DorLock

The human is defined in the workplace as the weakest link when you think about security. I am very excited about one unique company who wants to change how we tell websites we are indeed humans and not bots. Are You A Human wants to do away with how ordinary people tell websites their real humans. Instead of the painful captcha icons, you play a game. If you beat the game then you are indeed a human and might I say they are quite fun.

What I have always found interesting when studying security is the human element like for example social engineering and the interaction between how technology perceives us. Bots are very sneaky, but humans have different features that no bot could ever incorporate like pattern recognition. This kind of innovation is just exactly what we needed and like I have said before I am very excited for this product to premiere.

It’s amazing to think how these malicious spam spreading bots could impersanate us, but with this tool we can take back our right as humans. Now most of you know I am always interested in researching the new ways cyber criminals are using social engineering to trick their victims into clicking links that are malicious, but in this category more needs to be done in awareness. However, your always going to have some percentage of people who will always think those types of emails are legitimate. I didn’t mean to get sidetracked, but I just wanted to make my point that human interaction is still being threatened by the way criminals develop emails that seem to come from popular organizations. 

So now we have a new way to combat these spam bots thanks to Are You A Human. Even though this type of application isn’t an anti virus or etc it still satisfies a major need for websites and humans. Lets take back the web and prove that we are indeed human! 

Well, it’s been a while since I have been on here. What’s interesting is how the bad guys are analyzing their malware before they send it. Encrypting Malware now seems like it’s becoming a norm in the underground cyber crime world, but could this be just the beginning of it? 

There is no doubt that this year has been all about Mac threats, but what if the tactics get smarter and more improved? Flashback in my opinion surprised me because it seemed that instead of targeting Windows based computers they went after Apple’s Mac OS X. Flashback was stealthy and they used one of the most popular tactics in the book at getting clicks, social engineering.

Dean De Beer is CTO at an organization called ThreatGrid and he mentioned this quote below when being interviewed by DarkReading.com in one of their latest articles.

As the crimeware industry has grown, you see them moving toward active analysis, as well, and asking, ‘How are the defenders going to try to detect us?’” he says. “That is why we see a lot of creative ways to detect sandboxes and researchers.

I thought this quote was very interesting since I tend to write more about how cyber criminals work or how their strategies go. So much of the time in forensics we study the malware and how it works. However, it’s quite amazing that this same process is being used on us from the exact type of people who are trying to access our own info.

Well, like I have predicted there have been security vulnerabilities that have been found this past week in Google Wallet. Mobile payments are starting to become very popular in todays world. In order to help protect this growing trend we need new security defenses that can withstand well structured attacks. Encryption needs to be improved in these apps and proven that they can in fact keep hackers out. These types of apps hold financial information that are critical to people’s lives and that’s why I am taking these vulnerabilities so seriously. Cyber criminals are always looking for the next technology to target and if these holes continue to be left wide open then we will have another threat on our hands. We need to think about not only the consumer, but their individual safety when they are using apps that require payments and transfer funds.

Well, what a year it’s been for security threats. We saw a hand full of advanced threats and breaches. Probably the most notable breach in my opinion as far as impact was the RSA breach and how massive it was. We have certainly witnessed the year of cyber threats and intrusions. We saw the rise of the hacktivists groups of Anonymous and Lulzsec. We also saw the next major cyber threat, Duqu from the folks that brought you the Stuxnet worm. So now we can all get ready for a new year of hopefully stronger security and a decrease in cyber threats.

Unfortunately, I think cyber threats will continue to grow in sophistication and size. I just hope new advances in cyber security will help us to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. Android threats are expected to continue to grow next year and also social media threats as well.  I think also we will see another Stuxnet or Duqu next year as well or worse, a major update to Duqu that could change it’s entire structure.

So as we look ahead to 2012 in the threat landscape what will be the biggest story or event that we will be talking about? I have not idea, but one things for sure, it will change our perspective entirely.

I wish all of you a HAPPY NEW YEAR and stay safe online. ;)

- The Security Forecaster 

This past March RSA had a huge security breach which resulted in their SecureID Token product to gain a little bit of criticize and some customers worried that the tokens were compromised. It is so easy for an employee to open an email attachment that may look legitimate, but in the end is only used to gain access to the companies network. RSA has said that it believes the attack on it’s servers were sophisticated enough to be put under the Advanced Persistent Threat category and I agree with them. Whoever hacked and planned this attack out wasn’t a scriptkiddie, but someone or more then one that knew exactly what they were doing.

Now RSA’s Chairman Art Coviello has come out and said the following quote:

There were two individual groups from one nation state, one supporting the other. One was very visible and one less so.. We’ve not attributed it to a particular nation state although we’re very confident that with the skill, sophistication and resources involved it could only have been a nation state.

 I agree with him completely. Now the question is who would attack them? RSA said the hackers left stuff behind that tells them who may have possibly did it. I have my suspicions, but I won’t say yet who I think it is. I am starting to see a pattern occur with some of these recent breaches and that cyber criminals are starting to take small bites out of large organization’s security defenses and this makes me very concerned about how educated the employees are of cyber attacks in these types of organizations.

Stuxnet Of The Year?

Stuxnet was allegedly developed by a nation state and could there be trend starting to occur with nation state’s targeting others? I believe the RSA breach was our Stuxnet of 2011, but this attack is no comparison to Stuxnet I am just stating my opinion. DigiNotar was a very large attack, but in my opinion the RSA attack was the most sophisticated attack we saw this year. Could we see more nation state attacks occur in the next few years? I believe we will and if nation state attacks have taught us anything it’s that they are becoming more apparent with every year that goes by. If a nation state is responsible for the RSA attack then why RSA of all companies? Whatever the case may be it’s very clear now that the cybercrime industry has found another popular way for attacking their victims. Cyber Security never sleeps which is why we need to keep on staying one step ahead of the bad guys.