Category: Microsoft

Trend Micro’s One Vision, One Platform

The world moves fast sometimes. Just two years ago, organizations were talking vaguely about the need to transform digitally, and ransomware began to make headlines outside the IT media circle. Fast forward to 2022, and threat actors have held oil pipelines and critical food supply chains hostage, while many organizations have passed a digital tipping point that will leave them forever changed. Against this backdrop, CISOs are increasingly aware of running disjointed point products’ cost, operational, and risk implications.

That’s why Trend Micro is transforming from a product- to a platform-centric company. From the endpoint to the cloud, we’re focused on helping our customers prepare for, withstand, and rapidly recover from threats—freeing them to go further and do more. Analysts seem to agree.

Unprecedented change

The digital transformation that organizations underwent during the pandemic was, in some cases, unprecedented. It helped them adapt to a new reality of remote and now hybrid working, supply chain disruption, and rising customer expectations. The challenge is that these investments in cloud infrastructure and services are broadening the corporate attack surface. In many cases, in-house teams are drowning in new attack techniques and cloud provider features. This can lead to misconfigurations which open the door to hackers.

Yet even without human error, there’s plenty for the bad guys to target in modern IT environments—from unpatched vulnerabilities to accounts protected with easy-to-guess or previously breached passwords. That means threat prevention isn’t always possible. Instead, organizations are increasingly looking to augment these capabilities with detection and response tooling like XDR to ensure incidents don’t turn into large-scale breaches. It’s important that these tools are able to prioritize alerts. Trend Micro found that as many as 70% of security operations (SecOps) teams are emotionally overwhelmed with the sheer volume of alerts they’re forced to deal with.

SecOps staff and their colleagues across the IT function are stretched to the limit by these trends, which are compounded by industry skills shortages. The last thing they need is to have to swivel-chair between multiple products to find the right information.

What Gartner says

Analyst firm Gartner is observing the same broad industry trends. In a recent report, it claimed that:

  • Vendors are increasingly divided into “platform” and “portfolio” providers—the latter providing products with little underlying integration
  • By 2025, 70% of organizations will reduce to a maximum of three the number of vendors they use to secure cloud-native applications
  • By 2027, half of the mid-market security buyers will use XDR to help consolidate security technologies such as endpoint, cloud, and identity
  • Vendors are increasingly integrating diverse security capabilities into a single platform. Those which minimize the number of consoles and configuration planes, and reuse components and information, will generate the biggest benefits

The power of one

This is music to our ears. It is why Trend Micro introduces a unified cybersecurity platform, delivering protection across the endpoint, network, email, IoT, and cloud, all tied together with threat detection and response from our Vision One platform. These capabilities will help customers optimize protection, detection, and response, leveraging automation across the key layers of their IT environment in a way that leaves no coverage gaps for the bad guys to hide in.

There are fewer overheads and hands-on decisions for stretched security teams with fewer vendors to manage, a high degree of automation, and better alert prioritization. Trend Micro’s unified cybersecurity platform vision also includes Trend Micro Service One for 24/7/365 managed detection, response, and support—to augment in-house skills and let teams focus on higher-value tasks.

According to Gartner, the growth in market demand for platform-based offerings has led some vendors to bundle products as a portfolio despite no underlying synergy. This can be a “worst of all worlds,” as products are neither best-of-breed nor do they reduce complexity and overheads, it claims.

We agree. That’s why Trend Micro offers a fundamentally more coherent platform approach. We help organizations continuously discover an ever-changing attack surface, assess risks and then take streamlined steps to mitigate that risk—applying the right security at the right time. That’s one vision, one platform, and total protection.

To find out more about Trend Micro One, please visit: https://www.trendmicro.com/platform-one

Source :
https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/22/e/platform-centric-enterprise-cybersecurity-protection.html

Windows 11 KB5014019 update fixes app crashes, slow copying

Microsoft has released optional cumulative update previews for Windows 11, Windows 10 version 1809, and Windows Server 2022, with fixes for Direct3D issues impacting client and server systems.

