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 Security

Connected areas, also known as smart cities, use interconnected devices and sensors to increase service quality, such as configuring traffic lights to reduce congestion.  The benefits of smart cities and linked rural environments are various. However, even if cities are getting “smart,” security aspects should   show more ...  

not be ignored, as it would create more problems. Sensitive data must be protected against large-scale theft. The NCSC, a division of GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), has issued guidelines to local governments on how to secure "connected places."  They warn that critical public services must be protected against disruption.  The technical director of the NCSC, Dr. Ian Levy, mentioned a classic British film as an example of the potential impact of such disruption.  He wrote in a blog the following:  “One of the first Hollywood... (read more)

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 Security

The names of over 200,000 people participating in Amazon fraudulent product review schemes have been exposed due to an open database.  There is an ongoing battle between the e-commerce giant and shady vendors all over the world who want to hamstring rivals and gain an advantage by creating fake product feedback.    show more ...  

This can include providing free products in exchange for positive, public feedback or paying customers to leave positive reviews.  The strategy and how they stay under Amazon's radar differ, but an open ElasticSearch server reveals how some unethical activities are carried out.  The cybersecurity team of SafetyDetectives revealed on Thursday that the server held 7GB of data and over 13 million records that seemed to be connected to a widespread fake review scam. The same server accessed is open to the public and accessible online. Server's ownership is not kn... (read more)

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 Security

Google is committed to keeping user accounts more secure by enabling the two-factor authentication by default.  The company wants you to stop relying on your password alone to protect your account.  In a blog post published on Thursday, the company stats that it plans to prompt users to enable the two-factor   show more ...  

authentication. Accounts that already benefit from the setting are solely asked to confirm user identity. Soon, the two-factor authentication will become the norm for all accounts. According to Google’s senior director of product management, Mark Risher, “Using their mobile device to sign in gives people a safer and more secure authentication experience than passwords alone,”  Passwords alone do not provide enough security anymore  He continues "Passwords are the single biggest threat to your online security—they’re ... (read more)

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 Security

A flaw in Qualcomm's Mobile Station Modem (MSM) chip, used in 30% of all mobile devices worldwide, can be exploited from within Android.   Both hackers and researchers are interested in how MSM can be remotely controlled by sending an SMS or a specially designed radio packet that communicates with the device and   show more ...  

allows them to take control of it.  However, MSM can also be accessed from inside the system, and that's how Check Point Research decided to approach it (CPR).  The Qualcomm real-time OS, which is secured by the TrustZone, manages MSM on an Android computer. Regardless of whether it is a rooted device, it cannot be debugged or dumped, leaving only a vulnerability as the only way to access the MSM code.   CPR fuzzed MSM data services to find a way to patch QuRT from Android directly.  Qualcomm's protocol for communicating between software components in modems and other peripheral subsystems is known as QMI. According to the CPR researchers, QMI functions ... (read more)

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 Tips

Unable to concentrate on your work or relax with your favorite TV show because of annoying notifications on your phone? Alerts from social networks, ads, and news you don’t care about following you everywhere? A few simple configurations will help you take control of this information overload and put the world   show more ...  

