News - New England Safety Partners, LLC

Ransomware Shuts Down US Pipeline

May 10, 2021 Cyber Security Ed Gardner 0

This is a major story: a probably Russian cybercrime group called DarkSide shut down the Colonial Pipeline in a ransomware attack. The pipeline supplies much of the East Coast. This is the new and improved ransomware attack: the hackers stole nearly 100 gig of data, and are threatening to publish it. The White House has declared a state of emergency and has created a task force to deal with the problem, but it’s unclear what they can do. This is bad; our supply chains are so tightly coupled that this kind of thing can have disproportionate effects…

Fintech Startup Offers $500 for Payroll Passwords

May 10, 2021 Cyber Security Ed Gardner 0

How much is your payroll data worth? Probably a lot more than you think. One financial startup that’s targeting the gig worker market is offering up to $500 to anyone willing to hand over the payroll account username and password given to them by their employer, plus a regular payment for each month afterwards in which those credentials still work.

Newly Declassified NSA Document on Cryptography in the 1970s

May 10, 2021 Cyber Security Ed Gardner 0

This is a newly unclassified NSA history of its reaction to academic cryptography in the 1970s: “NSA Comes Out of the Closet: The Debate over Public Cryptography in the Inman Era,” Cryptographic Quarterly, Spring 1996, author still classifi…

Friday Squid Blogging: COVID Relief Funds

May 7, 2021 Cyber Security Ed Gardner 0

A town in Japan built a giant squid statue with its COVID relief grant.

One local told the Chunichi Shimbun newspaper that while the statue may be effective in the long run, the money could have been used for “urgent support,” such as for medical staff and long-term care facilities.
But a spokesperson for the town told Fuji News Network that the statue would be a tourist attraction and part of a long term strategy to help promote Noto’s famous flying squid.

I am impressed by the town’s sense of priorities.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered…

Teaching Cybersecurity to Children

May 7, 2021 Cyber Security Ed Gardner 0

A new draft of an Australian educational curriculum proposes teaching children as young as five cybersecurity:

The proposed curriculum aims to teach five-year-old children — an age at which Australian kids first attend school — not to share information such as date of birth or full names with strangers, and that they should consult parents or guardians before entering personal information online.
Six-and-seven-year-olds will be taught how to use usernames and passwords, and the pitfalls of clicking on pop-up links to competitions.
By the time kids are in third and fourth grade, they’ll be taught how to identify the personal data that may be stored by online services, and how that can reveal their location or identity. Teachers will also discuss “the use of nicknames and why these are important when playing online games.”…

Investment Scammer John Davies Reinvents Himself?

May 7, 2021 Cyber Security Ed Gardner 0

John Bernard, a pseudonym used by a convicted thief and con artist named John Clifton Davies who’s fleeced dozens of technology startups out of an estimated $30 million, appears to have reinvented himself again after being exposed in a recent investigative series published here. Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Davies/Bernard is now posing as John Cavendish and head of a new “private office” called Hempton Business Management LLP.

The Story of Colossus

May 6, 2021 Welcome Ed Gardner 0

Nice video of a talk by Chris Shore on the history of Colossus.

New Spectre-Like Attacks

May 5, 2021 Cyber Security Ed Gardner 0

There’s new research that demonstrates security vulnerabilities in all of the AMD and Intel chips with micro-op caches, including the ones that were specifically engineered to be resistant to the Spectre/Meltdown attacks of three years ago.

Details:

The new line of attacks exploits the micro-op cache: an on-chip structure that speeds up computing by storing simple commands and allowing the processor to fetch them quickly and early in the speculative execution process, as the team explains in a writeup from the University of Virginia. Even though the processor quickly realizes its mistake and does a U-turn to go down the right path, attackers can get at the private data while the processor is still heading in the wrong direction…

Malicious Office 365 Apps Are the Ultimate Insiders

May 5, 2021 Cyber Security Ed Gardner 0

Phishers targeting Microsoft Office 365 users increasingly are turning to specialized links that take users to their organization’s own email login page. After a user logs in, the link prompts them to install a malicious but innocuously-named app that gives the attacker persistent, password-free access to any of the user’s emails and files, both of which are then plundered to launch malware and phishing scams against others.

The Wages of Password Re-use: Your Money or Your Life

May 4, 2021 Cyber Security Ed Gardner 0

When normal computer users fall into the nasty habit of recycling passwords, the result is most often some type of financial loss. When cybercriminals develop the same habit, it can eventually cost them their freedom.

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