Test methodologies published today, and their scope includes security effectiveness, performance, stability and reliability, and total cost of ownership.

**AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 6, 2022 / PRNewswire/** — CyberRatings.org, the nonprofit entity dedicated to providing transparency on cybersecurity product efficacy, will begin testing Enterprise Firewalls and Data Center Firewalls this fall with group test scores and ratings to be released in 2023. Test methodologies have been published at CyberRatings.org and are provided at no charge.

CyberRatings invites all leading vendors to submit their offerings to be tested for free. Products with significant market share, as well as challengers with innovative technologies, will be included at CyberRatings' discretion. The scope of the methodologies includes security effectiveness, performance, stability and reliability, and total cost of ownership.

Enterprise Firewalls (also known as Next Generation Firewalls) are one of the largest and most mature markets in the industry, projected to grow 10% year over year. A firewall is the first line of defense that monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic. Its purpose is to protect the network by allowing or blocking data packets based on a set of security rules. Without a firewall, networks and data can be vulnerable to thousands of attacks.

"While Cloud Firewalls and SASE are new categories that garner a lot of attention, the Enterprise Firewall market is vast, and while mature, is still growing. Most firewalls remain at the enterprise perimeter or data center," said Vikram Phatak, CEO of CyberRatings.org. "Our test methodologies are designed to address the challenges faced by enterprise security and IT professionals in selecting and managing security products. We welcome feedback from the community about which firewalls should be tested."

CyberRatings.org test reports are primarily reserved for members with a paid subscription. In observance of Cybersecurity Awareness Month and courtesy of Keysight CyPerf, CyberRatings.org is making its recent Cloud Network Firewall test reports for Fortinet, Forcepoint and Juniper Networks available for free. Additional products are currently being tested with ratings and a comparative report to be published in the coming weeks.

If you would like to see an Enterprise Firewall or Data Center Firewall product tested, please contact us at \[email protected\].

**Additional Resources**

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**About CyberRatings.org**

CyberRatings.org is a nonprofit 501(c)6 entity dedicated to quantifying cyber-risk and providing transparency on cybersecurity product efficacy through testing and ratings programs. To become a member, visit www.cyberratings.org.

**SOURCE:**  CyberRatings.org

CyberRatings.org Invites Industry Participation in Forthcoming Enterprise Firewall and Data Center Firewall Tests

The infosec conference named after the UK's calling code returned this year with a focus on building a healthy community.

44CON -- London — After a two-year break, information security conference 44CON returned to London, where passionate security evangelists were joined by architects and managers from leading technology companies to enjoy a two-day festival of cybersecurity research from global headliners. From Sept. 15 to 16, people came to meet, do business, talk, and learn, with the 44CON crew providing fun, great food, and cybersecurity-themed entertainment.

It was a bit like the Babylon 5 of the UK infosec community.

I asked Adrian Mahieu, the founder of 44CON and the driving force behind the conference's resurrection, what motivated him to start up again post-COVID. 

"I wanted to make a conference that I'd like to go to, with some serious, in-depth technical talks \[and\] a few interesting sponsors that are not the usual suspects you'll see at other technical security conferences," he said. "But most interesting for me is getting people talking and learning from each other."  

This focus was apparent even in simple aspects, such as the way conference organizers devoted a large communal area to tabled seating, allowing attendees to share coffee, enjoy some excellent food, or just have impromptu birds-of-a-feather sessions. People at all stages of their cybersecurity careers were present, from eager recent graduates making connections to industry leaders talent-spotting and team-building, as well as a good number of people who justify the descriptor "expert."

Multiple industry sectors were represented, including broadcast entertainment and cloud service providers. "I tell vendors that all they need to bring is a backdrop for their exhibitors table," Mahieu explained. "I don't want those big palatial booths taking up the communal space. I want everyone to feel free to talk together!"

