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Here’s Why Foreign Intelligence Agencies Want Your Data

January 23, 2019 — by Mike O'Malley — 0

The implications of the recent Marriott hack go far beyond those of your average data breach. This megabreach of 383M records doesn’t just compromise sensitive data for the sake of fraud or financial gain, it paints a frightening picture of international espionage and personal privacy.

When news broke that hackers working on behalf of a Chinese intelligence agency may be responsible for the Marriott breach, questions abounded. Why would China be interested in loyalty program data by the millions? And why hospitality data?

Could You Be A Target?

Let’s be frank: Foreign intelligence agency actors aren’t exactly interested in earning a free night’s stay at a Marriott property. The answer is potentially far more nefarious. The fact is, data collected from breaches are but one piece of a larger, darker puzzle. Stolen customer data—when combined with travel data (see Delta, Cathay Pacific, and British Airways hacks, among others) and other sources of online personal information (i.e., what we share across social media platforms)—enable intelligence agencies to build profiles on individuals. These profiles can then be leveraged to recruit potential informants, as well as check the travel of known government and intelligence officers against their own government to identify moles.

It’s also critical to note that heads of state and other political VIPs are no longer foreign intelligence agencies’ only marks; ordinary citizens are similarly targeted, especially those who may have unfettered access to troves of company Intellectual Property (IP) that a foreign government may want for their domestic economy.

For example, if you work for a cloud storage company whose customers’ data is in an area of interest to an intelligence agency, you may very well become an object of interest. For example, in the FBI’s most recent indictment against foreign intelligence services, Zhu Hua and Zhang Shilong were charged on acting on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security for stealing personal information and IP from companies in various industries including banking and finance, telecom, consumer electronics, healthcare, biotech, automotive, oil and gas, mining and the U.S. Navy.

The Hua/Shilong case is just the latest example of foreign intelligence agencies playing a game of chess while the U.S. is playing checkers. 2018 demonstrated this multiple times: In March, the Justice Department announced that Iranians had, through years-long cyberattacks, stolen intellectual property from over 300 U.S. universities and companies. In July, several Russian agents were indicted for election hacking and in September, North Korea was accused of trying to hurt the U.S. economy through a hack. And, of course, in December, the U.S. government accused China of the Marriott megabreach. But 2018’s record isn’t unique; France was accused of stealing U.S. IP for French companies in 2014 by the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

In the case of Marriott and other large enterprises like it, CISOs and C-suite executives are focused on individual pieces of data lost, versus the sum of what that data can reveal about an individual as a whole, putting them (and us) at a significant disadvantage. Indeed, the entirety of the digital footprint we create, which can be used to impersonate us or to profile/create leverage on us, is greater than the sum of the individual data parts. Consumers likewise don’t typically consider the bigger picture their personal data paints, regarding their travel patterns, purchasing habits, hobbies, (not so) hidden secrets, social causes and more. Add in breach burnout, wherein the public has become desensitized to countless stories of data exposure, and a perfect storm for harvesting operatives and stealing IP emerges.

Look at the Whole Picture

Until enterprises view data holistically and realize that any company with valuable IP could be the target of a foreign government on behalf of that company’s foreign competitors, they will continue to play into the hands of transnational threat actors at the expense of consumer safety and national security.

It is critical that organizations incorporate cybersecurity into every fabric of the business, from the C-level down, including training and education, as well as seeking expertise from security service companies who understand how to protect organizations from the capabilities of foreign intelligence groups. And that education must include an understanding how personal, government and business-related information can be used by foreign intelligence agencies, and how corporate IP may be of value to foreign competitors. Whether it’s a game of chess or an intricate puzzle, individuals must look beyond the breach at hand and grasp what’s around the corner.

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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Top 3 Cyberattacks Targeting Proxy Servers

January 16, 2019 — by Daniel Smith — 1

Today, many organizations are now realizing that DDoS defense is critical to maintaining an exceptional customer experience. Why? Because nothing diminishes load times or impacts the end user’s experience more than a cyberattack.

As a facilitator of access to content and networks, proxy servers have become a focal point for those seeking to cause grief to organizations via cyberattacks due to the fallout a successful assault can have.

