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Pawn Storm Hacking Develops New Tools For Cyberespionage
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A Russian cyberespionage group known as Pawn Storm has made use of new tools in an ongoing attack campaign against defense contractors with the goal of defeating network isolation policies.
Since August, the group has been engaged in an attack campaign focused on defense contractors, according to security researchers from Kaspersky Lab.
During this operation, the group has used a new version of a backdoor program called AZZY and a new set of data-stealing modules. One of those modules monitors for USB storage devices plugged into the computer and steals files from them based on rules defined by the attackers.
The Kaspersky Lab researchers believe that this module’s goal is to defeat so-called network air gaps, network segments where sensitive data is stored and which are not connected to the Internet to limit their risk of compromise.
However, it’s fairly common for employees in organizations that use such network isolation policies to move data from air-gapped computers to their workstations using USB thumb drives.
Pawn Storm joins other sophisticated cyberespionage groups, like Equation and Flame, that are known to have used malware designed to defeat network air gaps.
“Over the last year, the Sofacy group has increased its activity almost tenfold when compared to previous years, becoming one of the most prolific, agile and dynamic threat actors in the arena,” the Kaspersky researchers said in a blog post. “This activity spiked in July 2015, when the group dropped two completely new exploits, an Office and Java zero-day.”
Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/pawn-storm-hacking-group-develops-new-tools-for-cyberespionage.html
IRS Reducing Size Of Cybersecurity Staff
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The Internal Revenue Service, which confirmed rumors of a breach of 100,000 taxpayer accounts, has been consistently reducing the size of its internal cybersecurity staff as it increases its security spending. This may seem paradoxical, but one observer suggested it could signal a shift to outsourcing.
In 2011, the IRS employed 410 people in its cybersecurity organization, but by 2014 the headcount had fallen by 11% to 363 people, according to annual reports about IRS information technology spending by the U.S. Treasury Department Inspector General.
Despite this staff reduction, the IRS has increased spending in its cybersecurity organization. In 2012, the IRS earmarked $129 million for cybersecurity, which rose to $141.5 million last year, an increase of approximately 9.7%.
This increase in spending, coupled with the reduction in headcount, is an indicator of outsourcing, said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute. Paller sees risks in that strategy.
“Each organization moves at a different pace toward a point at which they have outsourced so much that the insiders do little more than manage contracts, and lose their technical expertise and ability to manage technical contractors effectively,” said Paller.
An IRS spokesman was not able to immediately answer questions about the IRS’s cybersecurity spending.
This breach is drawing congressional scrutiny. On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who heads the Senate Finance Committee, called the breach “unacceptable.”
The IRS’s total IT budget in 2014 was $2.5 billion, an increase from the prior year’s $2.3 billion, with 7,339 employees last year, little change from 7,303 reported in 2013.
The agency’s IT budget has fared better than the agency overall. Congress has been cutting spending at the agency. IRS funding has been reduced by $1.2 billion over the last five years, from $12.1 billion in 2010 to $10.9 billion this year. An IRS official told lawmakers earlier this year that the budget cuts have delayed critical IT investments of more than $200 million, which includes replacing aging IT systems.
Techies Demand More Money
February 11, 2014 by admin
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Employers may need to loosen their purse strings to retain their IT staffers in 2014, according to a salary survey from IT career websiteDice.com.
Among the tech workers who anticipate changing employers in 2014, 68 percent listed more compensation as their reason for leaving. Other factors include improved working conditions (48 percent), more responsibility (35 percent) and the possibility of losing their job (20 percent). The poll, conducted online between Oct. 14 and Nov. 29 last year, surveyed 17,236 tech professionals.
Fifty-four percent of the workers polled weren’t content with their compensation. This figure is down from 2012′s survey, when 57 percent of respondents were displeased with their pay.
The decrease in salary satisfaction could mean companies will face IT staff retention challenges this year, since 65 percent of respondents said they’re confident they can find a new, better position in 2014.
