Yet Another Security Blog

 Summary Not a lot of regular news, but we had both the Verizon and Sophos annual reports came out. News The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report for 2022 indicated that while the education sector continues to be a favorite target, the motivator is mostly financial (somewhat confirming the Sophos report) and Medical Data is actually the least sought after.  The largest sector they indicated as a target was Professional, followed closely matched Finance, Information Technology, Manufacturing, and Public Administration.   https://cyware.com/news/education-sector-under-constant-cyberattacks-f2fbd34f https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/ Education The FBI issued an alert that they have become aware of cybercriminals selling usernames and passwords from university breaches.  The sales are occurring on a variety of dark websites.  The biggest takeaway for me was that just because you recover from an initial attack it does not mean it is ov...

Summary Sorry for the delay.  Work, life, and school got in the way.   As expected, most of the news can be wrapped around the growing war between Russia and Ukraine.  There is growing fear of either intentional or unintentional escalation in the cyber world outside those two countries. News SLTT Several state and local governments were targeted by a Chinese government-backed hacking gang.  The breaches occurred in at least 6 different states in The United States.  It appears that the group used the Log4J (i.e. LogJam) vulnerability.     https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/08/politics/china-hacking-state-governments-mandiant/index.html Western Australia announced it will invest $25.5 million AU to expand state cybersecurity.   https://www.zdnet.com/article/wa-government-allocates-au25-5m-to-expand-cybersecurity-services/?&web_view=true New Mexico in the United States (U.S.) appointed its first senior advisor for cybersecurity and critic...

  Summary Let me apologize for the long delay right upfront.  First, we had a round of Covid in the household in a person who is immune-compromised.  Next, I started a new semester in college and the workload was far greater than I expected.  Lastly, this is the start of the budget year for us and I had several projects that have demanded almost every second of my work time.  I hope to get back to weekly updates by November. Lots of news that covers:  health care, education, infrastructure, and SLTT governments around the world.  Since I am hitting the length limitations of Blogger, I will simply invite you to read and try and get caught up yourself.  News UC San Diego Health sued over breach In what is becoming a growing trend UC San Diego Health is being sued for failure to have proper data protection protocols.  The suit is citing breach of contract, negligence, and violating California consumer and medical privacy laws.  Specifically...

  Summary Cybersecurity is getting a lot of attention because of the rash of high-profile attacks.  This week saw more information about some of those attacks as well as new attacks against schools.  We also are starting to get word of past attacks that have had their investigations completed or that were declassified.    News Colonial Pipeline Hack Evidence is mounting that the United States government was the group behind the dismantling of servers operated by the DarkSide hacking group.  The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) announced that they had worked with Colonial Pipeline to recover about $2.3 million worth of bitcoin.  This marks the first such seizure by the newly created Department of Justice digital extortion taskforce (what?  No acronym?  Our federal partners are falling down on the game...).  This is part of the reason, in my opinion, that several of the global hacking organizations are making a change to avoid critic...

  Summary The Colonial pipeline hack dominated the news cycle this week.  This is probably the largest infrastructure hack in the history of the world. It is probable that this event will be in the news for weeks to come.   News Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Hack This may end up being the largest infrastructure attack in U.S. history.  From the various reports, it looks like the threat actor that launched the attack is Darkside.  Darkside is a group thought to be Russian as they avoid Russian companies and others in Russian speaking former Eastern Block countries.  They released a statement Monday saying that it was an affiliated group and they were vowing to reign in their partners in the future to avoid causing social and political strife.  In the past, the  Darkside group has held themselves as social justice warriors taking down corrupt corporations and has been known to donate 10% of their ransoms to charities.   While none have indi...

  Summary While I initially thought this would be a slow news week, several articles of interest came out later in the week.  Probably the biggest thing of note is the Biden administration going all in to point the finger at nation-state actors and their attacks against U.S. and allied targets.   News National assessment Normally I try and skip a lot of reports put out by the national intelligence agencies as they are normally focused on the bigger picture and not on SLTT issues.  I have decided to link to the first worldwide threat assessment report in a couple of years because 1) it has been a while since the U.S. has publically acknowledged that we have a cyberwar going on and 2) they mention specifically the risks to utilities and governments at all levels in the United States (and its allies).   The main takeaways from the report are that even if the United States may have taken a break (which I suspect regardless of the guidance from the Executiv...

  Summary Not a lot of activity in the SLTT arena this week.  It appears that threat actors are currently targeting the financial sector. News 2 colleges in Ireland were hit with ransomware.  The attack actually occurred the previous week, but both universities made a joint announcement this week.  It was further reported that they did not believe that any personal data was removed. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ransomware-hits-tu-dublin-and-national-college-of-ireland/?&web_view=true Jobs The city of El Reno Oklahoma is hiring an IT director.  For more information check out the job posting on their website: https://www.cityofelreno.com/employment/

  Summary There was not a lot of activity of general interest this week.  Industrial control systems (ICS) security kind of had a spotlight on it.  ICS security is included in this blog as many local governments are responsible for power and water production and/or distribution.  Another hot topic was educational security, and I outline a couple of individual cases as well as general information. News Kansas water utility hack The DOJ announced they were inditing Wyatt Travnichek for hacking the Ellsworth Rural Water District No. 1 (AKA Post Rock Rural Water District) in Ellsworth County, Kansas In March 2019.  The DOJ is claiming that Travnichek tampered with the water purification and disinfecting systems via computers with the intent of causing harm.  If found guilty on all charges he faces 25 years in prison.  It appears that he was a former employee that had remote access privileges.  Apparently, when his employment ended in January 2019, his...

  Summary This blog is geared towards cybersecurity events that are of interest to State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial (SLTT) governments in the United States of America.  It is hoped that this focus will help SLTT information technology workers and policymakers to get the information relevant to their mission.  If you are in other sectors hopefully there is information you can find useful as well.   Updates on Solar Wind and the Microsoft ProxyLogon issues dominated news again this week.  Breaking news is that as of Thursday night, Defender and System Center Endpoint Protection have added automatic patching for the linchpin of the attack playbook.  This was so successful they evidently broke one of their honey-pot farms.   In other news, we had updates from the US and other Federal governments.  There are even more signs of escalation by nation-state actors, primarily China, in what many are seeing as a global cyberwar.  We also ...