Apple has made data security and user privacy priorities of its iPhone push, as well as two important pillars of its marketing strategy all over the world, not just for the smartphone, but for the other products too. And needless to say, the Cupertino-based tech giant has invested aggressively in device security, so show more ...
its offering now includes important new features that are supposed to keep everyone protected. But as Apple is about to find out the hard way, there’s always room for improvements as Team Pangu has recently discovered what’s being described as an unpatched vulnerability in what’s supposed to be the most secure place on an iPhone. It’s the Secure Enclave Processor, or SEP, which is the home of very sensitive information, including Apple Pay details. The news of the discovery was shared on Twitter by Jin Wook Kim, a member of the CERT team in South Korea and Japan, and by the looks of t... (read more)
A California company that helps telemarketing firms avoid getting sued for violating a federal law that seeks to curb robocalls has leaked the phone numbers, email addresses and passwords of all its customers, as well as the mobile phone numbers and other data on people who have hired lawyers to go after telemarketers. show more ...
The Blacklist Alliance provides technologies and services to marketing firms concerned about lawsuits under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a 1991 law that restricts the making of telemarketing calls through the use of automatic telephone dialing systems and artificial or prerecorded voice messages. The TCPA prohibits contact with consumers — even via text messages — unless the company has “prior express consent” to contact the consumer. With statutory damages of $500 to $1,500 per call, the TCPA has prompted a flood of lawsuits over the years. From the telemarketer’s perspective, the TCPA can present something of a legal minefield in certain situations, such as when a phone number belonging to someone who’d previously given consent gets reassigned to another subscriber. Enter The Blacklist Alliance, which promises to help marketers avoid TCPA legal snares set by “professional plaintiffs and class action attorneys seeking to cash in on the TCPA.” According to the Blacklist, one of the “dirty tricks” used by TCPA “frequent filers” includes “phone flipping,” or registering multiple prepaid cell phone numbers to receive calls intended for the person to whom a number was previously registered. Lawyers representing TCPA claimants typically redact their clients’ personal information from legal filings to protect them from retaliation and to keep their contact information private. The Blacklist Alliance researches TCPA cases to uncover the phone numbers of plaintiffs and sells this data in the form of list-scrubbing services to telemarketers. “TCPA predators operate like malware,” The Blacklist explains on its website. “Our Litigation Firewall isolates the infection and protects you from harm. Scrub against active plaintiffs, pre litigation complainers, active attorneys, attorney associates, and more. Use our robust API to seamlessly scrub these high-risk numbers from your outbound campaigns and inbound calls, or adjust your suppression settings to fit your individual requirements and appetite for risk.” Unfortunately for the Blacklist paying customers and for people represented by attorneys filing TCPA lawsuits, the Blacklist’s own Web site until late last week leaked reams of data to anyone with a Web browser. Thousands of documents, emails, spreadsheets, images and the names tied to countless mobile phone numbers all could be viewed or downloaded without authentication from the domain theblacklist.click. The directory also included all 388 Blacklist customer API keys, as well as each customer’s phone number, employer, username and password (scrambled with the relatively weak MD5 password hashing algorithm). The leaked Blacklist customer database points to various companies you might expect to see using automated calling systems to generate business, including real estate and life insurance providers, credit repair companies and a long list of online advertising firms and individual digital marketing specialists. The very first account in the leaked Blacklist user database corresponds to its CEO Seth Heyman, an attorney in southern California. Mr. Heyman did not respond to multiple requests for comment, although The Blacklist stopped leaking its database not long after that contact request. Two other accounts marked as administrators were among the third and sixth registered users in the database; those correspond to two individuals at Riip Digital, a California-based email marketing concern that serves a diverse range of clients in the lead generation business, from debt relief and timeshare companies, to real estate firms and CBD vendors. Riip Digital did not respond to requests for comment. But According to Spamhaus, an anti-spam group relied upon by many Internet service providers (ISPs) to block unsolicited junk email, the company has a storied history of so-called “snowshoe spamming,” which involves junk email purveyors who try to avoid spam filters and blacklists by