacks based on the learning process of the attack program.

Looking further ahead, I can imagine large cybercrime organizations or nation-states using AI. Where machine learning was previously used mainly for automating attacks, now AI systems such as genetic algorithms and reinforced learning will be used to automatically generate new attack vectors and breach all kinds of systems, whether cloud, IoT or ICS. Then, combine this capability with the automation of the first stage. We will face a fully automated, continuously evolving attack ecosystem that will hack, crack and improve itself over time with no limits in scale or endurance.

Cybercriminals could move from being the actual hackers, performing the real attack and penetrating defenses, to becoming maintainers and developers of the automated AI hacking machine. Machines will do the hacking; humans will focus on improving efficiency of the machines.

What vulnerabilities will make targets more attractive to criminals once AI is incorporated in their tools? How will it affect corporate espionage?

Ultimately every organization will be digitally transformed and become a primary target for automated attacks. Which targets are chosen will be solely dependent on the objective of the attack. For ransom and extortion, every organization is a good candidate target. For corporate espionage, it depends how much organizations are willing to pay to secure intellectual property in certain areas. It’s fair to say that, by definition, every organization can — and, at some point, will — be a target.

What about politically motivated cyberattacks initiated at the national level?

We’ve already witnessed attacks meant to influence public opinion and the political landscape. Such attacks are likely to grow and become more difficult to identify early in the process and to protect against once attackers leverage deep learning and broader AI technologies. Attackers have already produced automatically generated messages and discussions, as well as “deep fake” videos that are created by AI algorithms.

Influencing what topics are important and manipulating opinions are becoming new weapons of choice for nation-states. Social platform providers need to take a stance and remain as clean as possible by dedicating much of their own AI-assisted automated detection systems to stay ahead of cybercriminals and others that create and improve AI-assisted automated systems for fake content creation.

From a defense perspective, what types of AI-based products will be used to combat more technologically savvy cybercriminals?

There’s a saying in our industry that “you cannot stop what you cannot detect.” Cybersecurity has become automated for the sake of the detection of new, increasingly complex and continuously adapting threats, and deep learning is improving that capability. AI, in the broad sense of the term, will probably come into play in the near-term future rather than immediately. The current state of AI in the defense discussion is confined to the traditional machine learning, and while deep learning shows a lot of promise, it is still too challenged to be used for automated mitigation. More intelligent and self-adaptive systems, the domain of AI, are still further out when it comes to automating our cyberdefenses.

Will the use of AI-based attacks by cybercriminals drive adoption of AI-based mitigation solutions by enterprises, organizations and institutions?

Yes, but not necessarily at the same pace. There are three factors to consider — the attack vector, its speed and its evasion technique:

For example, using AI for phishing does not affect the victim in terms of change in attack vector, but it does increase the scale and number of targets, compelling every organization to improve its This protection might include AI-based systems, but not necessarily.
On the other hand, as attacks get more automated, organizations will have to automate their security to ensure that they keep on top of the rising number and accelerated speed of attacks.
When new evasion techniques based on AI are leveraged by cybercriminals, it will ultimately lead to the use of better detection systems that are based on AI.

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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5 Ways Malware Defeats Cyber Defenses & What You Can Do About It

January 17, 2019 — by Radware — 0

Malware is a key vector for data breaches. Research shows that 51% of data breaches include the usage of malware, whether for initial breach, expansion within the network or heisting data. Yet despite malware being a pivotal attack vector, companies are unable to defend against data-theft malware running wild in their network. In fact, some of the biggest and most well-publicized breaches ever were the result of undetected malware.

Why? Modern malware is built to evade traditional anti-malware defenses. Today’s malwares are sophisticated multi-vector attack weapons designed to elude detection using an array of evasion tools and camouflage techniques. In the game of chess between attackers and defenders, hackers constantly find new ways to stay one step ahead of existing defenses.

Modern Malware

Here are five common evasion techniques used by modern malware and how they beat traditional anti-malware defenses.

Polymorphic malware: Many traditional anti-malware defenses operate using known malware signatures. Modern data-theft malware counteracts this by constantly morphing or shapeshifting. By making simple changes to the code, attackers can easily generate an entirely new binary signature for the file.

Shapeshifting, zero-day malware beats signature-based defenses such as anti-virus, email filtering, IPS/IDS, and sandboxing.

