A successful attack against 5G networks could disrupt critical infrastructure, manipulate sensor data, or even cause physical harm to humans.

RSA CONFERENCE — San Francisco — While 5G security is not new as a topic of conversation, emerging attack vectors continue to come to the fore. Deloitte & Touche researchers have uncovered a potential avenue of attack targeting network slices, a fundamental part of 5G's architecture.

The stakes are high: Not just a faster 4G, next-generation 5G networks are expected to serve as the communications infrastructure for an array of mission-critical environments, such as public safety, military services, critical infrastructure, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). They also play a role in supporting latency-sensitive future applications like automated cars and telesurgery. A cyberattack on that infrastructure could have significant implications for public health and national security, and impact a range of commercial services for individual enterprises.

At the heart of any 5G network is a flexible, IP-based core network that allows resources and attributes to be assembled into individual "slices" — each of these network slices is tailored to fulfill the requirements requested by a particular application. For instance, a network slice supporting an IIoT network of sensors in a smart-factory installation might offer extremely low latency, long device battery life, and constricted bandwidth speed. An adjacent slice could enable automated vehicles, with extremely high bandwidth and near-zero latency. And so on.

Thus, one 5G network supports multiple adjacent network slices, all of which make use of a common physical infrastructure (i.e., the radio access network, or RAN). Deloitte collaborated on a 5G research project with Virginia Tech to explore whether it was possible to exploit 5G by compromising one slice, then escaping it to compromise a second. The answer to that turned out to be yes.

"Throughout our journey with Virginia Tech, our objective was uncovering how to make sure that appropriate security is in place whenever a 5G network is put in for any type of industry or any customer," Shehadi Dayekh, specialist leader at Deloitte, tells Dark Reading. "We saw network slicing as a core area of interest for our research, and we set about discovering avenues of compromise."

**Achieving Lateral Movement Via Network Slicing**

Abdul Rahman, associate vice president at Deloitte, notes that attacking one slice in order to get to a second could be seen as a form of container escape in a cloud environment — in which an attacker moves from one container to another, moving laterally through a cloud infrastructure to compromise different customers and services.

"When we look at the end-to-end picture of a 5G network, there's the 5G core, and then the 5G RAN, then there are the end devices and the users after the end devices," he says. "The core has really evolved to a point where a lot of the services are essentially in containers, and they've been virtualized. So there may then be a similar \[attack-and-escape\] process where we're able to influence or affect a device on network slice two from a device or a compromise within network slice one."

The research uncovered that an initial compromise of the first network slice can be achieved by exploiting open ports and vulnerable protocols, he explains. Or, another path to compromise would involve obtaining the metadata necessary to enumerate all of the services on the network, in order to identify a service or a set of services that may have a vulnerability, such as a buffer overflow that would allow code execution.

Then, to achieve "slice-escape," "there are capabilities in the wireless space to emulate tons of devices that can join networks and start causing some stress on the core network," Dayekh says. "It's possible to bring in some scanning capabilities to start exploiting vulnerabilities across slices."

A successful attack would have a number of layers and steps, and would be non-trivial, Deloitte found — but it can be done.

From a real-world feasibility perspective, "it's really dependent on how much money is spent," Dayekh says, adding that cyberattackers would likely make an ROI calculation when weighing whether an attack is worth the time and expense.

"It's about how serious \[and hardened\] the network is, if it's a mission-critical network, and how serious the target application is," he explains. "Is it an application for, say, shelf replenishment or cashierless checkout, or is it a military or government application?"

If the attacker is a well-funded advanced persistent threat (APT) interested in mounting destructive attacks on, say, an automated pipeline, the approach would be more convoluted and resource-intensive, Rahman adds.

"This sets the stage for a bad actor that utilizes advanced recon and surveillance-detection techniques, to minimize on the blue side being seen," he says. "You utilize observation to determine avenues of approach and key terrain, while ensuring concealment. If we're going to recon a network, we want to do it from a place where we can scan the network and obfuscate our reconnaissance traffic amongst all the other traffic that's there. And they're going to build this network topology, aka an attack graph, with nodes that have metadata associated with enumerative services around what we would like to attack."

**Real-World Risk**

When it comes to potential outcomes of a successful attack, Rahman and Dayekh used the example of a campaign against an industrial sensor network for a smart-factory application.

"Ultimately, we can deploy malware that can actually impact the data that's gathered from those sensors, whether it's temperature, barometric pressure, its line of sight, computer vision, whatever that may be," Rahman notes. "Or it may be able to occlude the image or maybe only send back a portion of the results by manipulating what the sensor has the ability to see. That could potentially cause false readings, false positives, and the impact is huge for manufacturing, for energy, for transportation — any of those areas that depend on sensors to give them near-real-time outputs for things like health and status."

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is another area of concern, due to the ability to directly impact patients using remote health services such as kidney dialysis or liver monitoring, or those who have a pacemaker.

There's also another form of attacks that involve deploying malware on vulnerable IoT devices, then using them to jam or flood the air interfaces or take up shared computational resources at the edge. That can lead to denial of service across slices since they all share the same RAN and edge computing infrastructure, Deloitte found.

**Defending Against 5G Network-Slicing Attacks**

When it comes to defending against attacks involving network slicing, there are at least three broad layers of cybersecurity to deploy, the researchers note:

*   Convert threat intelligence, which consists of indicators of compromise (IOCs), into rules.
*   Use artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect anomalous behaviors.
*   Implement platforms that contain standard detection mechanisms, filtering, the ability to create automation, integration with SOAR, and alerting.