The evening's entertainment included a security communications wargame designed and hosted by innovative game developers Stone Paper Scissors. Threat Condition simulated the problems and issues that ensue after a reputationally damaging cyberattack and highlighted the consequential organizational and communication challenges. SPS designed what I think may be the best tabletop disaster-recovery scenario wargame I have ever seen.

One thing that differentiates 44CON from other conferences is its COVID-19 precautions. 44CON installed high-powered air purifiers throughout the venue to provide clean, breathable air for attendees.

**Chatham House Chats**

Discussions were held under the Chatham House rule, allowing people to speak and share their research freely. In that capacity, I was able to have an in-depth conversation with one of the world's cloud security experts. We discussed the type of events he sees and which ones are the "fire-alarm" events.

"Identity is always first," he said. "Our CIRT responds in minutes to a credential leak on a public source-code repository." 

When considering identity-first security, the joiners, movers, and leavers problem gets writ large, as all the cloud service provider sees is a token. 

"We're faced with a choice when tuning the token lifetime — too short, and the user experience becomes sucky with overly frequent login challenges; too long, and the token becomes vulnerable in such cases as endpoint theft," he said. 

Risk-assessing every transaction from the endpoint is possible. But given the breadth of activity for any cloud service user, this quickly crashes into security's scalability barrier.

Always curious about how the insider problem is evolving, I took the opportunity to ask how leading cloud service providers are addressing traditionally tricky problems, such as data loss prevention, and how that migrates in a cloud environment. Many security practitioners still have trouble converting their legacy mindsets into a cloud-native one. 

My security expert was eager to illustrate: "We see a common problem where a business application user will exfiltrate information to personal AWS buckets. This means that the cloud log is in their personal bucket, and the business has no visibility of it. However, there is a simple answer — we advise business customers to create a service-aware policy that limits bucket access to corporation-owned buckets."

What this means is that many security practitioners are still limited to legacy thinking and architectural models, a key indicator of which is when practitioners try to filter based on IP address, basically trying to re-create their traditional data center in a cloud service environment. Cloud instances are ephemeral by nature, allowing savvy architects and devs to create and destroy instances on demand. IP addresses just don't matter in this context.

**Participating and Presenting**

Capture-the-flag (CTF) events are a staple for many cybersecurity conferences, but 44CON had its own spin. This year's CTF was organized by Trace Labs, a Canadian not-for-profit organization that partners with law enforcement agencies to leverage the power of crowdsourced OSINT collection to assist in ongoing missing persons investigations. Instead of hurling their exploit kits at a target, contestants were invited to "use their powers for good" and take real missing persons cases and hunt for missing pieces of open source intelligence, or flags. The more flags a team finds, the more points they get, all the while helping to make the missing-persons database more complete.

And saving the best for last — the talks! Headlined by James Forshaw of Google Project Zero, superb presentations allowed all of us to learn about the latest in vulnerabilities and exploitation, whether you are a red or blue teamer. Erlend Andreas Gjære, co-founder and CEO of security training adviser Secure Practice, talked about the need for a human touch in cybersecurity, and the mysterious stranger identified only as "cybergibbons" explained how he took control of cruise ships, oil rigs, and other merchant navy vessels in a talk called "I'm the captain now!"

Last but not least was an inspiring talk by Thinkst founder and CEO Haroon Meer, who closed the conference by exhorting attendees to unleash their innovation and create security products that the world needs. Meer observed how many of the products currently on the market are snake oil, peddled by people who you wouldn't leave alone in your home with your grandmother. He also pointed out that the path to a profitable software-as-a-security business is simply to find something that 1,000 people will want to use — possibly the best advice to budding entrepreneurs since Ron Gula's five-slide pitch deck.

Sharing Knowledge at 44CON

Exploit allows unsigned and unnotarized macOS applications to bypass Gatekeeper and other security, without notifying the user.

New details about a known vulnerability in the macOS Archive Utility have emerged, showing that a cyberattacker armed with just the right specialty archive could exploit it to execute a malicious application while bypassing security checks — without the user ever being notified. 