File-less malware: Many anti-malware tools focus on static files and operating-systems (OS) processes to detect malicious activity. However, an increasingly common technique by attackers is to use file-less malware which is executed in run-time memory only, leaves no footprint on the target host and is therefore transparent to file-based defenses.

File-less malware beats IPS/IDS, UEBA, anti-virus, and sandboxing.

Encrypted payloads: Some anti-malware defense use content scanning to block sensitive data leakage. Attackers get around this by encrypting communications between infected hosts and Command & Control (C&C) servers.

Encrypted payloads beat DLP, EDR, and secure web gateways (SWG).

Domain generation algorithm (DGA): Some anti-malware defenses include addresses of known C&C servers, and block communication with them. However, malwares with domain generation capabilities get around this by periodically modifying C&C address details and using previously unknown addresses.

Beats secure web gateways (SWG), EDR, and sandboxing.

Host spoofing: spoofs header information to obfuscate the true destination of the data, thereby bypassing defenses that target the addresses of known C&C servers.

Beats secure web gateways (SWG), IPS/IDS and sandboxing.

What Can You Do?

Beating zero-day evasive malware is not easy, but there are several key steps you can take to severely limit its impact:

Apply multi-layer defenses: Protecting your organization against evasive malware is not a one-and-done proposition. Rather, it is an ongoing effort that requires combining endpoint defenses (such as anti-virus software) with network-layer protection such as firewalls, secure web gateways and more. Only multi-layered protection ensures complete coverage.

Focus on zero-day malware: Zero-day malware accounts for up to 50% of malware currently in circulation. Zero-day malware frequently goes unrecognized by existing anti-malware defenses and is a major source of data loss. Anti-malware defense mechanisms that focus squarely on identifying and detecting zero-day malwares is a must have.

Implement traffic analysis: Data theft malware attacks take aim at the entire network to steal sensitive data. Although infection might originate from user endpoints, it is typically the aim of attackers to expand to network resources as well. As a result, it is important for an anti-malware solution to not just focus on one area of the network or resource type, but maintain a holistic view of the entire network and analyze what is happening.

Leverage big data: A key ingredient in detecting zero-day malware is the ability to collect data from a broad information base amassed over time. This allows defenders to detect malware activity on a global scale and correlate seemingly unrelated activities to track malware development and evolution.

Read the “2018 C-Suite Perspectives: Trends in the Cyberattack Landscape, Security Threats and Business Impacts” to learn more.

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How Cyberattacks Directly Impact Your Brand: New Radware Report

January 15, 2019 — by Ben Zilberman — 0

Whether you’re an executive or practitioner, brimming with business acumen or tech savviness, your job is to preserve and grow your company’s brand. Brand equity relies heavily on customer trust, which can take years to build and only moments to demolish. 2018’s cyber threat landscape demonstrates this clearly; the delicate relationship between organizations and their customers is in hackers’ cross hairs and suffers during a successful cyberattack. Make no mistake: Leaders who undervalue customer trust–who do not secure an optimized customer experience or adequately safeguard sensitive data–will feel the sting in their balance sheet, brand reputation and even their job security.

Radware’s 2018-2019 Global Application and Network Security report builds upon a worldwide industry survey encompassing 790 business and security executives and professionals from different countries, industries and company sizes. It also features original Radware threat research, including an analysis of emerging trends in both defensive and offensive technologies. Here, I discuss key takeaways.

Repercussions of Compromising Customer Trust

Without question, cyberattacks are a viable threat to operating expenditures (OPEX). This past year alone, the average estimated cost of an attack grew by 52% and now exceeds $1 million (the number of estimations above $1 million increased 60%). For those organizations that formalized a real calculation process rather than merely estimate the cost, that number is even higher, averaging $1.67 million.

Despite these mounting costs, three in four have no formalized procedure to assess the business impact of a cyberattack against their organization. This becomes particularly troubling when you consider that most organizations have experienced some type of attack within the course of a year (only 7% of respondents claim not to have experienced an attack at all), with 21% reporting daily attacks, a significant rise from 13% last year.

There is quite a range in cost evaluation across different verticals. Those who report the highest damage are retail and high-tech, while education stands out with its extremely low financial impact estimation:

Repercussions can vary: 43% report a negative customer experience, 37% suffered brand reputation loss and one in four lost customers. The most common consequence was loss of productivity, reported by 54% of survey respondents. For small-to-medium sized businesses, the outcome can be particularly severe, as these organizations typically lack sufficient protection measures and know-how.