It's important, as ever, to ensure defense in depth. "The rules have a shelf life," Rahman explains. "You can't totally depend on rules because they get aged off because people create malware variants. You can't totally depend on what an AI tells you about probability of malicious activity. And you can't really believe in the platform because there may be gaps."

Much of the defense work also has to do with gaining a view into the infrastructure that doesn't overwhelm defenders with information.

"The key is visibility," Dayekh says, "because when we look at 5G, there's massive connectivity: A lot of IoT, sensors, and devices, and you also have containerized deployments and cloud infrastructure that scales up and down and gets deployed in multiple zones and multiple hybrid clouds, and some clients have more than one vendor for their cloud. It's easier when we don't have a lot of slices or we don't have a lot of device IDs or SIM cards or wireless connections. But there are potentially millions of devices that you may have to look at and correlate data for."

There's also ongoing management to consider, since the 5G standard is updated every six months with new features.

As a result, most operators are still scratching the surface on the amount of work they have to put into shoring up security for 5G networks, the researchers say, noting that the workforce shortage is also affecting this segment. And that means that automation will be required to handle tasks that need to be done in a repeatable manner.

"Automation from a source perspective can go out to these devices and reconfigure them on the fly," Rahman says. "But the question is, is do you want to do that in production? Or do you want to test that first? Typically, we are risk averse, so we test when we do change requests, and then we vote on it. And then we deploy those changes in production, and that takes a certain amount of time. But those processes can be automated with DevSecOps pipelines. Solving this will take some out-of-the-box thinking."

An Emerging Threat: Attacking 5G Via Network Slices

By Owais Sultan
Let’s talk about how AI in cybersecurity protects the corporate networks of companies. Technological progress has not only…
This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: How to use AI in cybersecurity?

****Let’s talk about how AI in cybersecurity protects the corporate networks of companies.****

Technological progress has not only pleasing but also bad consequences. Together with the accelerated pace of corporate security systems development, new and more sophisticated types of cyber-attacks are emerging.

According to the World Economic Forum, the protection measures taken by enterprises become outdated instantly. Over the previous year, the number of attacks increased by 30%, and this alarming trend continues.

The market is short of about 2.72 million cybersecurity professionals to deal with the growing number of threats. This is where artificial intelligence can help businesses. Let’s talk about six AI use cases in cybersecurity.

**Statistics on AI use in cybersecurity**

Researchers contributing to the 2022 Cybersecurity Almanac predict that spending on fighting cybercrimes will rise to $10.5 trillion. This is three times more than in 2015 ($3 trillion). Given the fact that the amount of global data is growing, it becomes more difficult to track and prevent vulnerabilities.

For example, 80% of telecommunications organizations are confident that they will not be able to respond to cyber-attacks without AI. The professional sector is a target for cyber villains (934 incidents were recorded in 2020). The public sector, manufacturing, and healthcare suffer from cyberattacks.

In 2020, AI in cybersecurity was worth more than $10 billion, and by 2027, the price will increase by almost 4.5 times. IBM estimates that companies that lack AI spend three times as much to mitigate cyberattacks as companies with deployed automated tracking systems.

Nearly half of the managers surveyed by Capgemini say they use a smart algorithm to detect cyber threats. With its help, 34% of these professionals predict attacks and 18% respond to incidents.

Based on the above trends, Meticulous Research says that AI in cybersecurity will grow by 24% per year to reach $46 billion by 2027.

**Six main AI use cases in cybersecurity**

Imagine a campus that consists of several buildings. Getting inside is not difficult, because it is impossible to put a guard at each door. This is where AI helps: cameras read the faces of visitors and find those who “sit on someone’s tail” following employees with passes to enter buildings. This may be a worker who was too lazy to show a pass or a scammer.

The larger the office, the higher the risk of intrusion, and the more useful AI systems for face recognition are. In a video, an algorithm singles out people who violate the security policy. An image of a person’s face is compared with the database of staff members’ photographs; thus, the system defines if it is an employee or a stranger who decided to illegally enter the office.

If we consider the use of AI in a corporate network or on the Internet, we can talk about six main options for using a smart algorithm.

*   **Detection of malicious code and malicious activity in corporate networks**

AI automatically classifies domains by analyzing DNS traffic to identify C&C, malicious, spam, phishing and clone domains, and so on. Previously, to manage this environment, it was enough to have good blacklists. They coped with their task albeit with regular updates and with large volumes.

Today, domains are created in 1-2 minutes, used no more than 2-3 times within half an hour, and then criminals switch to other domains. To track them, blacklisting is not enough: you need to use AI technology. A smart algorithm learns to detect such domains and block them immediately.

*   **Encrypted traffic analysis**

According to Cisco, more than 80% of Internet traffic is encrypted. It needs to be analyzed. You can apply the “government man in the middle” scheme or use AI technology, which, without encryption and decryption, allows you to identify the following issues by metadata and network packets and without analyzing the payload:

*   Malicious code; 
*   Malware family;
*   Applications that are used;
*   Devices that work within the framework of an encrypted TLS session or SSL of one version or another.

These are technologies that work in practice and allow you to understand what is happening inside the encrypted traffic the volume of which is growing. And you needn’t invest much in it.  

*   **Detection of fake photos and substituted pictures.**

An algorithm recognizes whether the face of a person in the photo has been replaced with someone else’s picture. This feature is particularly useful for remote biometric authentication in financial services. It prevents scammers from creating fake photos or videos and presenting themselves as legal citizens who could be granted a loan. Thus, they won’t steal the money of others. 

*   **Recognition of voice, language, and speech.**

This AI feature is used to detect information leaks and read unstructured information in non-machine readable formats. This information enriches the data from firewalls, gateways, proxy systems, and other technical solutions that provide structured data.