The updates are part of Microsoft’s scheduled April 2022 monthly “C” updates, allowing Windows users to test the fixes released on June 15th as part of next month’s Patch Tuesday.

Unlike regular Patch Tuesday Windows updates, scheduled non-security preview updates are optional. They are issued to test bug fixes and performance improvements before the general release, and they don’t provide security updates.

Cumulative updates released today include:

To install the updates, you have to go to Settings > Windows Update and manually ‘Check for updates.’ Windows will not install them until you click the ‘Download now’ button because they’re optional updates.

You can also manually download and install these cumulative update previews from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

“The preview update for other supported versions of Windows 10 will be available in the near term,” Microsoft said.

Windows 11 KB5014019 update
Windows 11 KB5014019 update (BleepingComputer)

KB5014019 fixes Direct3D app crashes

Today’s Windows optional updates come with fixes for issues that might cause some applications to crash or trigger various problems.

As Microsoft explained, KB5014019 “addresses an issue that might affect some apps that use d3d9.dll with certain graphics cards and might cause those apps to close unexpectedly.”

The same cumulative update also fixes a known issue affecting specific GPUs and could “cause apps to close unexpectedly or cause intermittent issues that affect some apps that use Direct3D 9.”

This update also fixes an issue that might cause file copying to be slower and another one preventing BitLocker from encrypting when using the silent encryption option.

KB5014019 addresses a known issue impacting the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) driver that might increase the system’s startup time.

What’s new in today’s Windows updates

After installing the KB5014019 non-security cumulative update preview, Windows 11 will have the build number changed to 22000.708.

The Windows 11 update preview includes dozens of quality improvements and fixes, including:

  • Addresses an issue that causes blurry app icons in Search results when the display’s dots per inch (dpi) scaling is greater than 100%.
  • New! Windows spotlight on the desktop brings the world to your desktop with new background pictures. With this feature, new pictures will automatically appear as your desktop background. This feature already exists for the lock screen. To turn on this feature, go to Settings > Personalization > Background > Personalize your background. Choose Windows spotlight.
  • Addresses an issue that fails to maintain the display brightness after changing the display mode.

    Source :
    https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-11-kb5014019-update-fixes-app-crashes-slow-copying/

Windows 11 KB5014019 breaks Trend Micro ransomware protection

This week’s Windows optional cumulative update previews have introduced a compatibility issue with some of Trend Micro’s security products that breaks some of their capabilities, including the ransomware protection feature.

“The UMH component used by several Trend Micro endpoint and server protection products is responsible for some advanced features such as ransomware protection,” the antivirus vendor revealed.

“Trend Micro is aware of an potential issue where customers who apply the optional Microsoft Windows 11 or Windows 2022 optional preview patches (KB5014019) and reboot would then find that the Trend Micro UMH driver would stop.”

The known issue affects the User Mode Hooking (UMH) component used by several Trend Micro endpoint solutions, including Apex One 2019, Worry-Free Business Security Advanced 10.0, Apex One as a Service 2019, Deep Security 20.0, Deep Security 12.0, and Worry-Free Business Security Services 6.7.

The Japanese cybersecurity company is now working on a fix to address this issue before the update previews are pushed to all Windows customers as part of the June 2022 Patch Tuesday.

How to restore Trend Micro endpoint solution capabilities

Luckily, unlike regular Patch Tuesday Windows updates, this week’s preview updates are optional and they were issued to test bug fixes and performance improvements before the general release.

Windows users have to manually check for them from Settings > Windows Update. They will not be installed until you click the ‘Download now’ button, limiting the number of potentially impacted users.

Impacted Windows platforms include both client and server versions with the problems experienced on systems running Windows 11, Windows 10 version 1809, and Windows Server 2022.

Trend Micro customers who have installed the optional Windows optional patch may either uninstall the patch temporarily or reach out to support to get a UMH debug module that should revive their security solution’s capabilities.

Windows users can remove the preview updates using the following commands from an Elevated Command Prompt.