spreading their spam-sending systems across a broad swath of domains and Internet addresses. The irony of this data leak is that marketers who constantly scrape the Web for consumer contact data may not realize the source of the information, and end up feeding it into automated systems that peddle dubious wares and services via automated phone calls and text messages. To the extent this data is used to generate sales leads that are then sold to others, such a leak could end up causing more legal problems for The Blacklist’s customers. The Blacklist and their clients talk a lot about technologies that they say separate automated telephonic communications from dime-a-dozen robocalls, such as software that delivers recorded statements that are manually selected by a live agent. But for your average person, this is likely a distinction without a difference. Robocalls are permitted for political candidates, but beyond that if the recording is a sales message and you haven’t given your written permission to get calls from the company on the other end, the call is illegal. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), companies are using auto-dialers to send out thousands of phone calls every minute for an incredibly low cost. In fiscal year 2019, the FTC received 3.78 million complaints about robocalls. Readers may be able to avoid some marketing calls by registering their mobile number with the Do Not Call registry, but the list appears to do little to deter all automated calls — particularly scam calls that spoof their real number. If and when you do receive robocalls, consider reporting them to the FTC. Some wireless providers now offer additional services and features to help block automated calls. For example, AT&T offers wireless customers its free Call Protect app, which screens incoming calls and flags those that are likely spam calls. See the FCC’s robocall resource page for links to resources at your mobile provider. In addition, there are a number of third-party mobile apps designed to block spammy calls, such as Nomorobo and TrueCaller. Obviously, not all telemarketing is spammy or scammy. I have friends and relatives who’ve worked at non-profits that rely a great deal on fundraising over the phone. Nevertheless, readers who are fed up with telemarketing calls may find some catharsis in the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, which offers subscribers a choice of automated bots that keep telemarketers engaged for several minutes. The service lets subscribers choose which callers should get the bot treatment, and then records the result. For my part, the volume of automated calls hitting my mobile number got so bad that I recently enabled a setting on my smart phone to simply send to voicemail all calls from numbers that aren’t already in my contacts list. This may not be a solution for everyone, but since then I haven’t received a single spammy jingle.
Reading Time: ~ 5 min. Don’t expect cybercriminals to go easy during a hurricane. Quite the opposite, in fact. Just like they’ve used the coronavirus pandemic to launch COVID-related malware scams, hackers will capitalize on the names and news coverage of hurricanes to disguise attacks. That’s why now is a good show more ...
time to review your cyber security posture and your overall cyber resilience strategy. We talked with Carbonite VP of Product Management Jamie Zajac about how to anticipate the types of adverse events that catch a lot of people and businesses off guard. With the right protection in place, you can maintain access to data during a hurricane – and all year round. You can start by knowing what to expect. Get woke to data loss When most people think of data loss, they think major disasters, like headline-generating storms and floods. Of course, it’s important to anticipate highly impactful outages. But these are far more rare than other causes of data loss. “It’s everyday scenarios that are really common. Like leaving a laptop on an airplane, dropping a phone in the river, or accidentally deleting a folder and having the recycle bin policies expire,” Zajac says. Another cause of data loss is hardware failure. “Hardware has become more reliable,” Zajac says, “but you never know when a hard drive will fail, a computer will be dropped or a motherboard will crash.” Since hardware has a finite lifespan, failure is inevitable. When you’re considering how to protect devices that store important data, Zajac recommends looking for a few key features: Continuous backup (so you’re capturing changes as you make them)Online file recovery (so you don’t have to wait to buy a new computer)Cloud failover for critical servers or disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) An ounce of prevention Whether it’s a lack of awareness, the complexity of systems or the perceived difficulty of deploying protection, too many people and businesses fail to protect themselves ahead of time. “We often don’t think to make cyber security and data protection a priority until it’s too late,” Zajac says. “For consumers and business alike, we see a ton of inquiries about how to get data off a hard drive that wasn’t backed up. That is way more time-consuming, expensive, error-prone