Thus, you will know who and when accessed the Internet and whether they used corporate or departmental networks. AI helps enrich this information with data from news, company newsletters, and so on.

*   **Providing recommendations**

Based on statistics, AI makes recommendations on what protection tools to use or what settings need to be changed to automatically increase the security of a corporate network. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created AI2, a system that detects unknown threats with a probability of up to 85%.

The more analyses the system performs, the more accurately it gives the next estimate due to the feedback mechanism. Moreover, a smart algorithm does this on such a scale and at such a speed that human defenders would not be able to handle.

*   **Automation of software vulnerability search**

A vulnerability is a bug in a program that allows someone to benefit from it (for example, extract data for sale, transfer money, steal private data from a phone, and so on). Thanks to AI, it has become possible to search for such errors automatically.

AI looks for vulnerabilities in a program and examines the application interface. If it finds ransomware on a computer, it immediately disconnects its user from the network, thereby saving the rest of the company from dangerous infection.

**Conclusion**

AI in cybersecurity has great prospects. But it must be handled reasonably, like any other technology. It is not a silver bullet and having even the most advanced technology does not mean 100% protection. AI will not save you from serious attacks caused by neglecting basic cybersecurity rules. A smart algorithm should be implemented if a clear ecosystem that can adapt to a changing corporate network has been built.

AI will be genuinely effective if it is developed, corrected, and tuned. This is time-consuming and difficult work, which will benefit if the technology is used carefully and not for the sake of being trendy.

**More AI Topics**

1.  Fields of application of artificial intelligence
2.  How Artificial intelligence (AI) Stops Cybercriminals
3.  ‘Optical Adversarial Attack’ uses a low-cost projector to trick AI
4.  Ways to Take Advantage of Artificial Intelligence in Technology
5.  Website uses Artificial Intelligence to create utterly realistic human faces

How to use AI in cybersecurity?

As Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia's company prepares to become part of Google, the incident response company continues to investigate many of the most critical cyber incidents.

RSA CONFERENCE 2022 – San Francisco – Back in the early 2000s when Mandiant was a small consulting firm in Northern Virginia, Kevin Mandia typically worked on just one incident response (IR) case at a time. Today, Mandia's team at the now IR giant Mandiant – which Google is in the process of acquiring – works on more than a half-dozen cases concurrently.

The volume of attacks is growing, especially so over the past year, according to Mandia. In recent IR cases Mandiant has been investigating, zero-day attacks and pilfered credentials have become the weapon of choice to infiltrate an organization, overtaking phishing.

"A lot of customers are saying, 'How long do we have to have our Shields Up?'" he said, in reference to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)'s current slogan for warning organizations to operate at heightened alert amid increasing cyber threat activity. "I think you have to keep \[them\] up. That's a lesson we're learning this year," Mandia said in an interview with Dark Reading this week.

"The impact of a breach is so much graver now," he said. Not only are ransomware and extortion getting more brazen and chaos-causing with public data leaks and digital blackmail, but cybercriminals are basically catching up with nation-states when it comes to exploiting expensive zero-day vulnerabilities in software, he said.

"In the early days, zero days were the purview of governments. In 2017, you started to see criminal elements arming a zero day," he said. Today, it's close to a 60-40 split, with nation-states still leading in zero-day attacks but with criminals not far behind. "That came sooner than I thought," Mandia added. "It just tells you how much money you can make hacking."

**Silver Lining**

But if there's a bit of good news, it's that organizations calling on Mandiant for help with an incident are spotting their intrusions sooner: "We're getting hired earlier in the breach process, and there's less \[attacker\] dwell time," he said.

Specifically, Mandiant saw the amount of time attackers remained unnoticed on a victim's network dropped to 21 days in 2021, down from 24 days in 2020. That trend has been steady for the past four years in Mandiant's IR cases.

There's also a sense of urgency now among cybercriminals to ensure they snag the valuable data or demand their ransom for stolen data, Mandia said. "I was told today that the time frame dwell time used to be that they had access for about seven days, and that's coming down to four to five days now. That speed means it's getting harder to monetize" and cybercriminals have to work faster and more publicly to make their money, he explained.

And the stakes are higher than ever for CISOs trying to deter and deflect a big breach. "This is the hardest year to be a CISO," he said. "Now you're \[also\] protecting your people threatened online, your employees, your customers. It's so much, and it's an unfair fight with \[mostly\] no risk of repercussions for the bad guys."

The threat includes the recent wave of phony or impossible-to-prove public data leak claims by threat actors and other fraudsters attempting to shake down or defame a victim organization. 

"It's impossible to prove a negative," Mandia said of these phony breach declarations that emerge. And organizations are forced to investigate an intrusion that may not even have occurred. 

"It's becoming more frequent," he said of this latest form of pressure by cybercriminals. There's nothing harder to respond to; something that's public, the hacker is vocal and making claims. And a company can't dispute them \[at first\] because they have to figure out the answers first. Those are terrible situations."  

That hit close to home for Mandia because, while Dark Reading was interviewing him on Monday, Mandiant itself became the subject of a fake breach assertion by the LockBit ransomware gang, which posted on Twitter that it had hacked the IR company. The claim appears to have been retribution for a recent ransomware report by Mandiant. 

"Based on the data released, there are no indications that Mandiant data has been disclosed," Mandiant said in a tweet today about the claims. "Rather the actor appears to be trying to disprove our June 2, 2022 research on UNC2165 and LockBit. We stand behind the findings of this research."

**Googling Mandiant**

Meanwhile, Mandiant is preparing for the completion of its merger with Google. Google announced its intent to acquire Mandiant in March for a whopping $5.4 billion, and Mandia at the time touted the merger as a way to build out Mandiant's planned strategy of automating specific elements of the IR process. Google's investment should accelerate that strategy.