on a short hold. In this post, we talk about how to manage notifications on an Android phone or tablet. Which notifications should you keep? Configuring notifications on devices with Android Disabling notifications in Android all at once Disabling notifications in Android ad hoc Silencing calls and notifications Other tips for digital serenity Peace and quiet at last! Now what? Which notifications should you keep? Although the focus of this post is how to disable notifications, we’ll start by talking about which ones you should keep. There aren’t a lot, but without them you could miss something important. Here’s the list. Notifications from bank apps. Disabling these notifications leads to a risk of missing a suspicious transfer or an attempt to access your user account. Leave SMS alerts on, but selectively block notifications from bank apps — for example, you can get rid of marketing messages, such as offers to apply for a loan or a new card, and keep confirmations of payments and transfers, and of course of new attempts to access your account. Messages from online stores. Game and accessory collections on Steam are tempting targets for scammers, so you should also keep an eye on those sorts of accounts. You should also keep the text or e-mail notifications, and disable notifications about special offers and other marketing messages in the app. Update notifications for the operating system and installed apps. These updates often close vulnerabilities and protect you from cybercriminals. Antivirus notifications. You don’t want to miss an alert about a suspicious website or dangerous e-mail attachment, do you? As for the rest, you can pause whatever you do not need with no problem — either by completely disabling notifications or by silencing them so they don’t distract you from what you’re doing at any given moment. Keep reading to learn how to tweak your notifications on an Android smartphone or tablet. Configuring notifications on devices with Android Now, without losing sight of the important alerts, let’s get down to business and start disabling unnecessary notifications. As it happens, there are many more ways to customize the system in Android than to disable some or all notifications: You can choose whether you want to see alerts on a locked screen, whether you need pop-up notifications, whether you want to receive them while you’re asleep, and more. It’s up to you. Many manufacturers change interfaces in their own way, so the settings menu may vary from one device to another. However, the basic principles are the same. Disabling notifications in Android all at once Your smartphone’s settings contain a separate menu to manage alerts from apps. Start on your way to digital well-being right there. Open Settings (or Options); Enter Notifications in the search bar or manually locate the item in the menu; Select each app and configure its notifications. Many apps make flexible settings for specific situations available. For example, in messaging apps you can disable alerts from channels and allow them for private chats only. For those who don’t have a lot of apps installed (or have a couple of hours and lots of patience), this is a good way to make your app notifications work for you. Configuring settings app by app can be tedious, but you’ll get immediate results. Disabling notifications in Android ad hoc What if you aren’t ready to spend two or three hours immersing yourself in labyrinthine configuration settings? What if you have not just five or ten apps on your phone, but more like a hundred? That alone could drive you to spend years procrastinating. Here’s an alternative: Deal with notifications as needed. When the next notification goes off, open the “shade,” tap it and hold it down, or swipe it to the left, right, or down (depending on smartphone model) to reveal a gearwheel. Tap the gear to see the settings for this specific type of alert for the specific app. The advantage of using this method is that you won’t need to sort out every app immediately; you can just configure the ones that really bother you to start. In many versions of Android, that same shade lets you postpone notifications (so you won’t forget about them). For example, if you’re having an important conversation over Zoom but your phone keeps asking you to update something, if you can’t immediately determine how important the patch is and which apps it affects, the ability to snooze the alert will come in handy. Tap the notification and drag it sideways. Next to the resulting gearwheel, you’ll see an icon with a clock or a bell. Tap it and choose how long you want to keep your gadget from interrupting you for that particular notification. As soon as the “timeout” period ends, you’ll receive the snoozed notification again. Silencing calls and notifications What if you’ve disabled everything you don’t need but in the next few hours you just want total silence? Of course, you could block important notifications and then have to reenable them, but you don’t need to do that. What you need is Do Not Disturb mode, which keeps your phone from showing any notifications until you restore the default mode. To turn on Do Not Disturb, open the Notification center by swiping down from the top of the screen (or, less commonly, swiping up). The Do Not Disturb icon usually looks like a Do Not Enter sign. You can also reach this setting by searching the menu and entering the term into the search line in the upper part of the Settings screen. In the Do Not Disturb settings, you can mute all sounds and stop vibrations. However, by default the rule of repeat calls applies: If someone tries to call you twice within 15 minutes, an alert on the notification shade will let you know you have an incoming call, and the phone will vibrate if you don’t disable that. You can set up a schedule to turn Do Not Disturb mode on and off, for example, in the evening and in the morning. You can also add important alerts such as calls from certain contacts to the list of exceptions in the “Do Not Disturb” exceptions section. For example, the alarm appears there automatically and will ring no matter what. You can remove any type of alert from the exception list as well. Other tips for digital serenity In addition to its general settings, Android has a schedulable “focus mode.” You’ll find it under Digital Wellbeing and Parental Controls, and you can use it to block apps from sending notifications. In the same menu, the Toolbar shows how much time you’re spending in each app and how many notifications the app sends, a statistic that helps you determine which services are distracting you the most often. If you spend too much time going down the rabbit hole of news, social networks, or games, for example, set a limit on how much time you can spend looking at them — and, of course, while an app is prevented from running, it also can’t send notifications. Peace and quiet at last! Now what? You don’t have to swear off social networks and other distracting services entirely. You can solve the problem by spending a little time on configuration. Once you’ve experienced the relief of having personalized your notifications, expand and enhance your digital comfort zone with tips for the whole household.

