2022 Week 6 Security Summary
Summary
This week we saw a wide array of news about cyber security.
News
SLTT
Pellissippi State Community College was the victim of a ransomware attack that apparently was trying to encrypt data. They report they did not pay the ransom and are working to figure out the extent of data that was accessed.
Infosec Institute is offering scholarships to 15 people from underrepresented groups in the infosec/cybersecurity industry. It expands on their Accelerate Scholarship Program.
Clario researchers discovered an unsecured Microsoft Azure blob repository that was searchable on the web that held over 144K student records.
The Biden administration is creating a task force to review cybersecurity issues affecting government at all levels and businesses. Their first task will be reviewing the Log4J issue.
Operational Technology (OT) General
Researchers have outlined the kinds of data being released to the Web and Dark Web and conclude that the technical information about (OT) network devices and programmable industrial devices can give valuable intelligence for future attacks. While security through obscurity is never ideal, the very nature of OT networks has led to a bit of a knowledge gap with 'script kiddies' and even some sophisticated actors. This proves once again why we in the defense side of the house are all in this together.
A new report from Claroty indicated that Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and OT networks are affected by ransomware attacks more often than previously believed. From there survey ~ 80% of respondents said they had a ransomware-type attack and of those, 50% said their ICS or OT networks had suffered.
Power
The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released a bulletin warning of indicators that Domestic Violent Extremists (DVE's) have "developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure
since at least 2020, identifying the electric grid as a particularly
attractive target given its interdependency with other infrastructure
sectors..." They note that this is more an issue at the individual operator level than to the grid itself, but it reminds us that the bad guys are still out there and could be closer to home than expected.
Water
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released a 100-day game plan to help protect water systems from cyber-attacks. Named Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity Initiative – Water and Wastewater Sector Action Plan gives guidelines on the highest impact acts that can be performed in 100 days to strengthen the posture of water and wastewater systems.
Healthcare
As a follow-up to last week's report about hospital-based IoT devices (https://yasb2018.blogspot.com/2022/01/2022-week-5-summary.html), Kaspersky Labs reports 33 vulnerabilities were found last year in home-based medical IoT devices. The issue was tracked to MQTT that is a data transfer protocol used by many medical IoT devices.
Joy Forsythe, makes an argument that security medical data is not just a regulatory or business best practice, but is essential to human health. Her presentation hit on a lot of topics that I have also argued over the years to make her point.
Aerospace
A misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 bucket exposed the details of an unknown number of airport staff from throughout South America. Researchers were able to access about 3TB of PII on airport workers dating back to 2018.
Swissport, a Swiss airport management services company, reported a ransomware attack on its IT systems. So far not much information is being released.
Legislative actions
California criminalizes "cyber flashing". SB 53, also known as the FLASH Act would make it against the law for someone to transmit unsolicited sexually explicit images or videos without the recipient's express consent.
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