It would behoove all businesses, regardless of size, to consider the following:

Direct costs: Extended labor, investigations, audits, software patches development, etc.
Indirect costs: Crisis management, fines, customer compensation, legal expenses, share value
Prevention: Emergency response and disaster recovery plans, hardening endpoints, servers and cloud workloads

Risk Exposure Grows with Multi-Dimensional Complexity

As the cost of cyberattacks grow, so does the complexity. Information networks today are amorphic. In public clouds, they undergo a constant metamorphose, where instances of software entities and components are created, run and disappear. We are marching towards the no-visibility era, and as complexity grows it will become harder for business executives to analyze potential risks.

The increase in complexity immediately translates to a larger attack surface, or in other words, a greater risk exposure. DevOps organizations benefit from advanced automation tools that set up environments in seconds, allocate necessary resources, provision and integrate with each other through REST APIs, providing a faster time to market for application services at a minimal human intervention. However, these tools are processing sensitive data and cannot defend themselves from attacks.

Protect your Customer Experience

The report found that the primary goal of cyber-attacks is service disruption, followed by data theft. Cyber criminals understand that service disruptions result in a negative customer experience, and to this end, they utilize a broad set of techniques. Common methods include bursts of high traffic volume, usage of encrypted traffic to overwhelm security solutions’ resource consumption, and crypto-jacking that reduces the productivity of servers and endpoints by enslaving their CPUs for the sake of mining cryptocurrencies. Indeed, 44% of organizations surveyed suffered either ransom attacks or crypto-mining by cyber criminals looking for easy profits.

What’s more, attack tools became more effective in the past year; the number of outages grew by 15% and more than half saw slowdowns in productivity. Application layer attacks—which cause the most harm—continue to be the preferred vector for DDoSers over the network layer. It naturally follows, then, that 34% view application vulnerabilities as the biggest threat in 2019.

Essential Protection Strategies

Businesses understand the seriousness of the changing threat landscape and are taking steps to protect their digital assets. However, some tasks – such as protecting a growing number of cloud workloads, or discerning a malicious bot from a legitimate one – require leveling the defense up. Security solutions must support and enable the business processes, and as such, should be dynamic, elastic and automated.

Analyzing the 2018 threat landscape, Radware recommends the following essential security solution capabilities:

Machine Learning: As hackers leverage advanced tools, organizations must minimize false positive calls in order to optimize the customer experience. This can be achieved by machine-learning capabilities that analyze big data samples for maximum accuracy (nearly half of survey respondents point at security as the driver to explore machine-learning based technologies).
Automation: When so many processes are automated, the protected objects constantly change, and attackers quickly change lanes trying different vectors every time. As such, a security solution must be able to immediately detect and mitigate a threat. Solutions based on machine learning should be able to auto tune security policies.
Real Time Intelligence: Cyber delinquents can disguise themselves in many forms. Compromised devices sometimes make legitimate requests, while other times they are malicious. Machines coming behind CDN or NAT can not be blocked based on IP reputation and generally, static heuristics are becoming useless. Instead, actionable, accurate real time information can reveal malicious activity as it emerges and protect businesses and their customers – especially when relying on analysis and qualifications of events from multiple sources.
Security Experts: Keep human supervision for the moments when the pain is real. Human intervention is required in advanced attacks or when the learning process requires tuning. Because not every organization can maintain the know-how in-house at all times, having an expert from a trusted partner or a security vendor on-call is a good idea.

It is critical for organizations to incorporate cybersecurity into their long-term growth plans. Securing digital assets can no longer be delegated solely to the IT department. Rather, security planning needs to be infused into new product and service offerings, security, development plans and new business initiatives. CEOs and executive teams must lead the way in setting the tone and invest in securing their customers’ experience and trust.

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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10 Most Popular Blogs of 2018

December 27, 2018 — by Radware — 0

Between large scale cyberattacks, the implementation of GDPR and increasing popularity of smart home technologies (and their associated vulnerabilities), we had a lot to write about this year. Of the hundreds of blogs we published in 2018, several floated to the top in terms of readership. Below, we recap the ten most popular blogs of 2018.