"You have to automate as much as you can," Mandia told Dark Reading this week. Tasks such as detection, collecting artifacts, and log file analysis could be automated, he noted. But there still are parts of IR that remain human tasks, such as attribution and deep-dive forensic analysis.  

"If there's ever a deepfake or false-flag operation, it will be a human that will \[spot it\]," Mandian said.

Mandia: Keep 'Shields Up' to Survive the Current Escalation of Cyberattacks

Cybersecurity needs to shift its thinking ahead of the next disruption, RSA's CEO said during the opening 2022 conference keynote.

RSA CONFERENCE 2022 – San Francisco – A catastrophic pandemic, an escalating war in Eastern Europe, and the Colonial Pipeline ransomware shutdown are all in their own ways recent seismic disruptions that forced external change on the cybersecurity sector. 

That was the word from RSA CEO Rohit Ghal, who used the opening keynote of this year's RSA Conference to encourage cybersecurity leadership to embrace intentional transformation – with the goal of coming out on the other side of these cascading disruptions stronger and better than ever.  

"Transforming security will require us to reorient our thinking," Ghal said. 

To accomplish that goal, he shared three core ideas he thinks will help set the information-security community on a path that will enable it to use recent events to crystalize and transform into something better. 

**1\. Rethinking Identity **

First, Ghal suggested that a focus on user identities is the future, and figuring out how to center access on identity without traditional access mechanisms (i.e., passwords) is the way forward.

"Identity is the one constant in cybersecurity," he said. "It's time to hold a requiem for passwords." 

Ghal called for the industry to focus on creating a single, decentralized, infrastructure-agnostic platform that puts control back in the hands of users. 

**2\. Truth Matters **

Next, Ghal said that protecting the veracity of information is going to be a key role for cybersecurity in the coming years. Fake news and misinformation have emerged as powerful weapons to bring down institutions and more.

"What matters most is the truth, the veracity of information," he said. "Hacked brains are way more dangerous than hacked systems." 

Ghal added that a disciplined application of technology is the solution to weeding out bad information, and the only real way to verify whether information is true is to authenticate its creator . 

**3\. Convenience Shouldn't Win **

When it comes to the well-worn debate over whether security is too onerous for users to adopt, Ghal called on the industry to ditch its old "dogmas."

"We need to stop sacrificing security at the altar of convenience," he said.

The answer, Ghal said, will lie with innovators, who have the "most important role." 

"Innovation grows the pie and delivers new benefits," he said. 

The sector shouldn't wait for a comparable "cybersecurity pandemic" to force change, Ghal added.   

"Transforming security will require us to reorient our thinking," he said.

RSAC Opens With Message of Transformation

A coalition of over 25 industry leaders, led by NightDragon and non-profit NextGen Cyber Talent, partner to raise $1 million for collegiate cybersecurity education

SAN FRANCISCO, June 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- NightDragon, an investment and advisory firm focused on the cybersecurity, safety, security, and privacy industries, and NextGen Cyber Talent, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion in the cybersecurity industry through education and career opportunities for underserved and underrepresented students, today announced the launch of the Coalition to Close the Cybersecurity Talent Gap ("Coalition"), a campaign to raise $1 million to help fund one year of community college courses for Bay Area students pursuing careers in cybersecurity.

The Coalition is composed of more than 25 industry-leading cybersecurity and technology leaders that are passionate about cultivating the next generation of cybersecurity talent and committed to closing the cybersecurity skills gap. Driven to make a difference in the lives of students and their local communities, at launch, the Coalition has raised more than $300,000 of the $1 million needed to fund the cybersecurity education initiative for Bay Area students.

Through leveraging its vast network, NightDragon led the formation of the coalition including NightDragon portfolio companies, go-to-market and investment partners. Founding members for the initial cohort include: AllegisCyber Capital, Carahsoft, Claroty, Coalfire, Cyderes, Deloitte, Exclusive Networks, ForgeRock, HUMAN Security, iboss, Immuta, Ingram Micro, Interos, Knight Group, Macnica, Marsh, Merlin, Mezmo, NightDragon, Onapsis, Optiv, Palo Alto Networks, Prosek, Team8, Ten Eleven Ventures, ThriveDX, SafeGuard Cyber, Snowflake, and vArmour.

"There are an estimated 2.7 million unfilled cybersecurity positions. These vacancies create a significant challenge as security teams everywhere struggle to hire talent to monitor and remediate cyberattacks, as well as develop new technology to combat today's latest threats," said Krishnan Chellakarai, Founder and Co-Chairman of NextGen Cyber Talent and CISO of Gilead Sciences. "Solving the cybersecurity talent shortage will take a collective industry-wide effort. We are calling on the industry during the RSA Conference to contribute to the campaign and look forward to the impact we can make together to close the cybersecurity talent gap."

"The cybersecurity talent shortage is an issue that impacts all of us and is one of the biggest challenges facing our industry and national security. Let's demonstrate that as an industry we can come together to help solve for the talent shortage and foster the next generation in cyber talent that will help us combat today's threats," said Dave DeWalt, Founder, and Managing Director, NightDragon, and Board Member, NextGen Cyber Talent.

"The partners who have pulled together on this important mission are an impactful group of leaders from across the industry, which speaks to the universal nature of this mission to close the cybersecurity talent gap. By reaching out to the broader industry at the RSA Conference, we hope to show the power and compassion of our industry to help the underserved and enrich the cybersecurity workforce with more diversity," said Amy De Salvatore, VP Business Development and Strategic Alliances, NightDragon, who initiated the campaign and led the formation of the Coalition.

