Category Archives: Information Sharing

US, allies pledge to combat money laundering as part of efforts to slow ransomware

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Nations must better clamp down on money laundering in order to disrupt ransomware gangs’ illicit financial transactions, according to a statement Thursday from 32 countries that participated in two days of White House meetings focused on slowing hackers and digital extortion. The joint statement also included commitments to other methods of countering ransomware, such as encouraging cyber hygiene practices to the private sector, collaborating across law enforcement and national security agencies and using diplomatic pressure against nations that harbor cybercriminals. The initiative comes after a White House summit that included presentations and intelligence sharing between countries including Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France and Germany, among others. The two days of meetings were the latest steps the Biden administration has taken to battle ransomware, a frequent focus of the White House since major attacks this summer on Colonial Pipeline, JBS and Kaseya. However, the meetings excluded Russia, […]

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New CISA director wants to spend less time cleaning up after big hacks, more time preparing for them

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U.S. cybersecurity officials have scrambled to respond to one major hacking incident after another over the past nine months, from the alleged Russian intrusions into federal networks using bugged SolarWinds software, to the extortion of Colonial Pipeline, which controls the East Coast’s biggest fuel artery. Jen Easterly, the new director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), wants to break that cycle, and spend less time putting out fires and more time preparing for incidents in an attempt to reduce their impact. It’s a goal that will draw on Easterly’s experience working on cyber operations for the military, and her time trying to safeguard one of the largest U.S. investment banks from hackers. To date, actions taken by federal and private sector organizations “to protect us from threats are just not keeping pace,” she said in a recent interview. This month, Easterly set up the Joint Cyber Defense […]

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CISA director unveils cyber defense collaborative center for pre-attack planning

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Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Director Jen Easterly announced the launch of a cyber defense center Thursday that will seek to foster collaboration before cyberattacks, rather than afterward, between federal agencies, the private sector and state and local governments. Speaking at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas in one of her first public appearances since the Senate confirmed her last month to lead the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber wing, Easterly said the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) would try to enhance teamwork that often happens only after a major incident, such as the past year’s high-profile attacks on companies like SolarWinds or Kaseya. “While some of this work is happening in pockets, most of it is reactive,” Easterly said in prepared remarks. “The unique value add of the JCDC is to create a proactive capability for government and private sector to work together closely before an incident occurs […]

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Why grassroots efforts like #ShareTheMicInCyber play a vital role in a whole-of-society approach to cyber

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Amid increasingly sophisticated ransomware and supply chain attacks, the cybersecurity community needs a cultural shift and novel ideas to help new executive branch leadership operationalize President Biden’s recent Executive Order. The insight and authority of the government — coupled with the agility and innovation of the private sector — will create a powerful force multiplier capable of painting a clearer picture of the threat landscape, timelier coordination of defensive activities, and quicker recovery. Unfortunately, for many reasons, like fear of legal or regulatory liability, lack of regulations and incentives, and uncertainty in where to turn, strong collaboration is largely unrealized today and is limiting US’s ability to get ahead of cyber threats. The lack of trust between the public and private sectors must be overcome at the grassroots level by creating strong communities and humanizing practitioners. But the onus of creating partnerships across sectors cannot rest with the government or the private sector alone. The entire […]

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Cybersecurity Executive Order Aims to Uplevel Protections Across Agencies

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The Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity takes aim at improving information sharing, supply chain security and tackling cyberthreats
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Colonial Pipeline didn’t tell CISA about ransomware incident, highlighting questions about information sharing

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Colonial Pipeline didn’t notify the Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of its ransomware incident, and CISA still didn’t have technical details about the attack as of Tuesday morning, the agency’s top official told senators. Acting director Brandon Wales also said he didn’t think Colonial would have reached out to CISA if the FBI hadn’t alerted his agency, he said in testimony before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. That exchange — and others over the course of a hearing that touched on several major recent security incidents — served as yet another reminder that despite the constant drumbeat for improved cybersecurity information sharing between industry and government, it still doesn’t happen fully in even some of the most dire circumstances. “This is potentially the most substantial and damaging attack on U.S. critical infrastructure ever,” said Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, the top Republican on the panel, in […]

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Colonial Pipeline didn’t tell CISA about ransomware incident, highlighting questions about information sharing

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Colonial Pipeline didn’t notify the Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of its ransomware incident, and CISA still didn’t have technical details about the attack as of Tuesday morning, the agency’s top official told senators. Acting director Brandon Wales also said he didn’t think Colonial would have reached out to CISA if the FBI hadn’t alerted his agency, he said in testimony before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. That exchange — and others over the course of a hearing that touched on several major recent security incidents — served as yet another reminder that despite the constant drumbeat for improved cybersecurity information sharing between industry and government, it still doesn’t happen fully in even some of the most dire circumstances. “This is potentially the most substantial and damaging attack on U.S. critical infrastructure ever,” said Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, the top Republican on the panel, in […]

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Hacker team-ups pose 2021 threat to financial industry, group cautions

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An information sharing group for the financial sector warned on Tuesday that banks will encounter growing danger this year from converging nation-state and criminal hackers, as well as supply chain risks and cross-border attacks. The report from the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center serves as a recap of threats the industry endured last year, as well as a forecast for 2021. Ransomware and other kinds of extortion attacks were among the biggest hazards for the financial services industry last year, FS-ISAC said. The organization said it expects further use of the increasingly common ransomware method of hackers leaking partial data to incentivize higher victim payments, and it said that more than 100 financial companies received distributed denial-of-service extortion threats last year. The organization also suggested that state-sponsored groups would leverage access or other techniques established by financially motivated scammers to boost their own operations. FS-ISAC did not point […]

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The dangers of misusing instant messaging and business collaboration tools

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71% of office workers globally – including 68% in the US – admitted to sharing sensitive and business-critical company data using instant messaging (IM) and business collaboration tools, Veritas Technologies research reveals. The report, which polled 1… Continue reading The dangers of misusing instant messaging and business collaboration tools→

Senate hearing on SolarWinds hack lays bare US shortcomings, remaining mysteries

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A host of federal government policy failures contributed to the rippling damage of the SolarWinds hack, leaders of cyber firms told a Senate panel on Tuesday, with even lawmakers saying Congress must do more to prevent a repeat. More than two months after the hack became public, the wide-ranging Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing committee demonstrated that the U.S. government, the private sector and digital incident responders still are wrestling with the ramifications of an suspected Russian espionage campaign that leveraged the federal contractor SolarWinds. A number of big questions remain: SolarWinds still hasn’t determined how the hackers originally got into its systems, nobody has fully settled debates on whether the incident amount to espionage, or something worse, and suspicions abound that more victims remain unrevealed. “It has become clear that there is much more to learn about this incident, its causes, its scope and scale, and where we […]

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