Windows 10 1809: wusa /uninstall /kb:5014022 
Windows 11: wusa /uninstall /kb:5014019
Windows Server 2022: wusa /uninstall /kb:5014021

Source :
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/windows-11-kb5014019-breaks-trend-micro-ransomware-protection/

New Zoom Flaws Could Let Attackers Hack Victims Just by Sending them a Message

Popular video conferencing service Zoom has resolved as many as four security vulnerabilities, which could be exploited to compromise another user over chat by sending specially crafted Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) messages and execute malicious code.

Tracked from CVE-2022-22784 through CVE-2022-22787, the issues range between 5.9 and 8.1 in severity. Ivan Fratric of Google Project Zero has been credited with discovering and reporting all the four flaws in February 2022.

The list of bugs is as follows –

  • CVE-2022-22784 (CVSS score: 8.1) – Improper XML Parsing in Zoom Client for Meetings
  • CVE-2022-22785 (CVSS score: 5.9) – Improperly constrained session cookies in Zoom Client for Meetings
  • CVE-2022-22786 (CVSS score: 7.5) – Update package downgrade in Zoom Client for Meetings for Windows
  • CVE-2022-22787 (CVSS score: 5.9) – Insufficient hostname validation during server switch in Zoom Client for Meetings

With Zoom’s chat functionality built on top of the XMPP standard, successful exploitation of the issues could enable an attacker to force a vulnerable client to masquerade a Zoom user, connect to a malicious server, and even download a rogue update, resulting in arbitrary code execution stemming from a downgrade attack.

Fratric dubbed the zero-click attack sequence as a case of “XMPP Stanza Smuggling,” adding “one user might be able to spoof messages as if coming from another user” and that “an attacker can send control messages which will be accepted as if coming from the server.”

At its core, the issues take advantage of parsing inconsistencies between XML parsers in Zoom’s client and server to “smuggle” arbitrary XMPP stanzas — a basic unit of communication in XMPP — to the victim client.

Specifically, the exploit chain can be weaponized to hijack the software update mechanism and make the client connect to a man-in-the-middle server that serves up an old, less secure version of the Zoom client.

While the downgrade attack singles out the Windows version of the app, CVE-2022-22784, CVE-2022-22785, and CVE-2022-22787 impact Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows.

The patches arrive less than a month after Zoom addressed two high-severity flaws (CVE-2022-22782 and CVE-2022-22783) that could lead to local privilege escalation and exposure of memory contents in its on-premise Meeting services. Also fixed was another instance of a downgrade attack (CVE-2022-22781) in Zoom’s macOS app.

Users of the application are recommended to update to the latest version (5.10.0) to mitigate any potential threats arising out of active exploitation of the flaws.

Source :
https://thehackernews.com/2022/05/new-zoom-flaws-could-let-attackers-hack.html

[Template] Incident Response for Management Presentation

Security incidents occur. It’s not a matter of “if,” but of “when.” That’s why you implemented security products and procedures to optimize the incident response (IR) process.

However, many security pros who are doing an excellent job in handling incidents find effectively communicating the ongoing process with their management a much more challenging task.

Feels familiar?

In many organizations, leadership is not security savvy, and they aren’t interested in the details regarding all the bits and bytes in which the security pro masters.

Luckily, there is a template that security leads can use when presenting to management. It’s called the IR Reporting for Management template, providing CISOs and CIOs with a clear and intuitive tool to report both the ongoing IR process and its conclusion.

The IR Reporting for Management template enables CISOs and CIOs to communicate with the two key points that management cares about—assurance that the incident is under control and a clear understanding of implications and root cause.

Control is a key aspect of IR processes, in the sense that at any given moment, there is full transparency of what is addressed, what is known and needs to be remediated, and what further investigation is needed to unveil parts of the attack that are yet unknown.

Management doesn’t think in terms of trojans, exploits, and lateral movement, but rather they think in terms of business productivity — downtime, man-hours, loss of sensitive data.

Mapping a high-level description of the attack route to damage that is caused is paramount to get the management’s understanding and involvement – especially if the IR process requires additional spending.