The vulnerability, discovered by Jamf Threat Labs and tracked as CVE-2022-32910, affects the Archive Utility, an Apple tool that allows users to easily create and send archives. The team said it discovered the flaw during research into general archiving feature security. 

"Although our testing was done with Apple Archives, the same bypass can be achieved with other archive formats such as .ZIP archives, in which case the .ZIP file could be created while within the app directory," the disclosure noted. 

The Jamf team reported the macOS bug to Apple on May 31 and said Apple issued a patch on July 20 — but it's just now releasing technical details. Out-of-date end users should update to the latest macOS version to avoid compromise.

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macOS Archive Utility Bug Lets Malicious Apps Bypass Security Checks

Russian-speaking cyberattackers boast they are behind disruption of Colorado, Kentucky, and Mississippi government websites.

A hacktvist group with ties to the Russian government has claimed credit for cyberattacks on the government websites of three US states: Colorado, Kentucky, and Mississippi. 

The sites for Mississippi and Kentucky were functioning Thursday, following the Russian cyberattacks, while the Colorado State Official Web Portal was displaying a message that the "homepage is currently offline," earlier in the day. By Thursday afternoon, the homepage appeared back online. 

Reports of the compromise of state government systems by the so-called Killnet hacktivist group is particularly alarming in light of upcoming November US midterm elections, which rely on individual states to administer voting. 

"In the case of these state government websites, the disruption of service, while inconvenient, is far less of a problem than a data breach involving the theft of personally identifiable information," Erich Kron, security awareness advocate with KnowBe4, said in an emailed statement in reaction to news of the cyberattack. "Whether it's the defacement of websites, or taking them offline with attacks such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, it does erode public trust in the organizations that these websites represent."

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Russian Hackers Shut Down US State Government Websites

The trend, spotted by Consumer Reports, could mean good news for organizations struggling to contain remote work challenges.

A survey on US consumer attitudes toward online privacy and security holds some potentially good news for enterprise organizations in an era of work-from-home and hybrid work models.

The survey of 2,103 US adults, conducted by Consumer Reports (CR), showed substantial improvement in consumer cybersecurity and privacy practices over the past three years. Many more individuals appear aware of the security and privacy risks associated with their digital footprint, and have modified their behavior significantly to try and protect it better.

Some of the changes — such as a surge in the use of multifactor authentication (MFA) — appear tied to the fact that more and more organizations require it for accessing online accounts and services. That said, a lot of the behavioral changes are likely also being driven by a higher awareness of cyber-risks, several security experts say.

"The harsh reality is that the explosive growth in ransomware attacks and data breaches has raised awareness of cybersecurity to a level we’ve never seen before," says Darren Guccione, CEO and co-founder at Keeper Security. "When people are unable to get fuel at the gas pump or their bank data is leaked on the Dark Web, they immediately understand the tangible impact cyberattacks can have on their personal lives."

The trend has upside for enterprise organizations that are struggling to contain security challenges tied to the use of insecure home networks and devices by their work-from-home and remote employees. It could mean less of an uphill battle for them, says Brian Dunagan, vice president of engineering at Retrospect, a StorCentric company.

It suggests that people are taking communications regarding security directives seriously and are taking the time to read, learn, and ask questions if necessary — which is a notable shift. 

"Now is the time for security leaders to make the case for increased security budgets, whether it is added personnel or added security technology solutions," Dunagan says.

**Significant Security Improvements for Consumers**

When it comes to better consumer adoption of certain security practices, 88% of survey respondents, for instance, said they use what CR describes as strong passwords — eight characters or more, with upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols — to protect access to their Wi-Fi networks. That's up from 74% in the last survey. Similarly, 85%, up from 69%, have implemented measures such as requiring a password, PIN, TouchID, or FaceID to unlock their smartphone.

The survey revealed a greater understanding among US consumers of the potential privacy and security implications of allowing mobile applications the unfettered ability to track their location and movements. Eighty-one percent of consumers now only allow an app to access their location when they are using the application. Eighty percent claimed they did not install applications that they perceived as collecting too much information about them, and 78% block apps from having access to the camera, location, or contacts if they think the app does not require that access.