NextGen Cyber Talent partners with Bay Area community colleges to offer several cohorts of training programs, continuous career development and mentoring, and grants to hundreds of students pursuing cybersecurity education. The funds will be distributed by NextGen Cyber Talent to students at participating Bay Area community colleges who have applied and met the qualifying grade criteria of a B- or better. In addition to capital, founding coalition partners have also contributed additional in-kind donations, including lectures, curriculum materials, and internships for students.

"As we continue to focus on the essential mission of making each day safer than the one before, we have a responsibility as an industry to encourage and educate the next generation of cyber leaders," said BJ Jenkins, President at Palo Alto Networks and NightDragon Board member. "We thank NightDragon and NextGen Cyber Talent for bringing us together on this shared vision. We look forward to helping students recognize all of the cybersecurity career possibilities."

Donations of any size can be made through the Coalition to Close the Cybersecurity Talent Gap campaign donations page.

**About NextGen Cyber Talent**

NextGen Cyber Talent is a non-profit providing a platform to increase diversity and inclusion in the cybersecurity industry. It brings together cybersecurity experts, solution providers and enterprises to make a difference in the underserved and underprivileged community and address a mounting cyber skills shortage and talent gap. To learn more, visit www.NextGencybertalent.com.

**About NightDragon**

NightDragon is an investment and advisory firm focused on growth and late-stage investments within the cybersecurity, safety, security and privacy industries. Its platform and vast industry network provide unparalleled threat insights, deal flow, market leverage and operating expertise to drive portfolio company growth and increase shareholder value. Founded by Dave DeWalt, the NightDragon team has more than 25 years of operational and market expertise leading technology companies such as Documentum, EMC, Siebel Systems (Oracle), McAfee, Mandiant, Avast and FireEye. Read more about NightDragon at www.nightdragon.com.

Cybersecurity Industry Leaders Launch Campaign to Close the Cybersecurity Talent Gap

Basic Pen Tests support rapid, basic vulnerability discovery, while Standard Pen Tests provide compliance-driven testing to meet requirements for Web apps, APIs, and networks.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Bugcrowd, the leader in crowdsourced security, today announced a significant expansion of its Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) product line to include new offerings—Basic Pen Test and Standard Pen Test—purpose built for today's digital business where continuous testing must keep pace with continuous and agile development. These strategic additions expand the use cases covered by Bugcrowd's PTaaS suite to cover the gamut of customer needs, from basic assurance for simple web apps and networks to continuous, crowd-powered testing of complex apps, cloud services, mobile apps, APIs, and IoT devices for maximum risk reduction.

Most pen test providers today offer cumbersome, ad hoc consulting offerings that do not identify all risks and are hard to execute at scale in a consistent and configurable way for buyers as well as pentesters themselves. PTaaS solutions have emerged to address these issues, but most don't go far enough—only Bugcrowd delivers a modern, platform-powered approach, enabling organizations to keep innovating without compromising security.

With Bugcrowd's expanded PTaaS product line, pen test buyers now have an option for meeting every requirement, and for every asset type:

*   **Basic Pen Tests** for rapid, basic vulnerability discovery and reporting
*   **Standard Pen Tests** for easy-to-launch, compliance-driven testing packaged to meet most customer requirements for common use cases for simple web apps, APIs and networks
*   **Plus Pen Tests** for meeting special needs around targets, testing times, geographic requirements, etc.
*   **Max Pen Tests** for continuous, maximum risk reduction

"We have a diverse set of use cases for pen testing, ranging from basic vulnerability discovery for very simple web apps to intensive and continuous risk reduction for business-critical ones," said Jason Frost, Manager, Security Assessment, Paychex. "These new additions to the Bugcrowd PTaaS product line fulfill all our needs in one platform."

The Bugcrowd Security Knowledge Platform™ enables pen tests to run alongside Bugcrowd's managed bug bounty, vulnerability disclosure programs, and other solutions as a fully integrated and orchestrated experience blending data, technology, and human intelligence, with all findings flowing directly into the software development lifecycle. Bugcrowd's PTaaS suite allows customers to:

*   Activate precisely the right crowd at the right time leveraging the platform's CrowdMatch ML technology, delivering a 2x increase in high-impact findings versus manual matching methods
*   Launch tests in days instead of weeks and continually get fresh eyes-on-target from Bugcrowd's broad and diverse crowd
*   Utilize historical information to create standardized tests that reduce the need for contracted SOW discussions, while getting the intelligence of the aggregated experience of the platform, customer needs, and researchers to conduct the most relevant pen test scope
*   Get high-impact results that go beyond compliance checkboxes
*   See prioritized results and methodology progress in real-time via a rich PTaaS Dashboard experience

"Traditional penetration testing often delivers noisy, low-impact results, often takes weeks or even months to produce results, and offers no visibility into test progress," said Ashish Gupta, CEO, Bugcrowd. "We provide real-time visibility into pen testing results and vulnerabilities being found that allow our customers to continuously reduce risk and secure their environments, helping them stay ahead of a breach with solutions tailored to meet their needs."

Click here to learn more about these additions to Bugcrowd's PTaaS.

Click here to learn more about the Bugcrowd Security Knowledge Platform.