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 A Little Sunshine

John Bernard, a pseudonym used by a convicted thief and con artist named John Clifton Davies who’s fleeced dozens of technology startups out of an estimated $30 million, appears to have reinvented himself again after being exposed in a recent investigative series published here. Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that   show more ...  

Davies/Bernard is now posing as John Cavendish and head of a new “private office” called Hempton Business Management LLP. John Davies is a U.K. man who absconded from justice before being convicted on multiple counts of fraud in 2015. Prior to his conviction, Davies served 16 months in jail before being cleared of murdering his wife on their honeymoon in India. Davies’ fraud convictions stemmed from a series of U.K. companies he set up supposedly to help troubled companies reorganize their debt and turn things around. Davies ended up looting what little money his clients had left and spending it on lavish cars, home furnishings, vacations and luxury watches. In a three-part series published last year, KrebsOnSecurity exposed how Davies — wanted by authorities in the U.K. — had fled the country, taken on the surname Bernard, remarried, and moved to his new (and fourth) wife’s hometown in Ukraine. The scam artist John Bernard (left) in a recent Zoom call, and a photo of John Clifton Davies from 2015. After eluding justice in the U.K., Davies reinvented himself as The Private Office of John Bernard, pretending to be a billionaire Swiss investor who made his fortunes in the dot-com boom 20 years ago and who was seeking private equity investment opportunities. In case after case, Bernard would promise to invest millions in hi-tech startups, only to insist that companies pay tens of thousands of dollars worth of due diligence fees up front. However, the due diligence company he insisted on using — another Swiss firm called Inside Knowledge — also was secretly owned by Bernard, who would invariably pull out of the deal after receiving the due diligence money. Bernard found a constant stream of new marks by offering extraordinarily generous finders fees to investment brokers who could introduce him to companies seeking an infusion of cash. Inside Knowledge and The Private Office both closed up shop not long after their exploits were detailed here late last year. But it appears Davies has just assumed a new name. KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from an investment broker who previously represented multiple clients that got fleeced by Mr. Bernard/Davies over the years. That broker said he was blown away to hear Davies’ unique British accent on a recent call with a client that had been in investment talks with a Northern Ireland firm called Hempton Business Management. This time, the source said, Davies was introduced by handlers on the call as John Cavendish. “I just sat in on a call and John’s voice is unmistakable,” said the broker, who asked to remain anonymous. “He stumbled on the beginning of the call trying to remember which last name he was supposed to use. Immediately they go back to the standard script about the types of deals they are looking for. They want to be minority investors in private transactions and they are industry agnostic.  Their deal sizes are investments in the $5-20 million range, they prefer to not use big 4 firms for due diligence, and they have some smaller firms they use which are better suited for smaller investment deals.” The source forwarded me some correspondence from Hempton Business Management, and I noticed it was sent from a Mariya Kulykova. This is interesting because Mr. Bernard’s personal assistant in Ukraine was a Mariya Kulikova (Ms. Kulikova deleted Bernard’s former companies from her LinkedIn profile shortly after last year’s series). The company’s website says Hempton has been around since 2017, but the domain name was only registered in late November 2020. There is no information about who runs or owns the company on its site. Hemptonllp[.]com was registered via Gandi, the same French registrar John Bernard/Davies has used over the years with his dozens of phantom companies. Hempton Business Management’s only presence on LinkedIn appears to be a help wanted ad from a few weeks ago, for a marketing position at an office in Kyiv, Ukraine. In response to an emailed request for comment on the apparent connections, Mr. Cavendish forwarded the message to a James Donohoe, who replied that he was the owner of Hempton. Donohoe said the domain was new because the company recently re-branded, although he declined to discuss the matter further. “This sounds like an accusation of a big fraud?,” Donohoe wrote. “I have never had any dealings with a John Clifton Davies or John Bernard. You really are a cheeky little bugger aren’t you!” Mr. Donohoe did not respond to further requests for comment. Hempton appears to be part of a network of corporate facades designed to lead any investigators into a labyrinth of entities that exist only on paper. Hempton is what’s known as a “shelf corporation,” an aged or seasoned company that was formed but never used as a business. Shelf corporations are registered solely for the purposes of being resold to others at a later date. Simply put, their resale allows new enterprises to appear older, more established, and trusted. “Perhaps the leading reason for acquiring an aged entity in general is credibility,” explains TBA & Associates, a company co-registered in the UK and New Zealand that has created hundreds of shelf companies for sale (PDF), including Hempton Business Management LLP in 2017. “Business relationships are frequently influenced by the length of time a company has been in existence,” TBA continues. “This is often true when establishing financial and client/vendor relationships.” Some of the shelf companies created and sold by TBA & Associates. Documents from the UK business record index Companies House show two entities as officers in Hempton: ABA Group & Associates LTD, and Harper & Partners Ltd. Both of these are shelf companies in Hong Kong that are listed for sale in the same TBA PDF advertisement linked for Hempton. Searching Companies House for information on ABA Group and Harper & Partners leads to a dizzying number of other shelf companies in Hong Kong, Belize and the U.K. — all of which also were recently listed for sale by TBA. The only person’s name attached to each of these companies is a Joaquim Magro de Almeida, a rather mysterious 72 year-old Portuguese business consultant. OpenCorporates says this same guy is an officer in 313 active companies. The U.K.’s Companies House lists Mr. Almeida as one of three officers in Euro Forex Investments Ltd., which Reuters says was a sprawling pyramid scheme that stole $1 billion from at least 3,700 victims in China, the United States and elsewhere. This 2017 story from New Zealand financial news site interest.co.nz follows a trail of various other investment scams leading back to TBA shell companies, and to Mr. Almeida, too. In my first report on John Davies, I noted that before becoming John Bernard he previously used the pseudonym “Jonathan Bibi” with an address in the offshore company haven of Seychelles. That identity was tied to a number of fraudulent cryptocurrency and binary options investment schemes. Fraudsters are drawn to complexity, and they typically incorporate their shell or shelf companies in countries with little to no oversight or background checks tied to the creation and maintenance of corporate entities. As we’ve seen here, the U.K. is a favorite of fraudsters and money launderers worldwide. In a scathing 2017 report titled Hiding in Plain Sight (PDF), Transparency International found some 766 UK corporate vehicles were alleged to have been used in 52 large-scale corruption and money laundering cases approaching £80 billion.