Attacking the CDN Proxy

New vulnerabilities in content delivery networks (CDNs) have left many wondering if the networks themselves are vulnerable to a wide variety of cyberattacks. Here are five cyber “blind spots” that are often attacked – and how to mitigate the risks:

Increase in dynamic content attacks. Attackers have discovered that treatment of dynamic content requests is a major blind spot in CDNs. Since the dynamic content is not stored on CDN servers, all requests for dynamic content are sent to the origin’s servers. Attackers are taking advantage of this behavior to generate attack traffic that contains random parameters in HTTP GET requests. CDN servers immediately redirect this attack traffic to the origin—expecting the origin’s server to handle the requests. However, in many cases the origin’s servers do not have the capacity to handle all those attack requests and fail to provide online services to legitimate users. That creates a denial-of-service situation. Many CDNs can limit the number of dynamic requests to the server under attack. This means they cannot distinguish attackers from legitimate users and the rate limit will result in legitimate users being blocked.

SSL-based DDoS attacks. SSL-based DDoS attacks leverage this cryptographic protocol to target the victim’s online services. These attacks are easy to launch and difficult to mitigate, making them a hacker favorite. To detect and mitigate SSL-based attacks, CDN servers must first decrypt the traffic using the customer’s SSL keys. If the customer is not willing to provide the SSL keys to its CDN provider, then the SSL attack traffic is redirected to the customer’s origin. That leaves the customer vulnerable to SSL attacks. Such attacks that hit the customer’s origin can easily take down the secured online service.

During DDoS attacks, when web application firewall (WAF) technologies are involved, CDNs also have a significant scalability weakness in terms of how many SSL connections per second they can handle. Serious latency issues can arise. PCI and other security compliance issues are also a problem because they limit the data centers that can be used to service the customer. This can increase latency and cause audit issues.

Keep in mind these problems are exacerbated with the massive migration from RSA algorithms to ECC and DH-based algorithms.

Attacks on non-CDN services. CDN services are often offered only for HTTP/S and DNS applications. Other online services and applications in the customer’s data center, such as VoIP, mail, FTP and proprietary protocols, are not served by the CDN. Therefore, traffic to those applications is not routed through the CDN. Attackers are taking advantage of this blind spot and launching attacks on such applications. They are hitting the customer’s origin with large-scale attacks that threaten to saturate the Internet pipe of the customer. All the applications at the customer’s origin become unavailable to legitimate users once the internet pipe is saturated, including ones served by the CDN.

Direct IP attacks. Even applications that are served by a CDN can be attacked once attackers launch a direct hit on the IP address of the web servers at the customer’s data center. These can be network-based ﬂood attacks such as UDP ﬂoods or ICMP ﬂoods that will not be routed through CDN services and will directly hit the customer’s servers. Such volumetric network attacks can saturate the Internet pipe. That results in degradation to application and online services, including those served by the CDN.

Web application attacks. CDN protection from threats is limited and exposes web applications of the customer to data leakage and theft and other threats that are common with web applications. Most CDN- based WAF capabilities are minimal, covering only a basic set of predefined signatures and rules. Many of the CDN-based WAFs do not learn HTTP parameters and do not create positive security rules. Therefore, these WAFs cannot protect from zero-day attacks and known threats. For companies that do provide tuning for the web applications in their WAF, the cost is extremely high to get this level of protection. In addition to the significant blind spots identified, most CDN security services are simply not responsive enough, resulting in security configurations that take hours to manually deploy. Security services are using technologies (e.g., rate limit) that have proven inefficient in recent years and lack capabilities such as network behavioral analysis, challenge-response mechanisms and more.

Finding the Watering Holes

Waterhole attack vectors are all about finding the weakest link in a technology chain. These attacks target often forgotten, overlooked or not intellectually attended to automated processes. They can lead to unbelievable devastation. What follows is a list of sample watering hole targets:

App stores
Security update services
Domain name services
Public code repositories to build websites
Webanalytics platforms
Identity and access single sign-on platforms
Open source code commonly used by vendors
Third-party vendors that participate in the website

The DDoS attack on Dyn in 2016 has been the best example of the water-holing vector technique to date. However, we believe this vector will gain momentum heading into 2018 and 2019 as automation begins to pervade every aspect of our life.