Consumer Sentiments About Cybersecurity and What It Means for Your Organization

Over the past six months, the data breaches against companies such as Panera Bread, Delta Airlines and Sears, and Saks have proven we live in an age where cyberattacks and data breaches are now commonplace. The result? Cybersecurity is no longer just the topic of conversation of tech gurus and IT personnel. It has transitioned into the mainstream conversation and has become a concern of the masses. Consumers are now concerned that the organizations they are conducting business with are proactive about safeguarding their information and how they will fix it if a breach does occur. Read more…

New Threat Landscape Gives Birth to New Way of Handling Cyber Security

With the growing online availability of attack tools and services, the pool of possible attacks is larger than ever. Let’s face it, getting ready for the next cyber-attack is the new normal! This ‘readiness’ is a new organizational tax on nearly every employed individual throughout the world. Amazingly enough, attackers have reached a level of maturity and efficiency – taking advantage of the increased value and vulnerability of online targets, and resulting in a dramatic increase in attack frequency, complexity and size. Read more…

The Evolution of IoT Attacks

IoT devices are nothing new, but the attacks against them are. They are evolving at a rapid rate as growth in connected devices continues to rise and shows no sign of letting up. One of the reasons why IoT devices have become so popular in recent years is because of the evolution of cloud and data processing which provides manufacturers cheaper solutions to create even more ‘things’. Before this evolution, there weren’t many options for manufacturers to cost-effectively store and process data from devices in a cloud or data center. Older IoT devices would have to store and process data locally in some situations. Today, there are solutions for everyone and we continue to see more items that are always on and do not have to store or process data locally. Read more…

Are Your Applications Secure?

As we close out a year of headline-grabbing data breaches (British Airways, Under Armor, Panera Bread), the introduction of GDPR and the emergence of new application development architectures and frameworks, Radware examined the state of application security in its latest report. This global survey among executives and IT professionals yielded insights about threats, concerns and application security strategies. Read more…

Snapshot of the Most Important Worldwide Cybersecurity Laws, Regulations, Directives and Standards

Are you out of breath from the breakneck pace of cyberattacks since the start of 2018? Throughout the world, nearly daily news reports have been filed detailing the results of incredibly effective cyberattacks ranging from small companies to nation-states. The sum total of these attacks has permanently and dramatically changed the information security threat landscape. This change hasn’t gone unnoticed with the regulators and now, depending on where your business operates, you have accrued even more work to demonstrate your diligence to these threats. Read more…

Credential Stuffing Campaign Targets Financial Services

Over the last few weeks, Radware has been tracking a significant Credential Stuffing Campaign targeting the financial industry in the United States and Europe. Credential Stuffing is an emerging threat in 2018 that continues to accelerate as more breaches occur. Today, a breach doesn’t just impact the compromised organization and its users, but it also affects every other website that the users may use. Read more…

Is My Smart Home Telling People What I Do Every Day?

The overall smart home market is expected to grow to over $50 billion by 2022. Already 1 in 4 U.S. households has some kind of smart device in their home. With all the smart thermostats, smart fridges, smart light bulbs, smart doors and windows, personal assistants, and smart home surveillance, internet-connected home devices are rapidly stacking up in U.S. households. These devices are adding convenience and efficiency, but are they safe? Read more…

Machine Learning Algorithms for Zero Time to Mitigation

Effective DDoS protection combines machine-learning algorithms with negative and positive protection models, as well as rate limiting. The combination of these techniques ensures zero time to mitigation and requires little human intervention. Read more…

Cybersecurity & The Customer Experience: The Perfect Combination

Organizations have long embraced the customer experience and declared it a competitive differentiator. Many executives are quick to focus on the benefits of a loyal-centric strategy and companies now go to great lengths to communicate their organization’s customer centricity to retain existing customers and attract new ones. But where is cybersecurity in this discussion? Read more…

Nigelthorn Malware Abuses Chrome Extensions to Cryptomine and Steal Data

On May 3, 2018, Radware’s cloud malware protection service detected a zero-day malware threat at one of its customers, a global manufacturing firm, by using machine-learning algorithms. This malware campaign is propagating via socially-engineered links on Facebook and is infecting users by abusing a Google Chrome extension (the ‘Nigelify’ application) that performs credential theft, cryptomining, click fraud and more. Read more…

Read the “2018 C-Suite Perspectives: Trends in the Cyberattack Landscape, Security Threats and Business Impacts” to learn more.

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2018 In Review: Healthcare Under Attack

December 12, 2018 — by Daniel Smith — 0

Radware’s ERT and Threat Research Center monitored an immense number of events over the last year, giving us a chance to review and analyze attack patterns to gain further insight into today’s trends and changes in the attack landscape. Here are some insights into what we have observed over the last year.