"Bugcrowd", "CrowdMatch", and "Bugcrowd Security Knowledge Platform" are trademarks of Bugcrowd Inc. and its subsidiaries. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

**About Bugcrowd  
**Bugcrowd is the leading provider of crowdsourced cybersecurity solutions purpose-built to secure the digitally connected world. Today's enterprise demands an offensive approach to cybersecurity—and Bugcrowd offers the only solution that orchestrates data, technology, and human intelligence to expose blind spots. The Bugcrowd Security Knowledge Platform™ enables businesses to do everything proactively possible to protect their organization, reputation, and customers with products like Bug Bounty, Penetration Testing-as-a-Service, and more. Trusted by organizations across the globe, Bugcrowd uncovers and remediates vulnerabilities before they interrupt business by leveraging expert ingenuity and the knowledge of world-class security researchers. Based in San Francisco, Bugcrowd is backed by Blackbird Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Industry Ventures, Paladin Capital Group, Rally Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Triangle Peak Partners. Learn more at www.bugcrowd.com.

Bugcrowd Expands Pen Testing Solutions with New Platform Services

FortiRecon combines machine learning, automation, and human intelligence to continually monitor an organization’s external attack surface.

**SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., – RSAC 2022 - Jun 6, 2022**

**John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet**

“The sooner in the attack cycle you identify and stop an adversary, the less costly and damaging their actions. Employing a powerful combination of human and artificial intelligence, FortiRecon provides organizations with a view of what adversaries are seeing, doing and planning. FortiRecon’s vendor agnostic SaaS delivery model combined with an intuitive interface and easily digestible reports enable executives across the organization to quickly understand the risks posed to their company, data, and brand reputation, while our team of FortiGuard Labs cybersecurity experts enhance the offering with takedown services, guidance on prioritization of remediation efforts, and targeted threat research and intelligence.”

**News Summary**

Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated, and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced FortiRecon, a complete Digital Risk Protection Service (DRPS) offering that uses a powerful combination of machine learning, automation capabilities, and FortiGuard Labs cybersecurity experts to manage a company’s risk posture and advise meaningful action to protect their brand reputation, enterprise assets, and data. FortiRecon uniquely delivers a triple offering of outside-in coverage across External Attack Surface Management (EASM), Brand Protection (BP), and Adversary-Centric Intelligence (ACI) to counter attacks at the reconnaissance phase – the first stage of a cyberattack – to significantly reduce the risk, time, and cost of later stage threat mitigation.

**Organizations are Overwhelmed in the Fight to Protect their Network, Data, and Reputation and Mitigate Risk Early**

Before attacking an organization, a cybercriminal’s primary objective is to gather as much intelligence about their target as possible. This phase of early reconnaissance arms the adversary with everything they need to determine if and how they would exploit an organization. They will test a company’s defense and response tactics, look for unpatched systems, use social media to learn more about its employees and their normal behavior, and go as far as researching business partners, recent acquisitions, and any other third-party affiliation that could lead to a successful compromise. As organizations digitally accelerate their businesses and deploy hybrid IT architectures that expand the attack surface, identifying and mitigating these threats has become increasingly more difficult. In response to the velocity of threats, cybersecurity best practices have evolved from point-in-time evaluations to continual monitoring, ongoing reviews, and continuous enhancements to an organization’s security posture.

**Taking a Page Out of the Adversary Playbook to Mitigate Risk**

With the introduction of FortiRecon, Fortinet provides enterprise organizations with a powerful tool to understand how the adversary views an organization from the outside to help inform cybersecurity teams, the C-Level, and risk and compliance management on how to prioritize risk and improve the company's overall security posture. FortiRecon offers companies consistent and comprehensive coverage across three areas:

*   **External Attack Surface Monitoring:** Empowers organizations to understand their risk profile and mitigate risks early. Provides an outside-in view of an organization and its subsidiaries to identify exposed known and unknown enterprise assets and associated vulnerabilities, and prioritize the remediation of critical issues. EASM identifies servers, credentials, public cloud service misconfigurations, and even third-party partner software code vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malicious actors.
*   **Brand Protection:** Enables organizations to protect their brand and identify risks to their customers. Proprietary algorithms detect web-based typo-squatting, defacements, and phishing impersonations, as well as rogue mobile apps, credential leaks, and brand impersonation on social media, all common techniques used by cyber threat actors. The early detection of malicious activity allows teams to quickly take action (such as website or application takedown) to stop and prevent damage.
*   **Adversary-Centric Intelligence:** Increases the security awareness of an organization’s SOC team with industry and geography specific coverage to better understand their attackers and protect assets. FortiGuard Labs cybersecurity experts assess the underground and imminent threat risks posed by active cybercriminals to an individual company by proactively monitoring public and private forums, open-source, dark web, and other cybercriminal domains. By engaging in human intelligence collection, FortiGuard Labs experts assess and curate custom threat intelligence, providing recommendations specific to the company, industry, and geography.

For partners, FortiRecon can be sold on top of the Fortinet Security Fabric or as a stand-alone, vendor-agnostic solution that delivers easily digestible reports and enables their customers to quickly understand the risks posed to their company, data, and brand reputation. FortiRecon also extends the categories of risk for which partners can provide insight to customers and increases the opportunity to land new customers that have only invested in more traditional security solutions.

**Enhancing Fortinet’s Early Detection and Response Portfolio and Industry Leading Security Services**

FortiRecon complements Fortinet’s robust portfolio of early detection and advanced response products, including FortiNDR, FortiXDR, FortiDeceptor, in-line sandboxing, as well as advanced automation with FortiAnalyzer, FortiSIEM and FortiSOAR.

Fortinet is firmly committed to the success of SOC teams and the protection of organziations and offers an extensive portfolio of outsource services ranging from cybersecurity assessments and readiness, playbook development, tabletop training, Incident Response, MDR and SOC-as-a-service. This combined offering, alongside the many enhancements across the Fortinet Security Fabric and extended ecosystem deliver simplification and automation to help SOC teams regain focus, control, and speed by strengthening an organization’s SOC with FortiGuard Labs cybersecurity tools and experts.