The IR Reporting for Management template follows the SANSNIST IR framework and will help you walk your management through the following stages:

Identification

Attacker presence is detected beyond doubt. Follow the template to answer key questions:

  • Was the detection made in-house or by a third-party?
  • How mature is the attack (in terms of its progress along the kill chain)?
  • What is the estimated risk?
  • Will the following steps be taken with internal resources or is there a need to engage a service provider?

Containment

First aid to stop the immediate bleeding before any further investigation, the attack root cause, the number of entities taken offline (endpoints, servers, user accounts), current status, and onward steps.

Eradication

Full cleanup of all malicious infrastructure and activities, a complete report on the attack’s route and assumed objectives, overall business impact (man-hours, lost data, regulatory implications, and others per the varying context).

Recovery

Recovery rate in terms of endpoints, servers, applications, cloud workloads, and data.

Lessons Learned

How did that attack happen? Was it a lack of adequate security technology in place, insecure workforce practices, or something else? And how can we mend these issues? Provide a reflection on the previous stages across the IR process timeline, searching for what to preserve and what to improve.

Naturally, there is no one-size-fits-all in a security incident. For example, there might be cases in which the identification and containment will take place almost instantly together, while in other events, the containment might take longer, requiring several presentations on its interim status. That’s why this template is modular and can be easily adjustable to any variant.

Communication with management is not a nice-to-have but a critical part of the IR process itself. The definitive IR Reporting to Management template helps security team leads make their efforts and results crystal clear to their management.

Download the Definitive IR Reporting to Management template here.

Source :
https://thehackernews.com/2022/05/template-incident-response-for.html

Get the most out of Windows Server with these 5 best practices

We’ve invested in Windows Server for nearly 30 years, and we continue to find new ways to empower businesses who trust Windows Server as the operating system for their workloads. Over this time, we understand that business requirements have become more complex and demanding. Thus, we are energized when we hear how customers continue to trust Windows Server to navigate these ever-evolving requirements and run business and mission-critical workloads.

We want to continue to invest in your organizations’ success and enable you to get the most out of Windows Server by keeping you informed of the latest product announcements, news, and overall best practices. Here are the top five to-do’s for you to make the most out of Windows Server:

1. Patch and install security updates without rebooting with Hotpatch

Hotpatch is now generally available. As part of Azure Automanage for Windows Server, this capability allows you to keep your Windows Server virtual machines on Azure up-to-date without rebooting, enabling higher availability with faster and more secure delivery of updates. Other capabilities that are part of Azure Automanage for Windows Server include SMB over QUIC, as well as extended network for Azure, which lets you keep your on-premises IP addresses when you migrate to Azure. Learn more about why Azure is the best destination for Windows Server.

2. Take the recently available Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Certification

Invest in your career and skills with this brand-new Windows Server certification. With this certification, you can keep the Windows Server knowledge you have built your career on and learn how to apply it in the current state of hybrid cloud computing. Earn this certification for managing, monitoring, and securing applications on-premises, in Azure, and at the edge. Learn more about Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate certification today.

3. Upgrade to Windows Server 2022

With Windows Server 2022, get the latest innovation for you to continue running your workloads securely, enable new hybrid cloud scenarios, and modernize applications to meet your ever-evolving business requirements. Learn more about investing in your success with Windows Server.

4. Protect your workloads by taking advantage of free extended security updates (ESUs) in Azure

While many customers have adopted Windows Server 2022, we also understand that some need more time to modernize as support for older versions of Windows Server will eventually end.

  • For Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 customers, the end of support date is October 10, 2023. 
  • For Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 customers, the third year of extended security updates are coming to an end on January 10, 2023. Customers can get an additional fourth year of free extended security updates (ESUs-only) on Azure (including Azure Stack HCI, Azure Stack Hub, and other Azure products). With this, customers will have until January 9, 2024 for Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 to upgrade to a supported release.

We are committed to supporting you as you start planning for end of support if you are running workloads on older versions of Windows Server. Learn more about end of support deadlines for Windows Server 2008/R2 and 2012/R2 and your options.