This dissatisfaction over pay comes even though the survey, released Wednesday, showed that the average tech salary rose 2.6 percent in 2013 to US$87,811 and that more companies gave merit raises. The main reason for last year’s bump in pay, according to 45 percent of respondents, was a merit raise. In comparison, the average tech salary was $85,619 in 2012 and 40 percent of those polled said they received a merit raise.
Meanwhile, 26 percent of respondents attributed their 2013 salary increase to taking a higher-paying job at another company.
Employers realize tech talent is coveted and are attempting to keep workers satisfied by offering them a variety of incentives, the survey found. In 2013, 66 percent of employers provided incentives to retain workers. The two most popular incentives were increased compensation and more interesting work. Incentives that allow employees to better balance their work and personal lives were also offered, such as telecommuting and a flexible work schedule.
Skills that commanded six-figure jobs in 2013 came from some of the hottest areas of IT. Data science led the way with big data backgrounds yielding some of the highest salaries. People skilled in Knowing R, the popular statistical computing language, can expect to make $115,531 on average, while those with NoSQL database development skills command an average salary of $114,796. IT pros skilled in MapReduce to process large data sets make $114,396 on average.
Is The Tech Industry Going Independent?
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The tech industry is undergoing a shift toward a more independent, contingent IT workforce. And while that trend might not be cause for alarm for retiring baby boomer IT professionals, it could mean younger and mid-career workers need to prepare to make a living solo.
About 18% of all IT workers today are self-employed, according to an analysis by Emergent Research, a firm focused on small businesses trends. This independent IT workforce is growing at the rate of about 7% per year, which is faster than the overall growth rate for independent workers generally, at 5.5%.
The definition of independent workers covers people who work at least 15 hours a week.
Steve King, a partner at Emergent, said the growth in independent workers is being driven by companies that want to stay ahead of change, and can bring in workers with the right skills. “In today’s world, change is happening so quickly that everyone is trying to figure out how to be more flexible and agile, cut fixed costs and move to variable costs,” said King. “Unfortunately, people are viewed as a fixed cost.”
King worked with MBO Partners to produce a recent study that estimated the entire independent worker headcount in the U.S., for all occupations, at 17.7 million. They also estimate that around one million of them are IT professionals.
A separate analysis by research firm Computer Economics finds a similar trend. Over the last two years, there has been a spike in the use of contract labor among large IT organizations — firms with IT operational budgets of more than $20 million, according to John Longwell, vice president of research at Computer Economics.
This year, contract workers make up 15% of a typical large organization’s IT staff at the median. This is up from a median of just 6% in 2011, said Longwell. The last time there was a similar increase in contract workers was in 1998, during the dot.com boom and the run-up to Y2K remediation efforts. Computer Economics recently published a research brief on the topic.
“The difference now is that use of contract or temporary workers is not being driven by a boom, but rather by a reluctance to hire permanent workers as the economy improves,” Longwell said.
Computer Economics expects large IT organizations to step up hiring in 2014, which may cause the percentage of contract workers to decline back to a more normal 10% level. But, Longwell cautioned, it’s not clear whether that new hiring will be involve full-time employees or even more contract labor.
NSA Spies With Tracking Cookies
December 23, 2013 by admin
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The browser cookies that online businesses use to track Internet customers for targeted advertising are also used by the National Security Agency to track surveillance targets and break into their systems.
The agency’s use of browser cookies is restricted to tracking specific suspects rather than sifting through vast amounts of user data, theWashington Post reported Tuesday, citing internal documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Google’s PREF (for preference) cookies, which the company uses to personalize webpages for Internet users based on their previous browsing habits and preferences, appears to be a particular favorite of the NSA, the Post noted.
PREF cookies don’t store any user identifying information such as user name or email address. But they contain information on a user’s general location, language preference, search engine settings, number of search results to display per page and other data that lets advertisers uniquely identify an individual’s browser.
The Google cookie, and those used by other online companies, can be used by the NSA to track a target user’s browsing habits and to enable remote exploitation of their computers, the Post said.
Documents made available by Snowden do not describe the specific exploits used by the NSA to break into a surveillance target’s computers. Neither do they say how the NSA gains access to the tracking cookies, the Post reported.
