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Gearing up for RSA Conference 2017, What s Hot in InfoSec?

Friends,

In this month’s edition of Cyber Warnings, we cover some of the hottest
topics in information security this month including Cloud Security,
Vulnerability Detection and Remediation, Internet of Things (IoT) Security
and Best Practices in Security Operations and much more.

We’re finding this year to be a continuation of the last with explosive
growth in Ransomware and new, very creative methods of cyber-attacks.
There’s some exciting news on the cyber-crime front. The money transfer
leader company Western Union has agreed to forfeit $586 million to settle
fraud charges and admitted it facilitated scammers. The services offered by the Western Union
have often been exploited by crooks and fraudsters because the company has failed to maintain a
proper anti-fraud program. In fact, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department
of Justice accused the company of not taking immediate action against cyber criminals that used its
service to transfer money that is the result of illicit activities. Since 2001, the US authorities have
convicted 29 owners and employees of Western Union agents for their active participation in fraud
schemes.

However, as we look towards attribution, we’re finding wild claims being made – the Chinese
Government hacked Yahoo!, the Russian Government hacked the DNC, yet there’s no detailed
report properly linking attribution to these governments. It’s so hard to attribute an attack without
tracerouting all the packets to the source, working with law enforcement such as Europol, the FBI
and others to get ISP’s to share their logs and help find the actual hackers at their keyboards, on
their ISP routers.

In some cases, many hackers will leverage someone else’s computer where they’ve planted a
Remote Access Trojan (RAT) to make the tracks lead in the wrong direction. In other cases, they
might be sitting at a café, using free wifi and hacking an organization that’s far away in another
country. I believe that attribution is going to become one of the biggest problems for cyber law
enforcement.

With that said, in 2017, we should focus on best-practices at logging, encryption of data at rest and
in transit, system hardening through vulnerability remediation and assume the devices which come
and go on our intranets are already infected and may cause serious harm. In fact, these risks make
having Cyber Insurance a business requirement.

When you hit the trade show floor next month, at RSA Conference 2017, look for next generation
solutions, better approaches to stopping spear phishing, RATs and ransomeware in their tracks and
look for continuous data protection (CDP) as the future of backups. Find a solid encryption solution.
Look to replace antiquated firewalls and antivirus. Get proactive, get one step ahead of the next
threat, or get victimized.

To our faithful readers, Enjoy

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini, Editor-in-Chief, [email protected]
3 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine January 2017 Edition
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