Author Archives: Greg Otto

Adm. Mike Mullen: Cyber Command should be empowered to go on offensive

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The push to allow Cyber Command to go on the offensive is welcomed by former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, adding that nation-states that have targeted the U.S. need to pay a “fairly significant price” for their actions. “I’ve thought for some time we were going to have to go on offense,” Mullen told CyberScoop. “Our training says until the enemy starts to pay a price, it pretty much has an open runway. I think that line has to be drawn, and we have to respond, and they need to pay a fairly significant price for what they’re doing.” Mullen said he is comfortable with U.S. Cyber Command taking on these offensive measures as part of its rise to a unified combatant command. The unit was officially given that distinction in May. His comments come as he assumes the chair position at the newly formed […]

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Forcepoint execs: CrowdStrike’s warranty is nothing more than marketing

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Two Forcepoint executives have criticized CrowdStrike’s recent announcement of a breach prevention warranty as nothing more than a marketing stunt. Earlier this month, Silicon Valley-based CrowdStrike announced a warranty would cover the company’s Falcon Endpoint Protection Complete customers for up to $1 million if a breach happens in the environment was hired to protect. Matt Moynahan, CEO of Austin-based Forcepoint, told CyberScoop that it’s standard business practice to place liability terms in contracts with customers, yet to take those provisions and make them public doesn’t mean the product will better secure an enterprise. “I think it’s a marketing gimmick,” Moynahan said Wednesday at the Cybersecurity Leadership Forum presented by his company and produced by CyberScoop and FedScoop. “I don’t think that changes anything fundamentally about the way the security industry operates or quite frankly the effectiveness of it. It probably puts you on the defensive more so than not. You won’t see […]

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Forcepoint CEO: Stop focusing on tech and start focusing on people

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Forcepoint CEO Matt Monyahan says the cybersecurity industry’s focus is flawed. According to Monyahan, way too much time and effort has been spent on securing technology stacks. If the security paradigm is to change, there must be more effort placed on modifying people’s behavior when they use technology. “We have to shift,” Monyahan said at the Cybersecurity Leadership Forum, presented by Forcepoint and produced by CyberSoop and FedScoop. “Shift our programs, our policy approach, to start thinking about people and data, and not necessarily infrastructure.” Monyahan told a crowd in Washington, D.C., Wednesday that the concentration on endpoints and networks has failed to take into account that people — both regular users and nefarious ones — modify their behavior as new tech emerges. This focus has led to the escalating problems the industry has seen today, with breaches exposing people’s personal information and nation-states using the Internet to cause worldwide […]

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FBI shuts down domain behind Russian ‘VPNFilter’ botnet

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The FBI seized a domain used to communicate with 500,000 infected routers Wednesday, cutting off a massive botnet that was possibly being used for a forthcoming cyberattack aimed at Ukraine. The Department of Justice obtained a seizure order Wednesday that allowed U.S. law enforcement to seize “toknowall.com,” which was used as the command and control in the “VPNFilter” botnet. VPNFilter was made public Tuesday, when it was announced that a combination of at least three groups — Cisco’s cybersecurity unit Talos, the non-profit information sharing group Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA) and U.S. law enforcement — have all been quietly notifying companies about the early stages of a potentially expansive cyberattack against Ukraine. In a seizure order made public Wednesday, the Department of Justice pinned the botnet on APT28, the hacking group known as “Fancy Bear.” The group is responsible for a number of high-profile hacks, including the 2016 hack of […]

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McAfee CEO ‘cautiously optimistic’ on companies’ ability to handle GDPR

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McAfee CEO Christopher Young says companies are “cautiously optimistic” about their ability to handle the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation despite concerns about the law’s scope. Young told CyberScoop he sees organizations working diligently to comply with the law, but there is only so much they can do ahead of the mandated compliance deadline. “I would tell you that a lot of organizations are still trying to figure it out and are a little bit of wait-and-see mode to understand exactly how some of the aspects of GDPR take hold,” Young said on the sidelines of the Security Through Innovation Summit presented by McAfee and produced by CyberScoop and FedScoop. The law, which goes into affect Friday, mandates much stricter controls on how data can be collected, analyzed and used. The EU considers the law a huge push toward strengthening citizen’s rights when it comes to data. Young’s optimism […]

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‘TheDarkOverlord’ shrugs shoulders over Serbian man’s arrest