5. Combine extended security updates with Azure Hybrid Benefit to save even more

In addition to all the innovative Windows Server capabilities available only on Azure, it also has offers for you to start migrating your workloads with Azure Hybrid Benefit. It is a licensing benefit that allows you to save even more by using existing Windows Server licenses on Azure. Learn more about how much you can save with Azure Hybrid Benefit.

Ask questions and engage in our community

Get started implementing these Windows Server best practices today! Join the conversation by sharing stories or questions you have here:  

System Center 2022 is now generally available

Datacenters are a core part of any IT infrastructure for businesses that run mission-critical workloads. However, with components across compute, networking, and storage, as well as the advancement in cloud technologies, the management of your datacenter environment can quickly become complex. Ever since its release in 2008, Microsoft System Center has been the solution that simplifies datacenter management across your IT environments.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of System Center 2022, which includes System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), System Center Orchestrator (SCORCH), Service Manager (SM), and Data Protection Manager (DPM). With this release, we are continuing to bring new capabilities for best-in-class datacenter management across diverse IT environments that could be comprised of Windows Server, Azure Stack HCI, or VMWare deployments. We have been energized to hear of organizations such as Olympia, Schaeffler, and Entain who have validated the capabilities of System Center 2022 during the preview. Now, let us dive into what is new with System Center 2022.

Why upgrade to System Center 2022

Best-in-class datacenter management

Your IT environments are ever-evolving to have applications running on a diverse set of hardware. Your workforce is spread across multiple locations and remote management is the new normal. System Center 2022 focuses on simplifying collaboration and providing consistent control for all your environments.

Enhanced access control capabilities in SCOM facilitate simpler management of permissions on the monitoring data and alert actions. A critical piece toward adoption of DevOps practices, empowering the users with the right level of control. The integration with Microsoft Teams and management of alert closures reduce the circle time between the application owners and the SCOM administrator. The developers can get notified about alerts for their applications on the Teams channels.

Additionally, to meet the needs of growing environments, you can now assign both IPv4 and IPv6 IP addresses to the software-defined networking (SDN) deployments with VMM. Performance and technology optimizations to the data protection manager mean you get more control and speed on the backups and restores.

Overall, this release gives you more control in managing the environment and working with the DevOps teams.

Flexible infrastructure platform

Datacenters are becoming more heterogeneous, with multiple host platforms and hypervisors, Windows/Linux, VMware, and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). System Center 2022 enables the unification of management practices for the datacenter, irrespective of the platform in use.

System Center 2022 is the best toolset to manage your Windows Server 2022 and SQL Server infrastructure. This includes using Windows Server 2022 for the management infrastructure and managing the Windows Server 2022 based environment. In addition to a comprehensive management experience for Windows Server 2022 workloads, this release of System Center adds support for managing Azure Stack HCI 21H2, VMware 7.0 hosts, and the latest Linux distros. You can create, configure, and register HCI 21H2 clusters, control virtual machines on the HCI clusters, set up SDN controllers, and manage storage pools from VMM. There are new management packs in SCOM for monitoring the Azure Stack HCI clusters. To protect the virtual machines on Stack HCI clusters, Microsoft Azure Backup Server can now be used.

Hybrid management with Azure

Efficiently managing IT resources that are sprawled across various locations without slowing down developer innovation is a key challenge that IT leaders face today. Azure Arc enables you to seamlessly govern, manage, and secure Windows and Linux servers, Kubernetes clusters, and applications across on-premises, multiple clouds, and the edge from a single control plane.

We will be bringing hybrid capabilities with System Center 2022 to standardize management and governance across on-premises and cloud environments while reusing your existing investments in System Center.

Stay tuned for more on these exciting capabilities!

Get started with System Center 2022

New in SecureX: Device Insights

Since its release, Cisco SecureX has helped over 10,000 customers gain better visibility into their infrastructure. As the number of devices in many customer environments continues to increase, so does the number of products with information about those devices. Between mobile device managers (MDM), posture agents, and other security products, a wealth of data is being collected but is not necessarily being shared or, more importantly, correlated. With the new device insights feature in Cisco SecureX, now available for all SecureX customers, we’re changing that.