Attacking from the Side

In many ways, side channels are the most obscure and obfuscated attack vectors. This technique attacks the integrity of a company’s site through a variety of tactics:

DDoS the company’s analytics provider
Brute-force attack against all users or against all of the site’s third-party companies
Port the admin’s phone and steal login information
Massive load on “page dotting”
Large botnets to “learn” ins and outs of a site

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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Threat Alert: MalSpam

January 10, 2019 — by Daniel Smith — 0

Radware researchers have been following multiple campaigns targeting the financial industry in Europe and the United States. These campaigns are designed to commit fraud via credential theft by sending MalSpam, malicious spam that contains banking malware like Trickbot and Emotet, to unsuspecting users. If the users open the document, they will become infected, and the malware will harvest and extract data from the victim’s machine for fraudulent purposes. Once the data is retrieved from their c2 server, the stolen credentials will be used to commit fraud against the victim’s bank account, leveraged in a credential stuffing attack or quickly sold for profit.

One of the things that make these two pieces of banking malware stand out is their ability to evolve and consistently update their modules to allow additional capabilities. Additionally, we have seen denial of service attacks in the past that have coincided with these security events. Occasionally attackers have been known to launch a flood of malicious traffic, known as a smoke screen attack, to distract network operators from other nefarious activity such as data exfiltration. These attacks typically will not exhaust network resources since the criminals still need access.

To read the full ERT Threat Alert, click here.

Now or Never: Financial Services and the Cloud

January 9, 2019 — by Sandy Toplis — 0

I will get straight to the point: The time is right for the financial services (FS) industry to leverage the power of the cloud. It dovetails quite nicely with retail banking’s competitive moves to provide users with more flexible choices, banking simplification and an improved, positive customer experience. Indeed, I am encouraged that roughly 70% of my financial services customers are looking to move more services to the cloud, and approximately 50% have a cloud-first strategy.

This is a departure from the FS industry’s history with the public cloud. Historically, it has shied away from cloud adoption—not because it’s against embracing new technologies for business improvement, but because it is one of the most heavily regulated and frequently scrutinized industries in terms of data privacy and security. Concerns regarding the risk of change and impact to business continuity, customer satisfaction, a perceived lack of control, data security, and costs have played a large role in the industry’s hesitation to transition to the cloud.

Embracing Change

More and more, banks are moving applications on the cloud to take advantage of scalability, lower capital costs, ease of operations and resilience offered by cloud solutions. Due to the differing requirements on data residency from jurisdiction-to-jurisdiction, banks need to choose solutions that allow them to have exacting control over transient and permanent data flows. Solutions that are flexible enough to be deployed in a hybrid mode, on a public cloud infrastructure as well as private infrastructure, are key to allowing banks to have the flexibility of leveraging existing investments, as well as meeting these strict regulatory requirements.

Although the rate of cloud adoption within the financial services industry still has much room for growth, the industry is addressing many of its concerns and is putting to bed the myths surrounding cloud-based security. Indeed, multi-cloud adoption is proliferating and it’s becoming clear that banks are increasingly turning to the cloud and into new (FinTech) technology. In some cases, banks are already using cloud services for non-core and non-critical uses such as HR, email, customer analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), and for development and testing purposes.

Interestingly, smaller banks have more readily made the transition by moving entire core services (treasury, payments, retail banking, enterprise data) to the cloud. As these and other larger banks embrace new FinTech, their service offerings will stand out among the competitive landscape, helping to propel the digital transformation race.

What’s Driving the Change?

There are several key drivers for the adoption of multi (public) cloud-based services for the FS industry, including:

Risk mitigation in cloud migration. Many companies operate a hybrid security model, so the cloud environment works adjacent to existing infrastructure. Organisations are also embracing the hybrid model to deploy cloud-based innovation sandboxes to rapidly validate consumers’ acceptance of new services without disrupting their existing business. The cloud can help to lower risks associated with traditional infrastructure technology where capacity, redundancy and resiliency are operational concerns. From a regulatory perspective, the scalability of the cloud means that banks can scan potentially thousands of transactions per second, which dramatically improves the industry’s ability to combat financial crime, such as fraud and money laundering.
Security. Rightly so, information security remains the number one concern for CISOs. When correctly deployed, cloud applications are no less secure than traditional in-house deployments. What’s more, the flexibility to scale in a cloud environment can empower banks with more control over security issues.
Agile innovation and competitive edge. Accessing the cloud can increase a bank’s ability to innovate by enhancing agility, efficiency and productivity. Gaining agility with faster onboarding of services (from the traditional two-to-three weeks to implement a service to almost instantly in the cloud) gives banks a competitive edge: they can launch new services to the market quicker and with security confidence. Additionally, the scaling up (or down) of services is fast and reliable, which can help banks to reallocate resources away from the administration of IT infrastructure, and towards innovation and fast delivery of products and services to markets.
Cost benefits. As FS customers move from on-prem to cloud environments, costs shift from capex to opex. The cost savings of public cloud solutions are significant, especially given the reduction in initial capex requirements for traditional IT infrastructure. During periods of volumetric traffic, the cloud can allow banks to manage computing capacity more efficiently. And when the cloud is adopted for risk mitigation and innovation purposes, cost benefits arise from the resultant improvements in business efficiency. According to KPMG, shifting back-office functions to the cloud allows banks to achieve savings of between 30 and 40 percent.