 Trends, Reports, Analysis

"The losses from ransomware are staggering. And the pace at which those losses are being realized is equally staggering," Mayorkas said, noting this is why DHS has made battling ransomware a priority.

 Breaches and Incidents

In total, 13,124,962 of records (or 7GB of data) have been exposed in the breach, potentially implicating more than 200,000 people in unethical activities like giving fake product reviews on Amazon.

 Breaches and Incidents

CaptureRx, which is based in San Antonio, fell victim to a ransomware attack on February 6. An investigation into the attack determined that certain files had been accessed without authorization.

 Breaches and Incidents

OGUsers has been hacked for the fourth time in two years. The hacking forum’s database consisting of private messages and user records for almost 350,000 members is on sale now for $3,000.

 Malware and Vulnerabilities

Panda Stealer, a new cryptocurrency variant, has been found spreading through a global spam campaign and potentially through Discord channels. It is targeting individuals across U.S., Australia, Japan, and Germany.

 Feed

This Metasploit module serves an OSX app (as a zip) that contains no Info.plist, which bypasses gatekeeper in macOS versions prior to 11.3. If the user visits the site on Safari, the zip file is automatically extracted, and clicking on the downloaded file will automatically launch the payload. If the user visits the   show more ...  

site in another browser, the user must click once to unzip the app, and click again in order to execute the payload.