Healthcare Under Attack

Over the last decade there has been a dramatic digital transformation within healthcare; more facilities are relying on electronic forms and online processes to help improve and streamline the patient experience. As a result, the medical industry has new responsibilities and priorities to ensure client data is kept secure and available–which unfortunately aren’t always kept up with.

This year, the healthcare industry dominated news with an ever-growing list of breaches and attacks. Aetna, CarePlus, Partners Healthcare, BJC Healthcare, St. Peter’s Surgery and Endoscopy Center, ATI Physical Therapy, Inogen, UnityPoint Health, Nuance Communication, LifeBridge Health, Aultman Health Foundation, Med Associates and more recently Nashville Metro Public Health, UMC Physicians, and LabCorp Diagnostics have all disclosed or settled major breaches.

Generally speaking, the risk of falling prey to data breaches is high, due to password sharing, outdated and unpatched software, or exposed and vulnerable servers. When you look at medical facilities in particular, other risks begin to appear, like those surrounding the number of hospital employees who have full or partial access to your health records during your stay there. The possibilities for a malicious insider or abuse of access is also very high, as is the risk of third party breaches. For example, it was recently disclosed that NHS patient records may have been exposed when passwords were stolen from Embrace Learning, a training business used by healthcare workers to learn about data protection.

Profiting From Medical Data

These recent cyber-attacks targeting the healthcare industry underscore the growing threat to hospitals, medical institutions and insurance companies around the world. So, what’s driving the trend? Profit. Personal data, specifically healthcare records, are in demand and quite valuable on today’s black market, often fetching more money per record than your financial records, and are a crucial part of today’s Fullz packages sold by cyber criminals.

Not only are criminals exfiltrating patient data and selling it for a profit, but others have opted to encrypt medical records with ransomware or hold the data hostage until their extortion demand is met. Often hospitals are quick to pay an extortionist because backups are non-existent, or it may take too long to restore services. Because of this, cyber-criminals have a focus on this industry.

Most of the attacks targeting the medical industry are ransomware attacks, often delivered via phishing campaigns. There have also been cases where ransomware and malware have been delivered via drive-by downloads and comprised third party vendors. We have also seen criminals use SQL injections to steal data from medical applications as well as flooding those networks with DDoS attacks. More recently, we have seen large scale scanning and exploitation of internet connected devices for the purpose of crypto mining, some of which have been located inside medical networks. In addition to causing outages and encrypting data, these attacks have resulted in canceling elective cases, diverting incoming patients and rescheduling surgeries.

For-profit hackers will target and launch a number of different attacks against medical networks designed to obtain and steal your personal information from vulnerable or exposed databases. They are looking for a complete or partial set of information such as name, date of birth, Social Security numbers, diagnosis or treatment information, Medicare or Medicaid identification number, medical record number, billing/claims information, health insurance information, disability code, birth or marriage certificate information, Employer Identification Number, driver’s license numbers, passport information, banking or financial account numbers, and usernames and passwords so they can resell that information for a profit.

Sometimes the data obtained by the criminal is incomplete, but that data can be leveraged as a stepping stone to gather additional information. Criminals can use partial information to create a spear-phishing kit designed to gain your trust by citing a piece of personal information as bait. And they’ll move very quickly once they gain access to PHI or payment information. Criminals will normally sell the information obtained, even if incomplete, in bulk or in packages on private forums to other criminals who have the ability to complete the Fullz package or quickly cash the accounts out. Stolen data will also find its way to public auctions and marketplaces on the dark net, where sellers try to get the highest price possible for data or gain attention and notoriety for the hack.

Don’t let healthcare data slip through the cracks; be prepared.

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Protecting Applications in a Serverless Architecture

November 8, 2018 — by Ben Zilberman — 0

Serverless architectures are revolutionizing the way organizations procure and use enterprise technology. Until recently, information security architecture was relatively simple; you built a fortress around a server containing sensitive data, and deployed security solutions to control the flow of users accessing and leaving that server.

But how do you secure a server-less environment?

The Basics of Serverless Architecture

Serverless architecture is an emerging trend in cloud-hosted environments and refers to applications that significantly depend on third-party services (known as Backend-as-a-Service or “BaaS”) or on custom code that’s run in ephemeral containers (known as Function-as-a-Service or “FaaS”). And it is significantly more cost effective than buying or renting servers.

