Keep Calm and Secure Data

Take a glance at the most discussed cybersecurity topics of the week.

To overcome the threat: something curious about sharks and cybersecurity

The Epoch Times on October 3, 2018

Let’s begin the day with an interesting question: what do shark cage diving and cybersecurity have in common? The answer is the sense of security and overcoming threats.

Although everyday people face dangerous threats like the getting into a car crash or even becoming a victim of natural disasters, there is an irrational fear of sharks making us think that swimming in dark water is likely more foreboding than the act of climbing into a motor vehicle. The solution to breach this stereotype is cage diving. In comparison with overcoming shark fear, giving company stakeholders an insider’s view of a so-called bug-bounty program is one way dispelling the fear of security threats. If companies can see, from an outsider’s perspective, what the vulnerabilities are, it can help them understand how they might be perceived by the public, and how the security team is dealing with the bugs, says Melanie Ensign, security and privacy communications lead at Uber.

I’d like Pizza Margherita and some bitcoins, please

CBC on October 3, 2018

“Pizza Margherita and some bitcoins, please!” That phrase wasn’t funny for Canadian restaurants affected by the malware attack last week. A company has been told to pay ransom in bitcoin to return data that hackers claim to have stolen.

“All of our computer systems crashed. The ransom note appeared under the file, ‘read me’ in a WordPad format. We were all really in a state of shock,” commented a worker of Recipe Unlimited. However, the company denies it’s being held ransom as all their systems are well-protected due to conduction the regular backups. Spokesperson Maureen Hart mentioned that threatening letter was only a “generic” statement associated with a virus called Ryuk. By the way, in August Ryuk attacked various companies worldwide and some of them paid an exceptionally large ransom to retrieve their files, netting the hackers more than $640,000 US. Now Recipe Unlimited is recovering its network in impacted restaurants.

May the cyberwar in financial sector lead to crisis?

Marketplace on October 3, 2018

Although educational and healthcare organizations are frequently hacked, nowadays the financial sector still remains the most appealing target for attackers. A serious cyber attack may have different scenarios. According to William Carter, deputy director of the technology policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the most frequent of them are:

• attacks on the “interlinkages” between banks, meaning payment systems and processors;
• attacks on “integrity of data”, manipulating the listed prices of stocks on an exchange;
• service attacks, which typically flood online systems like an internet banking system, with massive amounts of data in order to overload them and take them offline.

Cyber attacks still can disrupt the interbank system or other kinds of payment networks.

The actors that you’re really worried about are mostly nation-states, and if they blow up the U.S. banking sector, their banking sector is going down with it. And so what exactly were they trying to accomplish?

William Carter

The first aid to European cybersecurity

Marketplace on October 10, 2018

Along with organizations from different sectors, the governments have to concentrate their efforts to mitigate cyber risks in the first place.

The private sector, for its part, is also the subject of almost daily news of data breaches: The Belgian national Centre for Cybersecurity blocks 3-4 phishing sites a day. Furthermore, the Wannacry ransomware attack in 2017 affected more than 200,000 computers worldwide and inflicted hundreds of millions of euros in damages.

Although the European Commission and European Parliament have already taken significant steps to improve European cybersecurity capabilities, Europe’s leaders should begin promoting a general risk management culture that would give private companies and other organizations political, social, and economic stability.