 Feed

Sysdig Falco is a behavioral activity monitoring agent that is open source and comes with native support for containers. Falco lets you define highly granular rules to check for activities involving file and network activity, process execution, IPC, and much more, using a flexible syntax. Falco will notify you when these rules are violated. You can think about falco as a mix between snort, ossec and strace.

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Red Hat Security Advisory 2021-1518-01 - Red Hat Ceph Storage is a scalable, open, software-defined storage platform that combines the most stable version of the Ceph storage system with a Ceph management platform, deployment utilities, and support services. The ceph-ansible package provides Ansible playbooks for   show more ...  

installing, maintaining, and upgrading Red Hat Ceph Storage. Grafana is an open source, feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor for Graphite, InfluxDB & OpenTSDB. The tcmu-runner packages provide a service that handles the complexity of the LIO kernel target's userspace passthrough interface. It presents a C plugin API for extension modules that handle SCSI requests in ways not possible or suitable to be handled by LIO's in-kernel backstores. Issues addressed include denial of service and server-side request forgery vulnerabilities.

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Voting System version 1.0 suffers from a remote SQL injection vulnerability that allows for authentication bypass. Original discovery of SQL injection in this version is attributed to Syed Sheeraz Ali in May of 2021.

 Feed

An unknown threat actor with the capabilities to evolve and tailor its toolset to target environments infiltrated high-profile organizations in Asia and Africa with an evasive Windows rootkit since at least 2018. Called 'Moriya,' the malware is a "passive backdoor which allows attackers to inspect all incoming traffic to the infected machine, filter out packets that are marked as designated for

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As many as six zero-days have been uncovered in an application called Remote Mouse, allowing a remote attacker to achieve full code execution without any user interaction. The unpatched flaws, collectively named 'Mouse Trap,' were disclosed on Wednesday by security researcher Axel Persinger, who said, "It's clear that this application is very vulnerable and puts users at risk with bad

 Feed

Security researchers Thursday disclosed a new critical vulnerability affecting Domain Name System (DNS) resolvers that could be exploited by adversaries to carry out reflection-based denial-of-service attacks against authoritative nameservers. The flaw, called 'TsuNAME,' was discovered by researchers from SIDN Labs and InternetNZ, which manage the national top-level internet domains '.nl' and '.

 Feed

Google has announced a number of user-facing and under-the-hood changes in an attempt to boost privacy and security, including rolling out two-factor authentication automatically to all eligible users and bringing iOS-styled privacy labels to Android app listings. "Today we ask people who have enrolled in two-step verification (2SV) to confirm it's really them with a simple tap via a Google

 SMBs

What’s better for getting your business’ name out there and boosting sales than having a killer business marketing plan with well-placed ads, zippy copy, and a slick design? The answer is: having a group of dedicated real-world customers who use their own platforms to advocate for your business and its offerings.   show more ...  

