Week 7 - Security Assessment - Tech Support Scams

For this weeks’ security assessment report, I decided to talk about zdnet’s article on “Windows Warning: Tech-Support scammers are ramping up attacks, says Microsoft.” I decided on this article this week because I have personally received several of these calls myself in the recent past and have noticed an increase in these types of attacks. Not only have I received many of these attacks on my personal phone number, I have received many on my work phone number as well.


Going into the article, zdnet notes that the amount of these fake tech support calls has risen by “24 percent” (Tung, 2018) since the last year, and that reports of these calls are coming from over “183 countries” (Tung, 2018). This is an alarming trend as I had wondered in years past if these fake tech support calls would eventually die off as all the calls I have dealt with have been so painfully obvious that they were fakes. The one statistic given in the article that really surprised me was when they noted that a FBI report estimates the loses of people falling to these attacks at “$15 million” (Tung, 2018). While I could have guessed that there was a considerable amount of money lost during these scams, I would have never guessed that there was that much money being stolen. This statistic should be a warning to anyone and everyone who receives these random tech support messages to take care and not give payment information randomly.


I think the take away from this article is to be careful dealing with online tech support. While there are legitimate services out there, great care should be taken to verify that you are dealing with a qualified and actual individual and not falling to some sort of scam. One of the easiest ways to do this is to reject any calls or messages from tech support services that come out of the blue. The safest bet when dealing with these types of services is to assume that they are fake. Next, you should not install random software that the tech support company tells you to install to help you out. Most of the time these are remote control software suites that allow the scammers to gain complete and total access to your machine. Once they have control, they can hold your computer for ransom or steal important files or documents. Lastly, we should take immediate action against any tech support who requires payment in gift cards or other similar payment methods. These scammers want you to purchase these gift cards and provide them with the numbers as there is no easy way to cancel the money being removed or used. With credit cards, most of the time the company or person the card is associated to will cancel it before any major damage is done, preventing the money from getting to the scammers.


Overall, this report from Microsoft is troubling and we should take care when dealing with anyone calling themselves tech support, especially if their services come randomly to you.


Sources Cited:
Tung, L. (2018, April 23). Windows warning: Tech-support scammers are ramping up attacks, says Microsoft. Retrieved April 23, 2018, from https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-warning-tech-support-scammers-are-ramping-up-attacks-says-microsoft/#ftag=RSSbaffb68

Week 6 - Security Assessment - GPUs to fight back on malware scans

For this week’s security assessment write up, I decided to talk about arstechnica.com’s article titled “Intel, Microsoft to use GPU to scan memory for malware.” This topic jumped out at me as in past weeks I have talked about attacks that have gone on or advances by hackers that are making detection and threats harder to deal with, but this article describes new and innovative ways the industry is attempting to push back against the threat. The article describes that “certain kinds of malware refrain from writing anything to disk” (Bright, 2018) and causes problems when anti-malware software needs to scan for a threat. To compound the problem, the CPU must use a significant amount of power to do the scanning, upwards of “20 percent” (Bright, 2018) dedicated to scanning the system for malware. This is something you can directly see in your own personal machine as starting any anti-malware scan causes programs to be slow and laggy. To help combat this, Intel has both proposed plans that will utilize the GPU, either integrated or installed, to do the scanning. The article states that the GPU is usually “only light loaded” (Bright, 2018) and could easily take on the hard work of doing the scanning.


When I ran through this article I thought this to be a rather ingenious way to deal with the problem as during most operations on a computer, outside watching a movie or playing a computer game, the GPU is not necessarily being taxed. These cards also carry some serious power in them in most cases and can do the work with ease. While I do think that this is an interesting idea to help solve a problem of scan time and cost, I wonder how this will affect the already hard-hit market of GPUs. With the rise of cryptocurrency mining, GPUs have been a hot commodity that have seen their prices sky rocket in the past year. If features for security are pushed to the GPU, you could see the demand for them increase and cause the prices to go up higher than they are right now. While this might be a possibility, I think this might be a necessary evil to bare.


This article also talks about Microsoft’s changes to the Windows Defender program that is bundled with it’s Windows products. To help the Defender program protect your computer, Microsoft is starting to utilize “cloud-based machine learning with endpoint data collection” (SOURCE) to help spot anomalous usage on a machine to get in front of affected machines. I found this bit of information to be incredibly fascinating as it’s attempting to watch for when a machine is infected, instead of just trying to stop from getting infected. I think with both approaches combined in one solution, the amount of attacks and infections will start to decrease.


My overall take away this week was one of hope. There are companies out there who are leading the fight against these agents of chaos and are coming up with new and innovative ways to fight them. While the news may be filled with articles on successful attacks and damages to systems, we should take the occasional time out to look at those who are trying to save us.


