MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-08-22 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] hacking wars in the covid-19 period
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wsj.com
Companies Battle Another Pandemic: Skyrocketing Hacking Attempts
Catherine Stupp and James Rundle
8-10 minutes
Equifax Inc. EFX -1.32% had spent years working to repair its reputation
after a massive data breach when lockdown orders meant office workers
around the world had to start working from home this spring.
With most of its 11,000-plus employees scattered far from the company’s
security team, the credit rating agency couldn’t afford a repeat of the
painful 2017 breach, in which cybercriminals accessed Social Security
numbers, addresses, drivers-license information and other details of
about 150 million Americans.
Work-from-home requirements have magnified cybersecurity threats for
practically every company, whose data now must traverse Wi-Fi networks
with passwords named after the family dog while workers share devices
with teenagers taking classes on Zoom or playing Fortnite with their
friends.
In an effort to protect its most sensitive information, Equifax gave
customer-support agents laptops with software designed to detect
suspicious activity that could expose information or give hackers a way
into the company’s computer network. Those employees normally work in
restricted call centers and typically weren’t allowed to work from home,
said Jamil Farshchi, the company’s chief information security officer.
Security researchers have warned that hackers are targeting employees
doing business from their new, makeshift workplaces, using techniques
such as scam emails that pretend to be videoconference invitations but
that actually steal network credentials.
Technology, health-care and financial companies aren’t the only ones
under siege. With around half the U.S. workforce working remotely,
according to a June study from the National Bureau of Economic Research,
even companies like Kraft-Heinz Co. are experiencing an uptick in
attempts on their networks.
Before the pandemic, some firms tracked thousands, even millions of
threats a day. As soon as workers headed home, companies started seeing
attacks surge.
“In the course of [the first] two weeks, we saw orders-of-magnitude
increases in our alerts,” said John Masserini, who leads cybersecurity
for telecommunications operator Millicom International Cellular SA. “We
watched our security operations center light up.”
Most attacks are beaten back, but not all. Twitter Inc. saw hackers take
over the accounts of several prominent users, including former President
Barack Obama and musician Kanye West after tricking Twitter employees
into sharing administrative information. Hackers have breached suppliers
for financial services firms such as Freddie Mac and disrupted
operations at hospitals in the U.S. and Europe.
The FBI, as of May 28, had received around 320,000 complaints of
internet crime, a senior official told the Senate Judiciary Committee in
June—nearly double the rate for the prior year. A Secret Service
official told the same hearing that he expects over $30 billion in
stimulus funds will end up being pilfered through scams, many of them
cyberattacks. Intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Europe warn that
companies are prime targets for government-sponsored hackers going after
corporate secrets, especially coronavirus research, and have accused
China and Russia of backing these attacks. Beijing and the Kremlin deny
involvement.
So far during the pandemic, Kraft-Heinz has observed a jump of 10% to
15% in attempted email attacks, said Ricardo Lafosse, head of
cybersecurity. In recent weeks, hackers adopted new tactics, making
fraudulent phone calls to the company’s support center. They pose as
employees or suppliers to gather information that could help them launch
more sophisticated attacks in the future, he said. Hackers use tactics
such as calling the help desk and pretending to be an employee who is
locked out of an account, or a supplier who needs to confirm account
credentials to process payment, he added.
“We had a large influx of remote users,” Mr. Lafosse said. “That really
opened the opportunity for malicious attackers to start banging against
the door to see what would stick.”
The shifting spread of the virus complicates corporate security.
Companies that straddle international borders have to keep up with which
employees must work remotely and which can go to the office as
governments issue and rescind restrictions, said Mr. Masserini, the
security chief at Millicom, the telecommunications firm, which provides
mobile phone services in Latin America and Africa.
“It actually impacted us first here in Miami, and then as [the virus]
propagated through Latin America, you had one country that would all of
a sudden be working from home and then the country right next to it
would not,” he said. As offices closed, Mr. Masserini worked with
Millicom’s technology department to equip employees, in some cases
telling them to take company computers with them or use their personal
machines at home.
Nasdaq Inc. watched email traffic swell by 35% after almost all of its
4,500 employees went home in March, said Lou Modano, the stock-exchange
operator’s head of cybersecurity. Mixed with the email surge have been
hacker ploys that play on Covid-19 fears or solicit charitable
donations, he said. Some hackers pose as equipment suppliers, requesting
payments.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
If you have been working from home, what cybersecurity precautions, if
any, has your employer asked you to take? Join the conversation below.
Potential vulnerabilities are alarmingly widespread. About 53% of people
working remotely conduct company business on personal laptops, which
often lack safeguards that many employers provide, such as firewalls and
antivirus software, according to research from International Business
Machines Corp. Equally alarming to security chiefs, 29% of remote
workers said they let kids and other family members use their work
laptops for online shopping and gaming, potentially exposing them to
viruses, according to a survey from cybersecurity firm CyberArk Software.
At Equifax, security-monitoring tools had been tuned to recognize
employees’ habits at the office, such as when someone typically logs
into email and which computer they use. “You’re used to your network
traffic being in your network offices. You know what Monday at 10 a.m.
looks like,” said Bryson Koehler, Equifax’s chief technology officer.
“We upended all of that.”
Companies learned which alerts signal legitimate security problems and
which point to new work patterns. Highmark Health, a nonprofit
health-care company based in Pittsburgh, didn’t have the technology
needed to support all roughly 35,000 employees on its network at once,
so it split nonmedical staff into day and nighttime shifts—a step
companies in several industries have been forced to take. That means
time of day for network activity isn’t the obvious indicator of
suspicious behavior it once was, said security chief Omar Khawaja.
The company reset security monitoring tools to more heavily weight
factors such as multiple authorization attempts from the same internet
address but trying different user credentials. “In the past, we looked
at people excessively working off-hours because maybe something
malicious was happening,” Mr. Khawaja said. “But rules changed.”
Battling attacks during the pandemic has also reinforced a basic
security lesson, executives say. No matter how a hacker tries to
infiltrate a company’s systems, an individual worker can be the
strongest—or weakest—link.
“No matter what we do with our tools,” Nasdaq’s Mr. Modano said, “the
employee is always the first line of defense.”
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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