The numbers in each instance were significantly higher compared with the 2019 survey. For example, just 60% blocked app access to their cameras and contacts three years ago, and 65% ensured a mobile app had access to their location only when the app was in use.

One of the most significant changes was in the use of multifactor authentication: 77% of survey respondents said they now use MFA, up from 50% in 2019. Security experts consider MFA to be a fundamental security best practice for protecting online accounts against takeover and compromise.

"Many products and companies have started to encourage consumers to enable better cyber hygiene," says Amira Dhalla, director of impact partnerships and programs at Consumer Reports. **"**It's common that when you log in to your bank or email account, they encourage or mandate \[that\] you have to use multifactor authentication."

**Consumers Are More in Control, but Work Needs to Be Done**

Dhalla says that CR's survey showed that consumers overall feel more in control of their personal data because of the steps they are taking to control and secure it. 

“As more security and privacy tools have become available and marketed to everyday consumers, they feel they have more at their disposal to combat the security of their data," she notes. "\[They\] are placing more responsibility on themselves to protect themselves.”

At the same time, they are less secure with how companies are handling and storing their data. At least 75% of the respondents in the CR survey expressed concern about the privacy of personal data that companies collected online. "We know consumers are holding themselves more accountable. They just need knowledge and tools to be able to protect themselves more."

Roger Grimes, data-driven defense evangelist at KnowBe4, perceives the improved consumer habits as the result of a trickle-down effect. "What's largely driving the change is businesses are now taking cybersecurity threats more seriously, which trickles down to consumers because they work for those businesses and are impacted as customers," he says. "If your employer is training you to be more cybersecurity aware on the job, those are also skills you can apply at home and teach to your family."

Grimes says while the trends in the CR survey are encouraging, it's also important to view them in the right perspective. He points to the survey's definition of what constitutes a strong password as one example. "Eight-character passwords, even with complexity, are no longer considered secure," he says. "For someone's password to be truly secure it must be 12 characters or longer and fully random or 20 characters or longer if made up out of someone's head."

Similarly, using MFA alone is not sufficient, if it is not also phishing resistant, he says. "Unfortunately, 90% to 95% of MFA is easily phish-able \[and\] no harder to steal or bypass than a password. Telling people to use any MFA is bad advice."

US Consumers Are Finally Becoming More Security & Privacy Conscious

Cybercriminals are focusing more and more on crafting special email attacks that evade Microsoft Defender and Office security.

Increasingly, cyberattackers are laser-focused on crafting attacks that are specialized to bypass Microsoft's default security, researchers say — which is going to require a shift in defense posture for organizations going forward.

"Many hackers think of email and Microsoft 365 as their initial points of compromise, \[so they\] will test and verify that they are able to bypass Microsoft’s default security," according to a new report from Avanan that flags an uptick in its customer telemetry of malicious emails landing in Microsoft-protected email boxes. "This does not mean that Microsoft's security got worse. It means that the hackers got better, faster, and learned more methods to obfuscate and bypass the default security."

Some of the eye-catching numbers in the report, gleaned from analyzing 3 million corporate emails in the past year, include:

*   About 19% of phishing emails observed by Avanan bypassed Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and Defender.
*   Since 2020, Defender's missed phishing rates among Avanan's customers have increased by 74%.
*   On average, Defender sends only 7% of phishing messages received by Avanan customers to the Junk folder.
*   In good news: Microsoft flagged and blocked 93% of business email compromise attempts.
*   Microsoft catches 90% of emails booby-trapped with malware-laden attachments.

Again, the numbers speak to the evolution of phishing and the fact that attackers are increasingly using tactics like leveraging legitimate services to avoid including obviously malicious links in emails, using masking techniques like vanity URLs, and avoiding attachments altogether.