Introducing Device Insights

Device insights, which is now generally available, extends our open, platform approach to SecureX by allowing you to discover, normalize, and consolidate information about the devices in your environment. But this isn’t just another dashboard pulling data from multiple sources. Device insights fetches data from sources you might expect, like your mobile device manager, but also leverages the wealth of data available in your Cisco Secure products such as Cisco Secure Endpoint, Orbital, Duo, and Umbrella. Combining these sources of data allows you to discover devices that may be sneaking through gaps in your normal device management controls and gain a comprehensive view into each device’s security posture and management status. With device insights, you’ll be able to answer these all-important questions:

  • What types of devices are connected in our environment?
  • What users have been accessing those devices?
  • Where are those devices located?
  • What vulnerabilities are associated with each device?
  • Which security agents are installed?
  • Is the security software is up to date?
  • What context do we have from technologies beyond the endpoint?

Supported Data Sources

Now, you might ask: what types of data can I bring into device insights? When we created SecureX, we built a flexible architecture based on modules that anyone can create. Device insights extends this architecture by adding a new capability to our module framework. Here’s a look at what data sources will be supported at launch:

Bringing Everything Together

Once you’ve enabled your data sources, device insights will periodically retrieve data from each source and get to work. Some sources can also publish data in real time to device insights using webhooks. We normalize all of the data and then correlate it between sources so you have one view into each of your devices, not a mess of duplicate information. This results in a single, unified dashboard with easy filtering, a high level view into your environment, and a customizable table of devices (which you can export too!). To see more information about a device, just click on one and you’ll see everything device insights knows, including which source provided which data.

screenshot: SecureX device status dashboard
screenshot: SecureX device detail view

Getting Started

To get started with device insights, simply log into Cisco SecureX and click the new Insights tab! For more information about device insights, check out these resources:

Attacks Abound in Tricky Threat Terrain: 2021 Annual Cybersecurity Report

The digital transformations that had enabled many enterprises to stay afloat amid the Covid-19 health crisis also brought about major upheavals in cybersecurity, the impact of which was still widely felt in 2021. Trend Micro detected and blocked more than 94 billion threats over the course of last year, keeping pace with malicious actors who were intent on abusing any weak spots in the security postures of organizations around the world. In our annual cybersecurity report, “Navigating New Frontiers,” we look back at 2021 in terms of the most significant security issues and trends that shaped the year’s threat landscape.

Ransomware actors become more deliberate in targeting critical industries

From years of tracking ransomware activities, we have observed how ransomware operators have evolved from deploying quantity-based tactics to deliberately picking more profitable victims. Modern ransomware usually dedicates more time and effort to planning and reconnaissance, making for debilitating attacks that are tailored to the specific systems of targets.

Likely because of the important roles they had played amid the pandemic, organizations in the government, banking, and healthcare industries bore the brunt of ransomware attacks in 2021, although we observed a 21% year-on-year decrease in overall ransomware detections. But this decline does not necessarily mean that there were fewer ransomware attacks. Rather, it could be the result of our detection and blocking of more malware tools that were often used by ransomware actors, including the Cobalt Strike beacon CoBeacon, the trojan Trickbot, and the information stealer BazarLoader. That we blocked larger numbers of these affiliate tools, whose presence is an early indicator of infection, might have prevented ransomware actors from escalating their operations to full-scale attacks.


Figure 1. The top three industries in terms of ransomware file detections in 2020 and 2021

Source: Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™

Malicious actors zero in on misconfigurations in cloud environments

More companies turned to the cloud to continue and expand their businesses, but the inherent complexity of setting up cloud infrastructures drove malicious actors to move quickly and take advantage of misconfigurations in these environments. Notably, a role-based access control misconfiguration in Kubernetes enabled the threat actor group TeamTNT to compromise almost 50,000 IP addresses in the US and China as part of a large-scale credential theft campaign last year. Also in 2021, TeamTNT used misconfigured servers as an attack vector to pilfer metadata from cloud service providers.