The rapid adoption of micro-efficiency-based pricing models (a.k.a PPU, or pay-per-use) pushes public cloud providers to introduce a business model that meets this requirement. Serverless computing helps providers optimize that model by dynamically managing the allocation of machine resources. As a result, organizations pay based on the actual amount of resources their applications consume, rather than ponying up for pre-purchased units of workload capacity (which is usually higher than what they utilize in reality).

What’s more, going serverless also frees developers and operators from the burdens of provisioning the cloud workload and infrastructure. There is no need to deploy operating systems and patch them, no need to install and configure web servers, and no need to set up or tune auto-scaling policies and systems.

Security Implications of Going Serverless

The new serverless model coerces a complete change in architecture – nano services of a lot of software ‘particles.’ The operational unit is set of function containers that execute REST API functions, which are invoked upon a relevant client-side event. These function instances are created, run and then terminated. During their run time, they receive, modify and send information that organizations want to monitor and protect. The protection should be dynamic and swift:

There is no perimeter or OS to secure
Agents and a persistent footprint become redundant.
To optimize the business model, the solution must be scalable and ephemeral automation is the key to success

If we break down our application into components that run in a serverless model, the server that runs the APIs uses different layers of code to parse the requests, essentially enlarging the attack surface. However, this isn’t an enterprise problem anymore; it’s the cloud provider’s. Unfortunately, even they sometimes lag in patch management and hardening workloads. Will your DevOps read all of the cloud provider documentation in details? Most likely, they’ll go with generic permissions. If you want to do something right, you better do it yourself.

Serverless computing doesn’t eradicate all traditional security concerns. Application-level vulnerabilities can still be exploited—with attacks carried out by human hackers or bots—whether they are inherent in the FaaS infrastructure or in the developer function code.

When using a FaaS model, the lack of local persistent storage encourages data transfer between the function and the different persistent storage services (e.g., S3 and DynamoDB by AWS) instead. Additionally, each function eventually processes data received from storage, the client application or from a different function. Every time it’s moved, it becomes vulnerable to leakage or tampering.

In such an environment, it is impossible to track all potential and actual security events. One can’t follow each function’s operation to prevent it from accessing wrong resources. Visibility and forensics must be automated and perform real time contextual analysis. But the question is not whether to use serverless or not because it is more in/secure. Rather, the question is how to do it when your organization goes there.

A New Approach

Simply put, going serverless requires a completely different security approach—one that is dynamic, elastic, and real-time. The security components must be able to move around at the same pace as the applications, functions and data they protect.

First thing’s first: To help avoid code exploitation (which is what attacks boil down to), use encryption and monitor the function’s activity and data access so it has, by default, minimum permissions. Abnormal function behavior, such as expected access to data or non-reasonable traffic flow, must be analyzed.

Next, consider additional measures, like a web application firewall (WAF), to secure your APIs. While an API gateway can manage authentication and enforce JSON and XML validity checks, not all API gateways support schema and structure validation, nor do they provide full coverage of OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities like a WAF does. WAFs apply dozens of protection measures on both inbound and outbound traffic, which is parsed to detect protocol manipulations. Client-side inputs are validated and thousands of rules are applied to detect various injections attacks, XSS attacks, remote file inclusion, direct object references and many more.

In addition to detecting known attacks, for the purposes of zero-day attack protection and comprehensive application security, a high-end WAF allows strict policy enforcement where each function can have its own parameters white listed—the recommended approach when deploying a function processing sensitive data or mission-critical business logic.

And—this is critical—continue to mitigate for DDoS attacks. Going serverless does not eliminate the potential for falling susceptible to these attacks, which have changed dramatically over the past few years. Make no mistake: With the growing online availability of attack tools and services, the pool of possible attacks is larger than ever.

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Growing Your Business: Security as an Expectation

November 7, 2018 — by Mike O'Malley — 0

Who is responsible for my device and application security? This is a critical question in today’s growing threat landscape, and one without a clear answer. Despite increases in demands for mobile app and connected device security features, no key players—device manufacturers, consumers, mobile carriers or organizations that consumers do business with via devices—will take responsibility.

While this is certainly problematic, it also represents an opportunity to differentiate your business from competitors by baking security into your platform. Over 70% of C-suite executives report being greatly concerned about data privacy and 66% admit that their network is vulnerable to hacking. In light of this, security must be recognized and acknowledged beyond an add-on or premium feature; it must be treated as an integral feature for any business owner.