To defend themselves against these custom-built attacks, organizations can go to basic defense-in-depth approaches with four main prongs, according to Roger Grimes, data-driven defense evangelist at KnowBe4.

Those prongs include: A better focus on preventing social engineering, using a best defense-in-depth combination of policies, technical defenses, and education; patch software and firmware, especially any that are listed on CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerability Catalog; use phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA); and using different, secure, passwords for every site and service where MFA cannot be used.

"There are no other defenses, besides these four, that would have the most impact on decreasing cybersecurity risk," Grimes says. "It is the world's lack of focus on these four defenses that has made hackers and malware so successful for so long."

Hackers Have It Out for Microsoft Email Defenses

The malware-as-a-service group Eternity is selling a one-stop shop for various malware modules it's been distributing individually via a subscription model on Telegram.

An emerging Russia-linked threat group is ramping up its malware-as-a-service operation by packaging several of its modules into a multifunctional malware offering, dubbed LilithBot, that it's peddling via Telegram.

The Eternity group — aka EternityTeam or Eternity Project — has been active since at least January and uses an "as-a-service" subscription model to distribute different Eternity-branded malware modules in underground forums. Its individual malicious offerings include a stealer, miner, botnet, ransomware, worm with a dropper, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) bot, researchers from Zscaler ThreatLabz revealed in a blog post published this week.

In a recently observed campaign, Eternity put a number of those modules together into "one-stop shopping for these various payloads," Zscaler security researcher Shatak Jain and senior program manager Aditya Sharma wrote in the post. The threat actor is distributing the multifunctional LilithBot malware through its dedicated Telegram group and a Tor link.

"In addition to its primary botnet functionality, it also had built-in stealer, clipper, and miner capabilities," the researchers wrote of the LilithBot campaign, which appears to have multiple variants.

**Who Is EternityTeam?**

The EternityTeam has links to the Russian Jester Group and offers a malware toolkit sold through a malware-as-a-service subscription service advertised via a dedicated Telegram channel, named @EternityDeveloper.

Other security companies have also studied the group. Security firm Cyberint in January identified the group and its various malware modules as an emerging force to be reckoned with on the underground cybercrime industry. In May, research from security firm Sekoia.IO identified the group as a new "prominent malware seller" and provided analysis on the various tools in its arsenal.

Typically, EternityTeam offers different services individually — including a stealer, miner, clipper, ransomware, worm plus dropper, and DDoS Bot — and accepts payment through various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, and Tether/USDT, among others.

Eternity also offers customized viruses and will create viruses with add-on features upon customer request. The price of the various malware the group sells ranges from US$90 to $470, with its ransomware product priced the highest.

The cybercrime group runs a tight ship: Its business is extremely "user-friendly" for a number of reasons, the Zscaler researchers noted. It's easy for cybercriminals to purchase and operate via Tor, and the service accepts crypto as payment; it's customizable to fit clients' needs; and it's regularly updated at no additional charge, they said. The group also offers add-on discounts and referral rewards to its customers.

**LilithBot Campaign**

As legitimate businesses often see the value in bundling services together, so do cybercrime operators. LilithBot is an example of this practice, with Eternity selling the multifunctional malware as a subscription, similar to how it distributes its individual malware-as-a-service modules.

There are plenty of other examples of attackers distributing malware that relies not on one core competency but a combined range of malicious functionality in one package. The Chaos malware is one example of this, having evolved recently from its original ransomware builder into a DDoS and cryptomining tool.

Though LilithBot is different in that it is starting out as a combination of a threat group's existing services rather than evolving into a new type of malware, it's similar in that it packs a malicious, multifunctional punch.

LilithBot initiates its nefarious activity by registering as a botnet on an affected system and then decrypts itself step by step to drop its configuration file, the researchers said. It goes on to steal files and user information, which it then uploads via a zip file to a command-and-control (C2) server using the Tor network. LilithBot also uses fake certificates to bypass detections and deliver its various functionality as a stealer, cryptominer, and clipper.