Figure 2. TeamTNT’s attack chain

Email-based attacks evolve into a more complex threat

In 2021, Trend Micro Cloud App Security found and blocked more than 25 million email threats. Phishing attempts, in particular, nearly doubled from 2020’s number. Of these, 62% were from spam emails while the rest consisted of credential-phishing attempts. Organizations in finance, healthcare, and education experienced the bulk of phishing attempts.


Figure 3. A comparison of the detections of spam phishing and credential-phishing attempts in 2020 and 2021

Source: Trend Micro Cloud App Security

We observed a dip in attempts at business email compromise (BEC) in 2021, but this could be because of an increase in more sophisticated BEC emails that were capable of avoiding antispam rules. We were able to stay on top of this development, however, as Trend Micro Cloud App Security used authorship analysis to detect and block a greater proportion as well as a greater number of these BEC attempts in 2021 than in 2020.


Figure 4. A comparison of the proportions of BEC attempts blocked based on authorship analysis and BEC attempts blocked based on behavior and intention analysis in 2020 and 2021

Source: Trend Micro Cloud App Security

Email was also the preferred entry point of opportunistic actors looking to exploit developments in the ongoing pandemic. We detected over 8 million Covid-19-related threats throughout 2021, mostly in the US and Germany. The majority of these threats were made up of emails, which is consistent with the upward trend of phishing attempts levied against the vaccine cold chain. The consistent news coverage surrounding the health crisis likely supplied malicious actors with new themes for their email lures.


Figure 5. A comparison of the detections of Covid-19-related threats consisting of malicious emails, URLs, and files in 2020 and 2021

Source: Trend Micro Cloud App Security

Exploits of vulnerabilities both old and new run rampant

In 2021, Trend Micro™ Zero Day Initiative™ (ZDI) published advisories for 1,604 vulnerabilities, a 10% increase from the previous year. Alongside newly found ones, however, malicious actors continued to exploit previously disclosed flaws in their attacks. They carried on with abusing legacy vulnerabilities despite the availability of patches addressing these flaws, and a demand for these persisted in the cybercriminal underground, where almost 25% of vulnerabilities sold were at least three years old.


Figure 6. A comparison of the proportions of Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) ratings among vulnerabilities disclosed by Trend Micro’s ZDI program in 2020 and 2021

Source: Trend Micro™ Zero Day Initiative™

Unpatched systems remained a liability for organizations, as evidenced by Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228), a high-severity vulnerability in Apache Log4j that was first reported privately to Apache in November 2021. A patch for it was made available a month later, but that did not stop malicious actors from exploiting it in various ransomware, data theft, and cryptocurrency-mining attacks.

Similarly, even though patches for them had been released, the Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities ProxyLogon (CVE-2021-26855) and ProxyShell (CVE-2021-34473 and CVE-2021-34523) were still successfully exploited by malicious actors. The cybercriminals behind the Squirrelwaffle loader, for example, used ProxyLogon and ProxyShell in hijacking their victims’ email accounts.

Enterprises need multilayered defense to keep thorny threats at bay

As their attack surfaces expand or otherwise evolve, enterprises across the globe are compelled to explore unfamiliar security terrain, where they will need high-quality data from a unified view of their entire digital ecosystems to anticipate, assess, and mitigate risks. Read our annual cybersecurity report, “Navigating New Frontiers,” to learn more about the noteworthy security stories of 2021 and obtain valuable insights that can help enterprises fend off latent, emergent, and current threats.

Source :
https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/22/c/attacks-abound-in-tricky-threat-terrain–2021-annual-cybersecuri.html

Anti-Ransomware Day: What Can We Do to Prevent the Next WannaCry?

This Anti-Ransomware Day, SonicWall looks at how cybersecurity has changed since WannaCry — and what we can do to ensure we never see such a widespread, devastating and preventable attack again.