The True Cost of Data Insecurity

When security is included as a core component of a business, it strengthens customers’ perceptions of your company. In fact, security itself can be a key selling point that sways customers from competitors. Startups that especially integrate security as part of its foundational architecture have a competitive advantage over companies of all sizes that gloss over security or utilize it as an unsupported, unplanned add-on.

Indeed, security as an afterthought is a major, and potentially fatal, flaw during a company’s decision-making process. The average cost of a data breach is $3.9 million – an amount enough to put myriad companies in bankruptcy. But costs can be even higher. For example, Yahoo agreed to a settlement of $50 million following its 2013 data breach and had to pay an additional $37.5 million for attorney fees and expenses. And it didn’t end there; the original $4.83 billion deal to sell Yahoo’s digital services to Verizon was also discounted by $350 million as an added penalty for decreased brand value and to amend for other potential related costs. The true cost of a data breach? Far more than the current visible numbers.

Potential Growth Areas

Instead of approaching security as an extra, optional cost, business owners would do well to view security as a core capability for revenue; the growth potential for security as an integrated core strategy is enormous. Need proof? Just look at the numerous security vulnerabilities that accompany the constant onslaught of innovative hacking threats. Commonplace attacks, like IoT botnets, mobile APIs and malware, show no evidence of going away anytime soon and companies that are prone to system vulnerabilities are at risk. Even threats from a decade ago, such as Trojan malwares, and exploitation of vulnerabilities are still utilized as attacks, either in their original form or through modifications like malware botnet Mirai.

This is why companies shouldn’t wait for the “perfect” security product; delaying an investment in security only increases a company’s risk factor for being attacked and potentially dooms one to a constant game of catch up—and enormous costs. Conversely, by adding new applications within a secure business framework from the start, businesses can ensure optimal protection without any extreme added costs.

The sooner a business incorporates security as a core piece of the business puzzle, the better they’ll be at protecting and mitigating threats, and capturing new revenue opportunities.

Don’t let data seep through the cracks. Secure the customer experience now.

Read the “2018 C-Suite Perspectives: Trends in the Cyberattack Landscape, Security Threats and Business Impacts” to learn more.

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The Delta Airlines Security Breach: A Case Study in How to Respond to a Data Breach

October 24, 2018 — by Anna Convery-Pelletier — 2

Recent data breaches against Panera Bread, Delta Airlines, Sears, Saks, and Lord & Taylor highlight a lot: the need for improved web application and internet security processes, better accountability, and why cybersecurity is critical to securing the loyalty of an organization’s most valued customers.

But perhaps most importantly, it highlights how an organization should react if they do suffer a data breach and the significance of a response plan. If there was ever an example of the importance of honesty and transparency, communicating effectively with consumers after your organization has been breached is a critical one.

Take Delta Airlines as an example. In April 2018, the company announced it was informed that some of its customer’s credit card information had been compromised during online chat support provided by a third party software company called [24]7.ai. In response, Delta launched a custom webpage providing a complete overview of the breach (including a timeline and FAQ section), executed a customer communication plan that included education and mitigation best practices, and worked with partners and law enforcement to identify how/when the breach occurred.

Delta’s handling of the breach underscores some of the key best practices that organizations should act upon once they identify a data breach has occurred.

Communication is key to both internal (employees, partners, suppliers, etc.) and external (customers) audiences, including direct mailing to clients, an official media release/statement, and if necessary, interviews in the appropriate press
Be open and sincere and admit what happened and accept responsibility
Provide details and explain how the breach occurred
Mitigate. Provide solutions for impacted users, and if possible, prepare a special offer for the affected audience
Educate by providing best practices on how to prevent similar issues in the future
Invite open dialogue by involving clients, industry experts, and even the general public

All too often, consumers discover that their personal information was compromised long after the breach occurred when suspicious activity on financial accounts, e-commerce sites, etc., is noticed. This is often the result of one of two reasons. The first is because an organization doesn’t realize its sensitive data has been breached. According to various sources, it can take a company nearly 200 days to realize there’s been a data breach.[1]

The second and far too common reason is that organizations seeking to avoid the negative connotation of being a data breach victim avoid directly or immediately announcing that a breach has occurred. However, as research suggests, the consequences of such surreptitious communication tactics can be far worse than the direct impacts of a data breach.