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A representative of TheDarkOverlord hacking group claims the recent arrest of alleged member won’t stop its attacks. In a tweet posted around midnight EDT Thursday, someone from the group claimed a law enforcement action carried out in Serbia earlier this week did not affect the group. We’ve not endured the loss of any members of our organisation. Law enforcement continues to fail in their hunt for our organisation. — thedarkoverlord (@tdo_hackers) May 18, 2018 Serbia’s Ministry of the Interior announced Wednesday it arrested a 38-year-old man in an “international operation conducted by the FBI.” “The aim of the campaign was to uncover a large number of people who, using the name ‘TheDarkOverlord’ on the Internet, have been unauthorized access to computer networks and data of at least 50 victims since June 2016 and have been stifling US citizen information and personal data, including data on ownership and intellectual property, health insurance, treatment and […]

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RSA conference app leaks user data

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Here’s a new adage for 2018: It’s not a true security conference until someone discovers a flaw in the technology used by the conference’s event staff. A security researcher on Twitter discovered a flaw in the 2018 RSA Conference app Thursday that exposed a database of information tied to conference attendees. The database was discoverable via an unsecured API that could be accessed via credentials hard-coded into the app. Hi #RSAC2018. 😏 pic.twitter.com/9y1sDK723B — svbl (@svblxyz) April 19, 2018 If you attended #RSAC2018 and see your first name there – sorry! 😳 pic.twitter.com/YrgZo6jHDu — svbl (@svblxyz) April 20, 2018 The conference’s event staff confirmed the flaw, saying that 114 attendees had their information leaked. pic.twitter.com/QzTjOvMhSi — RSA Conference (@RSAConference) April 20, 2018 The conference worked with mobile event platform Eventbase to fix the flaw before further damage could be done. “No other personal information was accessed, and we have every indication that the […]

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Yubico CEO: Two-factor authentication should mirror seat belt’s history

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To push two-factor authentication into the future, one expert says we need to look back 50 years. The way to increase adoption of the security practice is to mimic the rise of seat belts in automobiles, says Yubico CEO Stina Ehrensvard. People must evolve in their thinking about sensitive accounts and personal data in the same way that society expanded its awareness of the need for auto safety, Ehrensvard says. “In the ’50s, there were 10 times less cars, but more fatal accidents,” Ehrensvard said during a panel at SF CyberTalks presented by CyberScoop. “We put out the car without the seat belts, without the crumple zones, without the airbags, and now they are standard features in cars. Because of that work, the car is safer.” One thing that consumers probably don’t want to mimic: The timespan it took for safety belts to become a fact of life. They were introduced in the 1950s, but were not required by […]

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White House sanctions Russian oligarchs over malicious cyber activity

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The White House announced Friday that the U.S. government has sanctioned seven Russian oligarchs and a host of Russian companies for what administration officials called “continued aggression against Western democracy,” including ongoing malicious cyber activity. Among the oligarchs sanctioned are Oleg Deripaska, founder and owner of one of the largest Russian industrial groups and Suleyman Kerimov, a Russian politician and oligarch. The oligarchs sanctioned are known to have close ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin. The sanctions also target a number of Deripaska-owned businesses, including Russian industrial conglomerate Basic Element, energy company EN+, and aluminum production company Rusal. In addition to the actions against the oligarchs and companies, 17 senior Russian government officials, a state-owned Russian weapons trading company and its subsidiary, a Russian bank, were also sanctioned. “The elite are not immune from the actions of the Russian government,” a senior administration official said during a media call Friday. The […]

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The fear over WannaCry is still very real

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This is the reality now. With Wednesday’s apparent tempest-in-a-teapot ransomware attack at Boeing, the possibility remains for even the biggest organizations to come to a crippling halt at the mere hint that WannaCry has been redeveloped, reworked and set out in the wild. The Seattle Times’ initial story relayed as much, as Boeing’s chief engineer sent out a companywide memo Wednesday calling for “all hands on deck” in the initial aftermath. A few hours passed, and suddenly what was WannaCry’s next great casualty was nothing more than an uncomfortable afternoon for the aviation giant’s IT teams. “A number of articles on a malware disruption are overstated and inaccurate,” a Boeing statement read. “Our cybersecurity operations center detected a limited intrusion of malware that affected a small number of systems. Remediations were applied and this is not a production or delivery issue.” Yet while Boeing avoided being labeled as infosec’s Next Great […]

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