and ineffective than having a full cyber resilience and protection plan in place.” “It’s never worth the risk of being hacked,” Zajac says. “I’ve seen businesses struggle and even close when they lose data, or their brands suffer because hackers have stolen their data. As compliance requirements and privacy requirements evolve, more and more small businesses face these risks.” Hurricane checklist Hurricane season is prime time for system outages. But it’s also a useful reminder to prepare for the unexpected. Here are three key steps you can take to form a strategy for dealing with annually occurring threats, according to Zajac. Anticipate your office being unavailable – Like the physical disruptions we’ve experienced with the COVID-19 pandemic, anticipate IT infrastructure becoming unavailable. Can you run systems in the cloud? Can you access a cloud backup quickly? DRaaS is a great solution for businesses susceptible to hurricanes.Back up everything, not just some things – Many people realize too late that they only chose to back up critical systems, and that one of those “second-tier” systems is also necessary to run the business. It’s better to have everything backed up than to be missing something. You can often save costs by tiering your backups or having different recovery objectives for different systems. But don’t skip backing up some systems.Test your backups – Know whether you can recover systems within the time required. When it comes to hurricanes and weather-related risks, specific security-related concerns should also be considered. “It’s important to train people on the protocols for when they need to work remotely,” Zajac says. “Generally speaking, you should be training users on security best practices, whether they are remote or in the office. But people are more distracted and thus susceptible to phishing and social engineering when they are remote.” If people need to work from cloud workstations, personal devices or laptops, make sure they have a security suite, such as cloud-based anti-virus and anti-phishing protection. Make sure you have security software that doesn’t require people to be in the office. For example, if you are relying on your firewall to block malicious websites, it won’t help employees who are off the network. Use DNS protection with roaming device security for these scenarios. An all-of-the-above approach Murphy’s Law dictates that you’ll probably experience the data breach you’re not prepared for. Any form of data loss can have bad effects. So, if you’re too narrowly focused on just one threat, consider all the potential adverse events you could experience. “Hackers are a constant threat and can have really big impacts in terms of data loss, productivity loss, compliance requirements, regulatory fines, brand damage and more,” Zajac says. “A coffee spill is a constant threat,” she warns, “but the damage is typically isolated. You still don’t want to rely on someone re-creating all of your work if a coffee spill or other localized damage even occurs, especially if it is the CEO’s laptop.” Zajac continues, “A hurricane is a rare and often well-predicted event, but the impact can be catastrophic. You can’t wait for a hurricane to build a plan.” The good news is that a competent IT consultant can help you build a strategy, and a good vendor can protect you against many of these adverse events in one fell swoop. Setting expectations There’s no backup without recovery. But how do you know if your recovery process is sufficient? It should align with the objectives you establish before disaster strikes. “On an endpoint, you can typically get very fast file backup and recovery so that you only lose minutes of data and all files are available online in a web interface for fast access,” Zajac says. “For servers, you need to tier systems into mission-critical applications and use a very low RPO solution, such as DRaaS. Non-mission critical infrastructure can withstand a few hours or days to get running again.” Zajac suggests doing an impact analysis. If a given system is offline, how much will it cost your business? Cloud considerations It’s not just devices that are worth protecting. Today, both personal and business users leverage the public cloud, like Microsoft 365 and Azure, for much of their storage and computing needs. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking cloud data is protected by the vendor. But this is not the case. “Microsoft cannot tell the difference between accidental data loss and legitimate file deletions because the content is no longer relevant. It’s up to users and company admins to make this determination,” Zajac says. “Microsoft 365 credential attacks are on the rise. It’s only a matter of time before someone creates or spreads ransomware to Microsoft 365 native data. That won’t be a good day for anyone who doesn’t have a backup in place.” Next steps Never let a good catastrophe, or the threat of one, go to waste. Use this hurricane season to make sure you have a robust cyber security and resilience plan. And not just for hurricanes, but for all the ways you can lose access to data. The post Hack, Crash, Storm, Spill: Pick Your Poison appeared first on Webroot Blog.