Sources Cited:
Bright, P. (2018, April 17). Intel, Microsoft to use GPU to scan memory for malware. Retrieved April 18, 2018, from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/intel-microsoft-to-use-gpu-to-scan-memory-for-malware/

Week 5 - Security Assessment - Insider Thread

For this week’s security assessment, I decided to talk about an article from The Register named “Company insiders behind 1 in 4 data breaches – study.” This article is in response to Verizon’s Data Breach Investigation Report which had shown that 25% of all data breaches a company will experience come from those working inside the organization being motivated by “financial gain, espionage, and simple mistakes or misuse” (Leyden, 2018). The ultimate reason I had choose to talk about this article was because of the surprisingly high numbers of the data that was being talked about. While I knew that company insiders prove to be a big part of data breaches, I would have never guessed the number would have been as high as 25%. Another fact that jumped out at me is espionage being one of the leading factors to doing this. While it was not as high as the financial gain, I found it surprising that espionage was such a major contributor to the problem. This is a hard one to try to prevent as well, as finding an enemy that has legitimately joined your company can be a hard task to do. One of the take aways I got from this article is how we need to make sure proper controls and security measures are in place in company’s networks to make sure that people do not steal information or gain access to something that they should not have had access to. The problem against this is if that a rogue employee already had access to that information because of a legitimate need and then decided to leak it or open up a way for someone to get a hold of it. Proper measures sure be in place that would try to minimize this risk as much as possible.


The article also goes on to explain that ransomware has had a drastic rise in incidents, going up nearly “39 per cent” (Leyden, 2018) over the last several years. This dramatic increase is an indicator that these attacks are working and yielding results to those utilizing them and we should take extra caution when it comes to clicking on suspicious links or messages. A great way to combat these types of attacks as well, as I have written about in the past, is to make regular backups of your system and have a strong anti-virus and anti-spyware software involved. Should your system become infected with a ransomware, you might be able to roll the system back to a time before the attack happened and be safe.


The last bit of striking information this article talked about are the industries that are at the biggest risk. Topping all other industries was education with attacks being motivated by the act of espionage and motivation coming from viewing the activity as “fun.” I found this data to be a bit disturbing on many accounts as purposely harming an education firm or people who are at or enrolled at the school merely for fun is inexcusable. Those who do these activities should be held just as accountable as those who do it out of espionage or other reasons. These kinds of attacks should never be utilized for fun.


Sources Cited:
Leyden, J. (2018, April 10). Company insiders behind 1 in 4 data breaches – study. Retrieved April 10, 2018, from https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/10/verizon_dbir/

Week 4 - Security Assessment - Panera Bread Breach

This week in security assessment news, I decided to talk about NPR’s reporting on a Panera Bread Website hack entitled “For Months, Panera Bread Website Reportedly Exposed Millions Of Customer Records.” I decided to talk about this topic when my wife brought this article to my attention. I had to question out loud “Great, we aren’t safe from ordering food anymore.” Much like many other point of sales attacks or retail attacks, hackers were able to make off with “customers’ first and last name, their date of birth, address, email address, phone number and the last portion of their credit card number” (Chappell, 2018). While this may not have affected the large portion of Panera’s customers, if you did any purchasing through their website like calling in orders, it is likely your information was stolen. All in all, this attack further shows us how vulnerable our information is and how easily it can fall into the hands of a hacker.


While you may think that the theft of customer information might be the biggest thing in this article, it wasn’t. Panera knew about the attack for some time, and either failed to act against it or didn’t realize what kind of problem they had. It wasn’t until very recently that their website was taken down and likely patched to remove the ability to access this data. What is troubling being that Panera itself did not find the actual problem, it was a security analyst who came across that Panera was not securing their data. He reached out to the company to illustrate the problems to them, however Panera did not seem to care or take him seriously, and these reports were left. This point illustrates the need for companies to take all security concerns seriously and investigate all claims, even if some come across as dubious. Instead, with what Panera is dealing with now, is that they might be held accountable now by a court as they had the information that this information was exposed, and willingly chose not to do something about it.


The biggest take away from this all is not that our information is vulnerable on the web, no matter where you are. This is understood by most and we put our information in other company’s hands for safe keepings. The takeaway is that we need to make sure that these companies are keeping their side of the bargain and doing all that they can to keep our information secret and safe. Hopefully customers will now keep a keen eye on all the sites they use and hopefully Panera has learned from their mistakes, putting the necessary steps in place to keep this from happening again.


Sources Cited:
Chappell, B. (2018, April 3). For Months, Panera Bread Website Reportedly Exposed Millions Of Customer Records. Retrieved April 4, 2018, from https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/03/599135288/for-months-panera-bread-website-reportedly-exposed-millions-of-customer-records