Thanks to social media, reviewing platforms, and the steady rise of online presence, your customers have numerous avenues in today’s internet to help make (or break) your brand. Discerning prospective customers don’t trust faceless brands with no reviews. In increasingly saturated markets, one of the best ways to build your brand is not to advertise to your customers, but to turn them into advocates for your brand and services. What’s the difference between advocacy and community? Although they may go hand in hand, an advocacy program isn’t the same as a user community. User communities are more about connecting all of your end customers with one another, your teams, and the resources they need to be successful with your products; and about giving them an active forum to find support, both from their peers and your teams. But an advocacy program should be more selective about its members. Sure, at first, you may be happy just to get people involved so you can get your program off the ground; but the ideal customer for your advocacy program isn’t just an average user with little investment in the product. Instead, it’s someone whom you can recognize as a power user; someone who is invested in the success of your product as being integral to their own success, and will, therefore, be more likely to help evangelize your wins and also bring enhancement requests, unanticipated requirements, bugs, and other worthwhile concerns to your attention. But how do you find these people? How do you keep them engaged once you do find them? And what does it look like to build an advocacy program that actually works for you and that your customers genuinely want to be a part of? We checked in with Emma Furtado, customer advocacy manager at Carbonite + Webroot, OpenText companies, for her take on the best tips to turn your savviest customers into your loyal advocacy partners who can’t wait to spread the word about your amazing products and efforts. Top 4 Tips for Building a Successful Customer Advocacy Program Tip #1: Take your time. According to Emma, step one is recognizing that doing anything right takes time. “You can’t build a successful advocacy program overnight,” she clarifies, “you’ll need to have at least one employee, maybe even a team, depending on the size of your business and program goals, dedicated to research and relationship-building. You should also think about coordinating across teams. Very few customers want to be cold-called to take part in an advocacy program. Take advantage of the relationships your sales reps and engineers have already built; start working with them to identify power users and have them make an introduction so that you don’t have to start building the relationship entirely from scratch.” Tip #2: Figure out your goals. Sometimes in business, we end up with the desire to do something without fully understanding why it’s necessary or what it can do for us. “The point of an advocacy program isn’t to just being able to say you have one,” Emma explains. “It needs to be doing something for you and for your advocates. So, start with the basics around your own needs. Are you trying to build brand awareness, get stronger product feedback, or something else? Ask yourself how this program could boost efforts that your team is already working towards. After you fully outline why you’re doing it, you can start determining realistic goals, deliverables, and KPIs to measure the progress of your program. And once you have those pieces in place, you can start working to determine how best to engage with your customers to develop the kind of program that can achieve those goals.” Tip #3: Hand-pick your members As mentioned previously, when your program is in its infancy, you might choose to have a sort of volunteer enrollment phase just to get people in the proverbial door. But Emma warns that, to actually meet your objectives, you need to make sure you’re bringing in customers who will work with you and make good brand advocates. “Not every customer meets that criteria, and that’s okay. Each customer will want to engage with us differently. Your job here is to identify the people who would make good advocates and be willing to be active for your brand in one way or another. A good place to start is by looking for folks who are already engaged in customer-facing programs, such as product betas; who have already provided a Net Promoter Score (NPS); who recently responded to a survey; and/or people who are already active in your industry through blogs or social media.” Tip #4: Give customers incentives, not bribes. It sounds rational to entice advocates to your program with exclusive swag or even free software. That’s not the worst thing you could do; but quality brand advocates are the ones who do it to get the word out, help their fellow IT pro, and improve the products we all use, regardless of whether they have a sweet, company-branded vacuum-insulated stainless steel tumbler for their morning coffee. “A good advocacy program isn’t about getting any old kind of engagement with your wider audience,” Emma says, “it’s about creating a mutually beneficial situation between your business and a select group of highly-invested power users. Those users aren’t doing it for the swag. They’re doing it because they believe in your mission; or because they love your products and want to help guild your roadmap; or because they feel they represent unique concerns and feel an obligation to share that voice; or because they want chances to increase their own expertise or presence in the space. There are so many reasons that have nothing to do with free stuff.” Summary While customer advocacy can’t entirely replace your normal marketing spend line items, creating an advocate program can make all the traditional line items significantly more effective. It is an exciting and important opportunity to level up your marketing efforts by identifying and leaning on your brand evangelists, who effectively share the marketing burden with you. “Figure out where your advocates are and go there. Talk to them about their businesses and goals. Show them you’re invested in their success, with or without your products. You’ll have an advocate for life.” – Emma Furtado, customer advocacy manager, Carbonite + Webroot, OpenText companies Keep in mind: an advocate program cannot succeed as a siloed effort. Customer advocacy works best when it supports your marketing efforts and product development. You can use the real-world customer input to inform your understanding of how customers want to be interacted with, improving the success of marketing programs and return on spend. Additionally, you can use the same feedback forum to guide how you use marketing and product development resources and pivot quickly on a leaner budget. By tailoring the overall customer journey to best serve their unique preferences and needs at each stage, you demonstrate to your base how highly you value their input. Ultimately, these actions serve to build a better experience for the customer overall, i.e., better reputation, brand recognition, and market posture for you. The post Building a Successful Customer Advocacy Program (Hint: It’s Not How You Think) appeared first on Webroot Blog.

2021-05
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