**Get a demo of FortiRecon in the Fortinet booth at RSAC 2022**

Fortinet will be a Platinum Sponsor at this year’s RSA Conference and will feature product demos, a live theater, and a Fortinet Expert Bar at booth #5855 in the Moscone Center North Hall. Stop by the booth to get a demo of FortiRecon and other recent product, solution, and services innovations from Fortinet. Learn more about Fortinet at RSA and presentations featuring Fortinet executives in the media alert.

**Additional Resources**

*   Read our blog to learn more about the value security services can bring to any organization and find out more about Fortinet’s robust portfolio of AI-powered Security Services.
*   Learn more about Fortinet’s advanced detection offerings for the SOC: FortiNDR, FortiDeceptor, FortiXDR, and FortiGuard In-line Sandbox Service
*   Learn more about Fortinet SOC-as-a-Service.
*   Learn more about how the Fortinet Security Fabric delivers broad, integrated, and automated protection across an organization’s entire digital infrastructure.
*   Learn more about FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence and research or Fortinet’s AI-powered FortiGuard Security Services portfolio.
*   Learn more about Fortinet’s free cybersecurity training which includes broad cyber awareness and product training. As part of the Fortinet Training Advancement Agenda (TAA), the Fortinet Training Institute also provides training and certification through the Network Security Expert (NSE) Certification, Academic Partner, and Education Outreach programs.
*   Read more about how Fortinet customers are securing their organizations.
*   Engage in the Fortinet User Community (Fuse). Share ideas and feedback, learn more about our products and technology, and connect with peers.
*   Follow Fortinet on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Subscribe to Fortinet on YouTube.

**About Fortinet**

Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) makes possible a digital world that we can always trust through its mission to protect people, devices, and data everywhere. This is why the world’s largest enterprises, service providers, and government organizations choose Fortinet to securely accelerate their digital journey. The Fortinet Security Fabric platform delivers broad, integrated, and automated protections across the entire digital attack surface, securing critical devices, data, applications, and connections from the data center to the cloud to the home office. Ranking #1 in the most security appliances shipped worldwide, more than 580,000 customers trust Fortinet to protect their businesses. And the Fortinet NSE Training Institute, an initiative of Fortinet’s Training Advancement Agenda (TAA), provides one of the largest and broadest training programs in the industry to make cyber training and new career opportunities available to everyone. Learn more at https://www.fortinet.com, the Fortinet Blog, or FortiGuard Labs.

Fortinet Unveils New Digital Risk Protection Offering

Prometheus ransomware contained a weak random number generator that inspired researchers to try and build a one-size-fits-all decryptor. 
The post RSA 2022: Prometheus ransomware’s flaws inspired researchers to try to build a near-universal decryption tool appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Prometheus—a ransomware build based on Thanos that locked up victims’ computers in the summer of 2021—included a major “vulnerability” that led security researchers at IBM to try and build a one-size-fits-all ransomware decryptor that could work against multiple ransomware variants, including Prometheus, AtomSilo, LockFile, Bandana, Chaos, and PartyTicket.

Though the IBM researchers managed to undo the work of multiple ransomware variants, the panacea dream decryptor never materialized.

IBM global head of threat intelligence Andy Piazza said that the team’s efforts revealed that even though some ransomware families can be reverse-engineered to develop a decryption tool, no company should rely on decryption itself as a response to a ransomware attack.

“Hope is not a strategy,” Piazza said at RSA Conference 2022, held in San Francisco in person for the first time in two years.

IBM security research Aaron Gdanski, who was aided by security researcher Anne Jobman, said his interest in building a Prometheus decryption tool began after one of IBM Security’s clients was hit with the ransomware. He began by trying to understand the ransomware’s behavior: Did it persist in the environment? Did it upload files anywhere? And how, specifically, did it generate the keys that were used to encrypt files?

By using the DS-5 debugger and disassembler, Gdanski found that Prometheus’ encryption algorithm relied on both “a hardcoded initialization vector which did not change between samples” and the uptime of the computer. Gdanski also learned that Prometheus created its seeds by relying on a random number generator that, by default, used Environment.TickCount.

These discoveries revealed a key vulnerability in Prometheus, Gdanski said. If he could find when Prometheus encrypted files on the system, he could then likely generate the same seed that Prometheus used for that decryption.

“If I could obtain the seed at the time of encryption, I could use the same algorithm Prometheus did to regenerate the key it uses,” Gdanski said.

Equipped with the boot time on an affected machine and the recorded timestamp on an encrypted file, Gdanski then had a starting point to narrow down his work. After some additional calculations, Gdanski generated a seed from Prometheus and he tested it on portions of encrypted files.

With some fine-tuning, Gdanski’s work paid off.

Gdanski also learned, though, that the seed changed depending on the time when a file was encrypted. That meant that one single decryption key would not work, but by sorting the encrypted files by the last write time on the machine, he was able to slowly build a series of seeds that could be used for decryption.

The success, Gdanski said, could be applied to other ransomware families that similarly relied on flawed random number generators.

“Any time a non-cryptographically secure random number generator is used, you’re probably able to recreate a key,” Gdanski said.

But Gdanski emphasized that this flaw is rare from what he’s seen. As Piazza reiterated, the best defense to ransomware isn’t hoping that the ransomware involved in an attack has a sloppy implementation—it’s preventing a ransomware attack before it happens.

For the latest on current ransomware activity, read our May ransomware review here. You can also read about some lessons from the real-life ransomware attack on Northshore School District here.

RSA 2022: Prometheus ransomware’s flaws inspired researchers to try to build a near-universal decryption tool

Crackdowns are driving down ransomware profits, and analysts see signs that operators are pivoting to business email compromise attacks, security researcher warned.

