Category Archives: Cyber Research

Report: cybercrime causes over $600 billion in damages annually

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Cybercrime and espionage have caused over $600 billion worth of damages annually in recent years, according to new estimates from the Washington D.C. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and American cybersecurity firm McAfee. “When we talk about impact of cybercrime, really it’s an economic impact with significant ramifications toward things like jobs, opportunity, investment, innovation,” said Raj Samani, McAfee’s chief scientist. “The objective is to change the discussion from this-country-does-that to how cybercrime impacts all of us, why it matters and how to address it.” The total cost is rising. A 2014 estimate from CSIS put the annual cost of hacking at around $500 billion. Increasingly sophisticated hackers, quick adoption of new technology as well as the growing professionalization of cybercrime has made being a profitable crook online easier than it’s ever been. Even so, cybercrime ranks behind government corruption and narcotics trafficking for annual cost to the world, according […]

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DHS wants help to identify, attribute major web outages

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The Department of Homeland Security wants help identifying, attributing and combatting major internet outages and disruptions — and it will pay. Last week, at an industry day and in solicitation documents posted online, the department’s Science and Technology Directorate invited research proposals under its “Predict, Assess Risk, Identify (and Mitigate) Disruptive Internet-scale Network Events,” or PARIDINE. These large-scale internet outages or slowdowns can have many causes, explained PARIDINE program manager Ann Cox — from natural disasters like hurricanes or tsunamis, to accidents that can knock out physical infrastructure, through geo-political events like a country trying to cut itself off from the internet, to the mass-scale re-routing of internet traffic. Large-scale re-routing incidents can happen by accident; but they can also be caused by malicious actors using a technique called border gateway protocol, or BGP, hijacking. On Twitter, security analyst Richard Bejtlich called BGP hijacking, “Probably[the] biggest Internet weakness hardly any[one] knows/cares about.” […]

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Security firms sometimes wreck FBI investigations. Here’s how.

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Publishing research about hackers can boost a cybersecurity firm’s reputation but muddle the hard work of federal law enforcement agencies — and it appears that the problem is likely to get worse. Some threat intelligence reports from cybersecurity companies are thorough enough (and public enough) that they can completely disrupt government-led cyber investigations, say industry experts, former law enforcement and intelligence officials. The issue comes up at least “every few months,” said James Trainor, a former assistant director for the FBI’s Cyber Division. Trainor and other officials who spoke to CyberScoop declined to name specific companies or incidents, but they agree that the potential for trouble is only increasing. “The industry isn’t privy to classified ops or government investigations, so this happens,” explained Synack co-founder and former NSA analyst Mark Kuhr. “They are asked to hold information sometimes if the government catches wind, but a lot of times the government simply doesn’t know or firms […]

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Security Weekly #482 – Kobi and Doron Naim, Cyberark Labs

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Kobi Ben-Naim Senior Director of Cyber Research Kobi is an accomplished information security professional, well-known for his pioneering work in the field of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) and Zero-Day Attacks. Full Show Notes Subscribe to YouTube … Continue reading Security Weekly #482 – Kobi and Doron Naim, Cyberark Labs→