A Fundamental Movement

Cloud innovation is fast becoming a fundamental driver in global digital disruption and is increasingly gaining more prominence and cogency with banks. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, a corporate no-cloud policy will become as rare as a no-internet policy is today.

Regardless of the size of your business—be it Retail Banking, Investment Banking, Insurance, Forex, Building Societies, etc.—protecting your business from cybercriminals and their ever-changing means of “getting in” is essential. The bottom line: Whatever cloud deployment best suits your business is considerably more scalable and elastic than hosting in-house, and therefore suits any organisation.

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

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Bot or Not? Distinguishing Between the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

January 8, 2019 — by Anna Convery-Pelletier — 2

Bots touch virtually every part of our digital lives. They help populate our news feeds, tell us the weather, provide stock quotes, control our search rankings, and help us comparison shop. We use bots to book travel, for online customer support, and even to turn our lights on and off and unlock our doors.

Yet, for every ‘good’ bot, there is a nefarious one designed to disrupt, steal or manipulate. Indeed, at least one third of all Internet traffic is populated by a spectrum of ‘bad’ bots. On one end, there are the manipulative bots, like those designed to buy out retailers’ inventory to resell high-demand goods at markup (like limited edition sneakers or ticket scalping) or simulate advertiser click counts. On the other, more extreme end, malicious bots take over accounts, conduct API abuse and enslave our IoT devices to launch massive DDoS attacks.

Equally troubling is the speed at which the bot ecosystem is evolving. Like most criminal elements, threat actors are singularly focused in their goals: They constantly update, mutate, and modify their tool sets to work around the various protections companies put in place.

In other words, what protected your organization against bots last year may not work today. Research from Radware’s 2018 State of Web Application Security Report shows that most organizations rely on tools like Captcha to detect their bot traffic, but modern, sophisticated bots can easily bypass those tools, making it difficult to even detect bot traffic, let alone identify the bot’s intentions.

Organizations need to look for bot management solutions that not only effectively detect and mitigate bot attacks but can also distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bots in real-time.

Yesterday, Radware announced its intent to acquire ShieldSquare, which is a pioneer in the bot mitigation industry and one of three recognized solution leaders by Forrester with strong differentiation in the Attack Detection, Threat Research, Reporting, and Analytics categories.

The strong technology synergy between the two companies around advanced machine learning and the opportunity to extend Radware’s existing cloud security services bring a tremendous advantage to our customers and partners.

This acquisition allows Radware to expand our portfolio with more robust bot management solutions that can stand alone as product offerings as well as integrate into our suite of attack mitigation solutions. Radware will offer ShieldSquare’s bot management and mitigation product under the new Radware Bot Management product line. It enhances Radware’s advanced anti-bot capabilities from multi-protocol IoT DDoS attacks to more crafted e-commerce attacks affecting six emerging problems:

Data harvesting and Scraping Attacks
Account creation and Account Takeover Attacks
Denial of Inventory
Application DDoS & Brute Force Attacks
Brand Image / Reputation Attacks

It also provides ShieldSquare’s customers with access to the full suite of Radware security and availability solutions both on-prem and in the cloud, including our Cloud WAF services for comprehensive protection of applications.

We look forward to welcoming the ShieldSquare team into the Radware family and joining forces to offer some of the world’s best bot management solutions.

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

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Ad Fraud 101: How Cybercriminals Profit from Clicks

January 3, 2019 — by Daniel Smith — 1

Fraud is and always will be a cornerstone of the cybercrime community. The associated economic gains provide substantial motivation for today’s malicious actors, which is reflected in the rampant use of identity and financial theft, and ad fraud. Fraud is, without question, big business. You don’t have to look far to find websites, on both the clear and the darknet, that profit from the sale of your personal information.

Fraud-related cyber criminals are employing an evolving arsenal of tactics and malware designed to engage in these types of activities. What follows is an overview.