RSA CONFERENCE 2022 – San Francisco – Law enforcement crackdowns, tighter cryptocurrency regulations, and ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operator shutdowns are driving down the return on investment for ransomware operations across the globe. 

Abnormal Security threat researcher Crane Hassold, in a presentation at the RSA Conference, laid out his latest analysis of the ransomware threat landscape, predicting that there will be a pivot from ransomware toward renewed interest in basic business email compromise (BEC) attacks in the next 6 to 12 months. 

**RaaS Operator Crackdowns**

Ransomware attacks grab headlines and have been supercharged by a few prolific RaaS operators, Hassold explained. But crackdowns on just one group can make an enormous dent. 

"Ransomware is a centralized ecosystem with small numbers of operators responsible for the majority of attacks," Hassold said. 

He pointed to the recent disappearance of Pysa, leaving just two groups, Conti and Lockbit, with more than 50% of the share of the total ransomware attacks in the first half of 2022. BEC groups, on the other hand, are diffuse and scattered, making them much harder to eradicate, Hassold added. 

Although they're not as quick to make the headlines, BEC attacks have cost business more than $43 billion since 2016, according to the FBI, and make up $1 out of every $3 lost to cyberattacks, far outpacing ransomware losses, Hassold said. 

**Cryptocurrency Supercharged Ransomware**

Ransomware has had a moment over the past couple of years, Hassold explained, in part because once threat actors were able to abandon arcane wire transfers to collect ransoms and rely on cryptocurrency, caps on transactions were lifted and it became simple to collect much larger amounts. But new crypto regulations are chilling the ability of these cybercriminals to rely on its infrastructure to do business, adding what Hassold called "friction" to the transactions. 

BEC attacks, by comparison, rely on social engineering to corrupt a business's financial supply chain to get employees to willingly part with the cash, making them exponentially harder to track and stop.  

**Social Engineering Works**

By far, the most-used BEC tactic is the standard gift-card swindle, tricking employees to buy bogus gift cards, meaning the tried-and-true grift is still working. But Hassold said the BEC landscape is shifting from impersonating internal employees to posing as external business contacts. 

Once inside a business email account, attackers will wait and gather intelligence that can help them impersonate a trusted source. Today's BEC attacks are aimed at a company's financial supply chain, and once threat actors are inside, they will look for opportunities to spoof vendor emails to send payments to controlled accounts, change direct deposit information of executives to steal their paychecks, and even order aging reports showing which vendors owe the company. Once they have an aging report, an attacker will simply try to reach out to partners and collect any outstanding balances. 

In short, social engineering works. 

"BEC, in my opinion, is the clear threat to enterprises everywhere," Hassold warned. "These attacks disproportionately impact business." 

He added there is already evidence that ransomware operators and West African BEC attackers have already started comparing notes. 

"They're not collaborating, but interacting," Hassold said. "Those relationships might harden in the future."

Ransomware's ROI Retreat Will Drive More BEC Attacks

A panel of CISOs at the RSA Conference outlined what a successful first 90-day plan looks like, and it boiled down to effective communication and listening.

RSA CONFERENCE – San Francisco – A trio of high-powered CISOs talked about the first 90 days in their roles, and whether the aim was getting board of directors' buy-in or building rank-and-file credibility, they all said how they communicated was what mattered the most. 

The RSAC panel included Allison Miller, Reddit's CISO and VP of Trust; Olivia Rose, Amplitude's CISO and VP of IT; and Caleb Sima, CISO for Robin Hood. Chenxi Wang, founder of the Rain Capital venture capital fund, moderated the discussion.

Practically, Sima opened up by explaining how during his first few days with Robin Hood he gathered simple data points he labeled "top challenges" and "things that scare me."   

But Rose interjected that in many instances blunt statements like that could end up offending and alienating critical engineering and IT teams right out of the gate, which can make a CISO's job much harder. 

**The Internal Comms "Dance"**

"It's a dance," Rose said. "You have to be careful not to offend those who have been handling this before you got there." 

Rose suggests meeting members of other departments where they are. 

"Whether its infrastructure or executive, talk their language," she said. "And be very clear and persistent." 

Sima disagreed, adding with a bit of a chuckle, "If you don't have any haters, you're not doing the right thing."

Regardless of the approach, both of them, as well as Miller, spent time early in their positions trying to sell a security program to internal teams often not in line with their strategies. Miller and Rose said legal and compliance became their most natural partners inside the business.

"You've got to have allies," Rose said. There's often friction with engineering, infrastructure, IT, product, customer service, and others, but the legal and compliance teams have a clearer vision of the consequences of a security incident and can be invaluable in communicating them to the wider enterprise. 

**Communicating With the Board of Directors**

Beyond everyday internal wrangling, these CISOs unpacked their communications approach with their respective companies' boards of directors. Sima explained he relies heavily on narrative to tell the story about where his team is right now and where it's heading. The techie stuff he drops in the appendix in case someone wants more detail. 

When it comes to providing boards with data they can digest and use, Rose said she relies on the CMMI Cybermaturity Model and Sima and Miller said they lean on the NIST CSF framework. 

"It's an easy way to visually show people who don't understand security where you need to be and why," Rose said. 

Moderator Wang sits on a company's board of directors and suggested the boards should requisition a third-party validation assessment so they can be assured that the information the CISO is providing is correct.

"The first board meeting should be about setting expectations," Sima added. 

But for all the competing messages and audiences CISOs regularly juggle, during the first 90 days in the CISO chair, talking as little as possible is the best bet, Rose explained.

"You first 90 days you should just shut up," Rose said. "You have to listen to what's going on."

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