According to the report Consumer Sentiments: Cybersecurity, Personal Data and The Impact on Customer Loyalty, the vast majority of consumers must be convinced that the security issue has been addressed and any damage has been rectified before continuing to do business with the brand.[2]

[You might also like: Consumer Sentiments About Cybersecurity and What It Means for Your Organization]

The impact on businesses is twofold. Whereby companies were once reticent about speaking publically about cybersecurity because it would cause consumers to question their business’s fragility, organizations must now embrace and communicate their ability to safeguard customer data. Forward-thinking organizations have the opportunity to use security and due diligence as a competitive differentiator to build trust and loyalty with customers in the face of an increasingly insecure world.

Per the aforementioned points, companies must clearly communicate that a breach has occurred, those likely impacted and planned remediation actions to address the issue. Organizations that don’t admit to compromised consumer records until long after the breach took place to suffer the greatest wrath from consumers.

In addition to increased customer attrition rates and lost revenue, that wrath increasingly includes lawsuits. Forty-one percent of executives report that customers have taken legal action against their companies following a data breach. Given the string of high-profile data breaches in recent years, consumers are becoming increasingly empowered by regional government regulations that are forcing the hands of organizations to act accordingly following a data breach. The best example of this is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that went into effect throughout the European Union in May 2018. Broadly speaking, the GDPR provides individuals with a right to an effective judicial remedy and/or compensation and liability, especially if the holder of the PII has not acted accordingly to the regulations.

Ultimately, an organization’s ability to successfully respond to a data breach is linked to its ability to view cybersecurity, not as an afterthought, but rather a strategic initiative that mitigates business risk across all mission-critical departments within the organization, not just IT. When an organization is breached, it’s not just impacting the CIO. It affects the CFO, CMO and the COO, in addition to the CEO.

In an increasingly insecure world where customer loyalty to a particular brand is tied directly to that brand’s ability to safeguard the customer’s data, the entire C-suite must be held responsible when a breach occurs to reaffirm the trust and loyalty of consumers and to mitigate the broader, more cataclysmic impact that could result if they don’t.

Read “Consumer Sentiments: Cybersecurity, Personal Data and The Impact on Customer Loyalty” to learn more.

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Older Posts

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Long Lasting Impacts

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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Adapting for the Future: DDoS Mitigation

Inspecting Encrypted Data

Dealing with DevOps and Agile Software Development

Adaptability is the Name of the Game

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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What is the threat landscape, and how disruptive is it likely to be?

What vulnerabilities will make targets more attractive to criminals once AI is incorporated in their tools? How will it affect corporate espionage?

What about politically motivated cyberattacks initiated at the national level?

From a defense perspective, what types of AI-based products will be used to combat more technologically savvy cybercriminals?

Will the use of AI-based attacks by cybercriminals drive adoption of AI-based mitigation solutions by enterprises, organizations and institutions?

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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Modern Malware

What Can You Do?

Read the “2018 C-Suite Perspectives: Trends in the Cyberattack Landscape, Security Threats and Business Impacts” to learn more.

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Repercussions of Compromising Customer Trust

Risk Exposure Grows with Multi-Dimensional Complexity

Protect your Customer Experience

Essential Protection Strategies

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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Consumer Sentiments About Cybersecurity and What It Means for Your Organization

New Threat Landscape Gives Birth to New Way of Handling Cyber Security

The Evolution of IoT Attacks

Are Your Applications Secure?

Snapshot of the Most Important Worldwide Cybersecurity Laws, Regulations, Directives and Standards

Credential Stuffing Campaign Targets Financial Services

Is My Smart Home Telling People What I Do Every Day?

Machine Learning Algorithms for Zero Time to Mitigation

Cybersecurity & The Customer Experience: The Perfect Combination

Read the “2018 C-Suite Perspectives: Trends in the Cyberattack Landscape, Security Threats and Business Impacts” to learn more.

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Healthcare Under Attack

Profiting From Medical Data

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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The Basics of Serverless Architecture

Security Implications of Going Serverless

A New Approach

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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The True Cost of Data Insecurity

Potential Growth Areas

Read the “2018 C-Suite Perspectives: Trends in the Cyberattack Landscape, Security Threats and Business Impacts” to learn more.

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Read “Consumer Sentiments: Cybersecurity, Personal Data and The Impact on Customer Loyalty” to learn more.

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