On May 12, 2017, attackers identified a vulnerability in a Windows device somewhere in Europe — and in the process, set off an attack that would ultimately impact roughly 200,000 victims and over 300,000 endpoints across 150 countries. The devastation wrought by WannaCry caused financial losses of roughly $4 billion before the strain was halted by an unlikely hero just hours later. But perhaps most devastating of all was that it was completely preventable.

To help raise awareness about ransomware strains like WannaCry and the steps needed to combat them, INTERPOL in 2020 teamed up with cybersecurity firm Kaspersky to declare May 12 Anti-Ransomware Day. By taking a few important steps, organizations can help stop the next major ransomware attack, averting the potential for downtime, reputational damage, fines and more.

“Cybercrime and cybersecurity may seem like a complex issue that is difficult to understand unless you are an expert in the field — this is not the case. INTERPOL’s campaign aims to demystify these cyberthreats and offer simple, concrete steps which everybody can take to protect themselves,” INTERPOL’s Director of Cybercrime Craig Jones said.

What’s Changed Since WannaCry?

In the years since the infamous attack, ransomware has continued to grow. In 2021, SonicWall Capture Labs threat researchers recorded 623.3 million ransomware attempts on customers globally. This represents an increase of 105% from 2020’s total and a staggering 232% since 2019.

And while ransomware was a hot topic worldwide due to attacks such as WannaCry and NotPetya, which would begin its own savage trek across the globe just six weeks later, ransomware volume in 2017 was less than a third of what it was in 2021.

Weakened, but Still Wreaking Havoc

While variants such as Ryuk, SamSam and Cerber made up 62% of the ransomware attacks recorded by SonicWall in 2021, WannaCry lives on — and in surprising numbers. By now, five years on, the number of vulnerable Windows systems should be virtually zero. A patch for the EternalBlue vulnerability exploited by WannaCry was released two months prior to the attack, and Microsoft later took the unusual step of also releasing patches for Windows systems that were old and no longer supported.

But in 2020, SonicWall observed 233,000 instances of WannaCry, and in 2021, 100,000 hits were observed — indicating that there are still vulnerable Windows systems in the wild that need to be patched.

We Can Worry … Or Get to Work

What made WannaCry so successful was that many organizations at the time took a set-it-and-forget-it approach to IT, leaving vulnerable hundreds of thousands of endpoints that could otherwise have been patched prior to the attack. But while patching is a crucial part of any cybersecurity strategy, it can’t work alone — there are still a number of other steps organizations need to take to bolster their odds against the next big ransomware attack.

  • Update: Whenever possible, enable automatic updates on applications and devices on your network — both for operating systems and for any other apps in your ecosystem.
  • Upgrade: The older an operating system gets, the more malware and other threats are created to target them. Retire any software or hardware that is obsolete or no longer supported by the vendor.
  • Duplicate: All important data should be backed up to a place inaccessible by attackers. Having adequate and up-to-date backups on hand significantly eases recovery in the event of a ransomware attack.
  • Educate: A staggering 91% of all cyberattacks start with someone opening a phishing email. Teach employees to be wary any time they receive an email, particularly one with an attachment or link.
  • Safeguard: By taking the above steps, most attacks can be prevented, but not all. They’re called “best practices” and not “universal practices” for a reason: If any are allowed to lapse — or new methods are found to circumvent them — organizations will need a strong last line of defense. An advanced, multi-layer platform that includes endpoint security, next-gen firewall services, email security and secure mobile access can work to eliminate blind spots and eradicate both known and unknown threats.

“In the past two years, we have seen how cybercriminals have become bolder in using ransomware. Organizations targeted by such attacks are not limited to corporations and governmental organizations — ransomware operators are ready to hit essentially any business regardless of size,” Jones said. “To fight them, we need to educate ourselves on how they work and fight them as one. Anti-Ransomware Day is a good opportunity to highlight this need and remind the public of how important it is to adopt effective security practices.”

Source :
https://blog.sonicwall.com/en-us/2022/05/anti-ransomware-day-what-can-we-do-to-prevent-the-next-wannacry/

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