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CyberWire Daily
The CyberWire 1.13.16
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catastrophic cyber incident is said to be in the works security companies differ over next generation firewalls Microsoft and Adobe issue their monthly patches m&a news in the cyber sector and the crackers with attitude they're back I'm Dave Bittner in Baltimore with your cyberwire summary for Wednesday January 13th 2016 declarations of war aside anonymous continues to find easier targets in the civilized world than it has in ISIS the hacktivist collective protests wailing with an attack on Icelandic government sites the US government in the form of ICS cert says it's providing support to Ukraine's investigation of the recent attack on that country's power grid former senior US intelligence officials reiterate warnings that the US power grid is comparably vulnerable ICS expert and applied control solutions managing partner Joe Weiss told the cyberwire about one regulatory gap he thinks should be addressed this affected low voltage transmission and electric distribution low voltage transmission and electric distribution are excluded from the NERC critical infrastructure protection standards you can hear more of our conversation with Joe Weiss on this Friday's cyberwire we can review researchers at digital bond labs describe what observers characterize as a relatively easy new way of remotely burning out variable speed industrial motors such a capability has obvious implications for attacks on infrastructure ICS is reported to have added some new secure messaging apps the amok agency and all right apps join telegram in the ICS toolkit some new year predictions warn of growing ICS cyber attack capability but US President Obama's state of the Union address counter warned against aiding ICS by giving them too much credit the president is also said to be meditating an executive order that would mandate certain measures federal agencies would take in response to large-scale cyber incidents catastrophic incidents in some characterizations some observers continue to worry that US defensive and offensive cyber policy lacks what they see as structure or focus as the crypto wars between security officials and privacy advocates continue to gutter some recent developments may perhaps inform the debate researchers at Penn State claimed to have made significant progress on an algorithm that could prove useful in identifying terrorist actors and police forces turned to threat scoring as an aid to investigation such measures carry their own if different controversies but they do suggest that the issues at stake aren't confined to encryption policy and former US DCI and NSA Director Hayden's characterization of NSA's capabilities is also interesting in this respect he told the S4X 16 conference that the agency quote steals other people's stuff in the cyber domain end quote it's the duty of every country's intelligence services he explained then added quote as a former director of NSA I like to think we're number one end quote he also distinguished legitimate intelligence operations from for example economic espionage some Antech described an upgrade to information stealing malware and droid Bankosi which can now bypass the protection of one-time passwords generated through two-factor authentication systems it does so by establishing a bogus identity within the infected device Z scalar takes a look at a bad neighborhood sundown neutrino and angler exploit kits are gurgling around the address space registered under Alexander Mulgian servinogic some disclosures provoke controversy a researcher claims to find a backdoor in older versions of Fortinet's 40 OS Fortinet denies it's a backdoor and calls it a management authentication issue they've already patched and two security firms bug sec and signet say they found a design feature of next-generation firewalls that's inherently vulnerable to exploitation at issue is the next-gen firewalls inspection of apps as opposed to ports to do this they allow a TCP handshake regardless of packet destination and this is what bug set and signet find objectionable next-generation firewall companies vigorously denied that the feature amounts to a flaw the vendors counter that as Palo Alto puts it firewall policy is never violated and that the rules in place preclude the handshake from creating problems Brazil's cyber black market is booming according to a widely circulated trend micro study that black market as usual mirrors features of legitimate markets including training programs in the criminal labor markets illegitimate invisible hand last year's hacking team leaks are reported to have helped put kaspersky on the track of a Microsoft silver light zero day this week's patch Tuesday marked the end of support for older versions of Windows and Internet Explorer it also featured a number of critical patches to both Microsoft and Adobe products in industry news CEOs and CISOs are finding their distinctive perspectives on cyber security reciprocally illuminating Canadian M&A has an interesting three part series on cyber considerations during all phases of mergers and acquisitions distill networks acquires scrapes century whose capabilities are seen as both competing and complimentary accounting firm horn LLP buys halbert and establishes a cyber practice PSS acquires tetra concepts and checkpoint is an initial talks over a possible acquisition of cyber arc in crime and punishment the dread pirate Ross Ulbricht is appealing his Silk Road sentence this time on grounds related to the judicially proven corruption of some federal officers involved in his case and finally remember the crackers with attitude who counted coup against some of us director of central intelligence Brennan's private accounts their back or at least his motherboard sensibly observes someone pretending to be the cracker is back and they're tugging on Superman's Cape this time they've taken on us director of national intelligence clapper redirecting calls to a pro Palestinian number and defaming clapper and social media with rude schoolyard demotics the office of the director of national intelligence is aware of the incident and has initiated appropriate investigations one would think the crackers are on increasingly thin ice this episode is brought to you by Amazon the holidays are here and you know what that means it's time to get your friends and family the gifts they deserve take the stress out of shopping with Amazon's great deals and low prices on a huge range of items from toys to tech and much more whoever you're gifting for Amazon has great prices on everything you need this holiday season shop Black Friday week deals now and now a word from our sponsor know before it's all connected and we're not talking conspiracy theories when it comes to info sec tools effective integrations can make or break your security stack the same should be true for security awareness training no before provider of the world's largest library of security awareness training provides 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strategies tailored to your needs when the coast is clear it's a seamless switchback no more downtime no lost revenue no frustrated customers just continuous secure access to your critical applications every single time protect your business from the high costs of IDP outages with identity continuity from strata downtime is a thing of the past visit strata.io/cyberwire to learn how strata's identity continuity can provide seamless enhanced capabilities to your existing identity fabric and receive a free set of AirPods Pro joining me is John Patrick editor the cyberwire John a term that comes up regularly in the cyberwire is skater what is skater skater that's SCADA stands for supervisory control and data acquisition and it refers to automated industrial control systems and especially those kinds of automated industrial control systems that are used to control large-scale processes or processes that are distributed across a wide geographic area so skater is the kind of thing that we've seen with the Ukraine hack recently is that wouldn't that would skater be applied to that yeah power grids are an example of an industrial system that's geographically widely distributed SCADA is really a subset of industrial control systems or ICS and an industrial control system is one that controls industrial processes obviously is the name implies so motion control systems were industrial robots and process control systems that regulate variables like pressure flow temperature things like that those are all examples of industrial control systems and SCADA systems which typically control presses over those large widely distributed areas that's a kind of ICS all right John Patrick thanks very much the IT world used to be simpler you only had to secure and manage environments that you controlled then came new technologies and new ways to work now employees apps and networks are everywhere this means poor visibility security gaps and added risk that's why cloudflare created the first ever connectivity cloud visit cloudflare.com to protect your business everywhere you do business the holidays are coming and everything's a glow give your loved one a reason to sparkle with jewelry from blue Nile right now blue Nile is offering special Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals save up to 50 percent on the season's most stunning trends or keep it classic with an endless selection of bold gold styles gemstone jewelry and eternally stylish diamond pieces shop now for up to 50 percent off jewelry at blue Nile calm the original online jeweler that's blue Nile calm blue Nile calm and that's the cyber wire we are proudly produced in Maryland by our talented team of editors and producers I'm Dave Bittner thanks for listening and now a word from our sponsor Nordpass Nordpass is an advanced password manager from the team behind Nord VPN designed to help keep your business safe from data leaks and cyber threats it gives your IT professionals control over who has access to your 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