Digital Fraud

Digital fraud—the use of a computer for criminal deception or abuse of web enabled assets that results in financial gain—can be categorized and explained in three groups for the purpose of this blog: basic identity theft with the goal of collecting and selling identifiable information, targeted campaigns focused exclusively on obtaining financial credentials, and fraud that generates artificial traffic for profit.

Digital fraud is its own sub-community consistent with typical hacker profiles. You have consumers dependent on purchasing stolen information to commit additional fraudulent crime, such as making fake credit cards and cashing out accounts, and/or utilizing stolen data to obtain real world documents like identification cards and medical insurance. There are also general hackers, motivated by profit or disruption, who publicly post personally identifiable information that can be easily scraped and used by other criminals. And finally, there are pure vendors who are motivated solely by profit and have the skills to maintain, evade and disrupt at large scales.

Identity fraud harvests complete or partial user credentials and personal information for profit. This group mainly consists of cybercriminals who target databases with numerous attack vectors for the purposes of selling the obtained data for profit. Once the credentials reach their final destination, other criminals will use the data for additional fraudulent purposes, such as digital account takeover for financial gains.
Banking fraud harvests banking credentials, digital wallets and credit cards from targeted users. This group consists of highly talented and focused criminals who only care about obtaining financial information, access to cryptocurrency wallets or digitally skimming credit cards. These criminals’ tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) are considered advanced, as they often involve the threat actor’s own created malware, which is updated consistently.
Ad fraud generates artificial impressions or clicks on a targeted website for profit. This is a highly skilled group of cybercriminals that is capable of building and maintaining a massive infrastructure of infected devices in a botnet. Different devices are leveraged for different types of ad fraud but generally, PC-based ad fraud campaigns are capable of silently opening an internet browser on the victim’s computer and clicking on an advertisement.

Ad Fraud & Botnets

Typically, botnets—the collection of compromised devices that are often referred to as a bot and controlled by a malicious actor, a.k.a. a “bot herder—are associated with flooding networks and applications with large volumes of traffic. But they also send large volumes of malicious spam, which is leveraged to steal banking credentials or used to conduct ad fraud.

However, operating a botnet is not cheap and operators must weigh the risks and expense of operating and maintaining a profitable botnet. Generally, a bot herder has four campaign options (DDoS attacks, spam, banking and ad fraud) with variables consisting of research and vulnerability discovery, infection rate, reinfection rate, maintenance, and consumer demand.

With regards to ad fraud, botnets can produce millions of artificially generated clicks and impressions a day, resulting in a financial profit for the operators. Two recent ad fraud campaigns highlight the effectiveness of botnets:

3ve, pronounced eve, was recently taken down by White Owl, Google and the FBI. This PC-based botnet infected over a million computers and utilized tens of thousands of websites for the purpose of click fraud activities. The infected users would never see the activity conducted by the bot, as it would open a hidden browser outside the view of the user’s screen to click on specific ads for profit.
Mirai, an IoT-based botnet, was used to launch some of the largest recorded DDoS attacks in history. When the co-creators of Mirai were arrested, their indictments indicated that they also engaged in ad fraud with this botnet. The actors were able to conduct what is known as an impression fraud by generating artificial traffic and directing it at targeted sites for profit.

The Future of Ad Fraud

Ad fraud is a major threat to advertisers, costing them millions of dollars each year. And the threat is not going away, as cyber criminals look for more profitable vectors through various chaining attacks and alteration of the current TTPs at their disposal.

As more IoT devices continue to be connected to the Internet with weak security standards and vulnerable protocols, criminals will find ways to maximize the profit of each infected device. Currently, it appears that criminals are looking to maximize their new efforts and infection rate by targeting insecure or unmaintained IoT devices with a wide variety of payloads, including those designed to mine cryptocurrencies, redirect users’ sessions to phishing pages or conduct ad fraud.

Read the “IoT Attack Handbook – A Field Guide to Understanding IoT Attacks from the Mirai Botnet and its Modern Variants” 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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Could You Be A Target?

Look at the Whole Picture

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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Attacking the CDN Proxy

Finding the Watering Holes

Attacking from the Side

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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Embracing Change

What’s Driving the Change?

A Fundamental Movement

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

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

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Digital Fraud

Ad Fraud & Botnets

The Future of Ad Fraud

Read the “IoT Attack Handbook – A Field Guide to Understanding IoT Attacks from the Mirai Botnet and its Modern Variants” 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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