It is theorized that one way the NSA could get access to the tracking cookies is to simply ask the companies for them under the authority granted to the agency by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Separately, the documents leaked by Snowden show that the NSA is also tapping into cell-phone location data gathered and transmitted by makers of mobile applications and operating systems. Google and other Internet companies use the geo-location data transmitted by mobile apps and operating systems to deliver location-aware advertisements and services to mobile users.
However, the NSA is using the same data to track surveillance targets with more precision than was possible with data gathered directly from wireless carriers, the Post noted. The mobile app data, gathered by the NSA under a program codenamed “Happyfoot,” allows the agency to tie Internet addresses to physical locations more precisely than was possible with cell-phone location data.
An NSA division called Tailored Access Operations uses the data gathered from tracking cookies and mobile applications to launch offensive hacking operations against specific target computers, the Post said.
An NSA spokeswoman Wednesday did not comment on the specific details in the Post story but reiterated the agency’s commitment to fulfill its mission of protecting the country against those seeking to do it harm.
“As we’ve said before, NSA, within its lawful mission to collect foreign intelligence to protect the United States, uses intelligence tools to understand the intent of foreign adversaries and prevent them from bringing harm to innocent Americans and allies,” the spokeswoman said.
The Post’s latest revelations are likely to shine a much-needed spotlight on the extensive tracking and monitoring activities carried out by major Internet companies in order to deliver targeted advertisements to users.
Privacy rights groups have protested such tracking for several years and have sought legislation that would give users more visibility and control over the data that is collected on them by online companies.
SecureID CRACKED?
May 31, 2012 by admin
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An analyst has come up with a technique that clones the secret software token that RSA’s SecurID uses to generate one-time passwords.
Sensepost senior security analyst Behrang Fouladi said that the discovery has important implications for the safekeeping of the tokens. Fouladi demonstrated another way determined attackers could circumvent protections built into SecurID. By reverse engineering software used to manage the cryptographic software tokens on computers running Windows, he found that the secret “seed” was easy for people with control over the machines to locate and copy. He provided step-by-step instructions for others to follow in order to demonstrate how easy it is to create clones that mimic verbatim the output of a targeted SecurID token.
Defense Dept. IT Is ‘Stone Age’
U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a stinging critique of the Defense Department’s IT systems and said he sees much room for improvement.
Cartwright, who was speaking at the FOSE information technology conference in Washington,DC, said the DOD is sending increasing amounts of data, such as video, to soldiers on the battlefield, and it’s beginning to build an architecture “that starts to take us where we need to be.” But Cartwright quickly tempered that.
“Quite frankly, my feeling is — at least being a never-satisfied person — the department is pretty much in the Stone Age as far as IT is concerned,” Cartwright said.
Cartwright cited problems with proprietary systems that aren’t connected to anything else and are unable to quickly adapt to changing needs. “We have huge numbers of data links that move data between proprietary platforms — one point to another point,” he said.
The most striking example of an IT failure came during the second Gulf War, where the Marines and the Army were dispatched in southern Iraq.
RSA To Replace SecureID Tokens
June 10, 2011 by admin
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In an acknowledgement of the severity of its recent systems breach, RSA Security said Monday that it will replace SecureID tokens for any customer that asks.
Customers have been left to ponder whether or not to trust RSA’s security tokens since March, when the company confirmed that it had been hacked and issued a vague warning to its customers. Then, two weeks ago, government contractor Lockheed Martin was reportedly forced to pull access to its virtual private network after hackers compromised the SecureID technology.
In a letter sent to customers Monday, RSA confirmed that the Lockheed Martin incident was related to SecureID. Information “taken from RSA in March had been used as an element of an attempted broader attack on Lockheed Martin,” RSA Executive Chairman Art Coviello stated in the letter.
Coviello said the company remains “highly confident in the RSA SecureID product,” but acknowledged that the recent Lockheed Martin attack and general concerns over hacking, “may reduce some customers’ overall risk tolerance.”