Zscaler researchers observed two variants of LilithBot being distributed by Eternity, with slight differences in the main functions of each release, they said. Specifically, some commands that were present in earlier variants were absent from the newest variant that researchers analyzed.

The latest version of LilithBot no longer checks for the presence of various DLLs related to virtual software like Sandboxie, 360 Total Security, Avast, and COMODO Avs, nor for the Win32\_PortConnector that represents physical connection ports such as DB-25 pin male, Centronics, or PS/2 to ensure the malware is running on a physical machine rather than a virtual one.

"It is likely that the group is still performing these functions," the researchers wrote, "but doing so in more sophisticated ways: such as performing it dynamically, encrypting the functions like other regions of code, or using other advanced tactics."

Russia-Linked Cybercrime Group Hawks Combo of Malicious Services With LilithBot

While organizations wait for an official patch for the two zero-day flaws in Microsoft Exchange, they should scan their networks for signs of exploitation and apply these mitigations.

Microsoft has confirmed two new zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server (CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082) are being exploited in "limited, targeted attacks." In the absence of an official patch, organizations should check their environments for signs of exploitation and then apply the emergency mitigation steps.

*   CVE-2022-41040 — Server-side request forgery, allowing authenticated attackers to make requests posing as the affected machine
*   CVE-2022-41082 — Remote Code Execution, allowing authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary PowerShell.

"Currently, there are no known proof-of-concept scripts or exploitation tooling available in the wild," wrote John Hammond, a threat hunter with Huntress. However, that just means the clock is ticking. With renewed focus on the vulnerability it is just a matter of time before new exploits or proof-of-concept scripts become available.

**Steps to Detect Exploitation**

The first vulnerability — the server-side request forgery flaw — can be used to achieve the second — the remote code execution vulnerability — but the attack vector requires the adversary to already be authentication on the server.

Per GTSC, organizations can check if their Exchange Servers have already been exploited by running the following PowerShell command:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path <Path\_IIS\_Logs> -Filter "\*.log" | Select-String -Pattern 'powershell.\*Autodiscover\\.json.\*\\@.\*200

GTSC has also developed a tool to search for signs of exploitation and released it on GitHub. _This list will be updated as other companies release their tools._

**Microsoft-Specific Tools**

*   According to Microsoft, there are queries in Microsoft Sentinel that could be used to hunt for this specific threat. One such query is the Exchange SSRF Autodiscover ProxyShell detection, which was created in response to ProxyShell. The new Exchange Server Suspicious File Downloads query specifically looks for suspicious downloads in IIS logs.
*   Alerts from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint regarding possible web shell installation, possible IIS web shell, suspicious Exchange Process Execution, possible exploitation of Exchange Server vulnerabilities, suspicious processes indicative of a web shell, and possible IIS compromise can also be signs the Exchange Server has been compromised via the two vulnerabilities.
*   Microsoft Defender will detect the post-exploitation attempts as _Backdoor:ASP/Webshell.Y_ and _Backdoor:Win32/RewriteHttp.A_.

Several security vendors have announced updates to their products to detect exploitation, as well.

Huntress said it monitors approximately 4,500 Exchange servers and is currently investigating those servers for potential signs of exploitation in these servers. "At the moment, Huntress has not seen any signs of exploitation or indicators of compromise on our partners' devices," Hammond wrote.

**Mitigation Steps to Take**

Microsoft promised that it is fast-tracking a fix. Until then, organizations should apply the following mitigations to Exchange Server to protect their networks.

Per Microsoft, on-premises Microsoft Exchange customers should apply new rules through the URL Rewrite Rule module on IIS server.

*   In IIS Manager -> Default Web Site -> Autodiscover -> URL Rewrite -> Actions, select Request Blocking and add the following string to the URL Path:

.\*autodiscover\\.json.\*\\@.\*Powershell.\*

The condition input should be set to {REQUEST\_URI}

*   Block ports 5985 (HTTP) and 5986 (HTTPS) as they are used for Remote PowerShell.

_**If you are using Exchange Online:**_

Microsoft said Exchange Online customers are not affected and do not need to take any action. However, organizations using Exchange Online are likely to have hybrid Exchange environments, with a mix of on-prem and cloud systems. They should follow the above guidance to protect the on-prem servers.

Worried About the Exchange Zero-Day? Here's What to Do

Weeks after it breached the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Vice Society ransomware group is threatening to leak the stolen data, unless they get paid.

The clock is ticking for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) — the second largest in the country. Following a ransomware attack at the beginning of the month, it has now has been given an ultimatum: meet Vice Society's ransom payment demands or have their data released to the public for anyone, including phishers and other cybercriminals, to access.

Brett Callow, a threat analyst for Emsisoft, shared a screen capture of the Vice Society leak site that shows the ransomware group is threatening to publish the goods in just a few days.

"The papers will be published by London time on October 4, 2022 at 12:00 a.m." the notice read.

The district has not provided an update on the types of information the cyberattackers are threatening to release, one district parent told Dark Reading.

"I do wish they'd sent out a notice about what personal information of our kids and ourselves could be included in this planned release," she says. "And whether we could do anything about reducing harm."

**LAUSD Refuses to Pay Ransom**

The school district acknowledged the attack in a Sept. 5 statement and said it was working with law enforcement to investigate the breach. Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent Alberto Carvalho confirmed a ransomware demand was made after the cyberattack was announced, and that the district was not paying up.

"We can confirm that there was a demand made," Carvalho said during a Sept. 20 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "There has been no response to the demand."

At press time, all of the systems used by parents and students are fully functioning, the district parent confirms.

"I'm generally supportive of how the district has handled the breach — they brought in the Feds immediately and stood firm on not paying the ransom," she says. "I could quibble here and there about communication and the actual implementation of the password reset, but all things considered, they've done OK."

The LAUSD hit was part of a series of ransomware attacks against schools by Vice Society, which hoped to capitalize on the busy back-to-school season.

The wave of early September attacks also prompted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) to issue a warning about Vice Society's campaign against educational institutions.

LA School District Ransomware Attackers Now Threaten to Leak Stolen Data

It's time to dispel notions of deepfakes as an emergent threat. All the pieces for widespread attacks are in place and readily available to cybercriminals, even unsophisticated ones.

Malicious campaigns involving the use of deepfake technologies are a lot closer than many might assume. Furthermore, mitigation and detection of them are hard.

A new study of the use and abuse of deepfakes by cybercriminals shows that all the needed elements for widespread use of the technology are in place and readily available in underground markets and open forums. The study by Trend Micro shows that many deepfake-enabled phishing, business email compromise (BEC), and promotional scams are already happening and are quickly reshaping the threat landscape.

**No Longer a Hypothetical Threat**

"From hypothetical and proof-of-concept threats, \[deepfake-enabled attacks\] have moved to the stage where non-mature criminals are capable of using such technologies," says Vladimir Kropotov, security researcher with Trend Micro and the main author of a report on the topic that the security vendor released this week. 

'We already see how deepfakes are integrated into attacks against financial institutions, scams, and attempts to impersonate politicians," he says, adding that what's scary is that many of these attacks use identities of real people — often scraped from content they post on social media networks.

One of the main takeaways from Trend Micro's study is the ready availability of tools, images, and videos for generating deepfakes. The security vendor found, for example, that multiple forums, including GitHub, offer source code for developing deepfakes to anyone who wants it. Similarly, enough high-quality images and videos of ordinary individuals and public figures are available for bad actors to be able to create millions of fake identities or to impersonate politicians, business leaders, and other famous personalities.

Demand for deepfake services and people with expertise on the topic is also growing in underground forums. Trend Micro found ads from criminals searching for these skills to carry out cryptocurrency scams and fraud targeting individual financial accounts. 

"Actors can already impersonate and steal the identities of politicians, C-level executives, and celebrities," Trend Micro said in its report. "This could significantly increase the success rate of certain attacks such as financial schemes, short-lived disinformation campaigns, public opinion manipulation, and extortion."

**A Plethora of Risks**

There's a growing risk also of stolen or recreated identities belonging to ordinary people being used to defraud the impersonated victims, or to conduct malicious activities under their identities. 

In many discussion groups, Trend Micro found users actively discussing ways to use deepfakes to bypass banking and other account verification controls — especially those involving video and face-to-face verification methods.

For example, criminals could use a victim's identity and use a deepfake video of them to open bank accounts, which could later be used for money laundering activities. They can similarly hijack accounts, impersonate top-level executives at organizations to initiate fraudulent money transfer or plant fake evidence to extort individuals, Trend Micro said. 

Devices like Amazon's Alexa and the iPhone, which use voice or face recognition, could soon be on the list of target devices for deepfake-based attacks, the security vendor noted.

"Since many companies are still working in remote or mixed mode, there is an increased risk of personnel impersonation in conference calls which can affect internal and external business communications and sensitive business processes and financial flows," Kropotov says.

Trend Micro isn't alone in sounding the alarm on deepfakes. A recent online survey that VMware conducted of 125 cybersecurity and incident response professionals also found that deepfake-enabled threats are not just coming — they are already here. A startling 66% — up 13% from 2021 — of the respondents said they had experienced a security incident involving deepfake use over the past 12 months.

"Examples of deepfake attacks \[already\] witnessed include CEO voice calls to a CFO leading to a wire transfer, as well as employee calls to IT to initiate a password reset," says Rick McElroy, VMware's principal cybersecurity strategist.

**Few Mitigations for Deepfake Attacks & Detection Is Hard**

Generally speaking, these types of attacks can be effective, because no technological fixes are available yet to address the challenge, McElroy says. 

"Given the rising use and sophistication in creating deepfakes, I see this as one of the biggest threats to organizations from a fraud and scam perspective moving forward," he warns. 

The most effective way to mitigate the threat currently is to increase awareness of the problem among finance, executive, and IT teams who are the main targets for these social engineering attacks. 

"Organizations can consider low-tech methods to break the cycle. This can include using a challenge and passphrase amongst executives when wiring money out of an organization or having a two-step and verified approval process," he says.

Gil Dabah, co-founder and CEO of Piaano, also recommends strict access control as a mitigating measure. No user should have access to big chunks of personal data and organizations need to set rate limits as well as anomaly detection, he says.

"Even systems like business intelligence, which require big data analysis, should access only masked data," Dabah notes, adding that no sensitive personal data should be kept in plaintext and data such as PII should be tokenized and protected.

Meanwhile on the detection front, developments in technologies such as AI-based Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have made deepfake detection harder. "That means we can't rely on content containing 'artifact' clues that there has been alteration," says Lou Steinberg, co-founder and managing partner at CTM Insights.

To detect manipulated content, organizations need fingerprints or signatures that prove something is unchanged, he adds.

"Even better is to take micro-fingerprints over portions of the content and be able to identify what's changed and what hasn't," he says. "That's very valuable when an image has been edited, but even more so when someone is trying to hide an image from detection."

**Three Broad Threat Categories**

Steinberg says deepfake threats fall into three broad categories. The first is disinformation campaigns mostly involving edits to legitimate content to change the meaning. As an example, Steinberg points to nation-state actors using fake news images and videos on social media or inserting someone into a photo that wasn't present originally — something that is often used for things like implied product endorsements or revenge porn.

Another category involves subtle changes to images, logos, and other content to bypass automated detection tools such as those used to detect knockoff product logos, images used in phishing campaigns or even tools for detecting child pornography.

The third category involves synthetic or composite deepfakes that are derived from a collection of originals to create something completely new, Steinberg says. 

"We started seeing this with audio a few years back, using computer synthesized speech to defeat voiceprints in financial services call centers," he says. "Video is now being used for things like a modern version of business email compromise or to damage a reputation by having someone 'say' something they never said."

Source

DARKReading