Today, we released the latest issue of The Domain Name Industry Brief, which shows that the third quarter of 2022 closed with 349.9 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains, a decrease of 1.6 million domain name registrations, or 0.4%, compared to the second quarter of 2022.1,2 Domain name registrations have increased by 11.5 million, or 3.4%, year over year.1,2
Check out the latest issue of The Domain Name Industry Brief to see domain name stats from the third quarter of 2022, including:
• Top 10 Largest TLDs by Number of Reported Domain Names
• Top 10 Largest ccTLDs by Number of Reported Domain Names
• ngTLDs as Percentage of Total TLDs
• Geographical ngTLDs as Percentage of Total Corresponding Geographical TLDs
To see past issues of The Domain Name Industry Brief, please visit verisign.com/dnibarchives.
The post Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief: 349.9 Million Domain Name Registrations in the Third Quarter of 2022 appeared first on Verisign Blog.
Australian health insurance company Medibank will take all of its IT systems offline and close its branches over the weekend as part of its ongoing efforts to improve security and recover from a massive data security breach in October.…
Ransomware groups are constantly devising new methods for infecting victims and convincing them to pay up, but a couple of strategies tested recently seem especially devious. The first centers on targeting healthcare organizations that offer consultations over the Internet and sending them booby-trapped medical records for the “patient.” The other involves carefully editing email inboxes of public company executives to make it appear that some were involved in insider trading.
Alex Holden is founder of Hold Security, a Milwaukee-based cybersecurity firm. Holden’s team gained visibility into discussions among members of two different ransom groups: CLOP (a.k.a. “Cl0p” a.k.a. “TA505“), and a newer ransom group known as Venus.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) warned that Venus ransomware attacks were targeting a number of U.S. healthcare organizations. First spotted in mid-August 2022, Venus is known for hacking into victims’ publicly-exposed Remote Desktop services to encrypt Windows devices.
Holden said the internal discussions among the Venus group members indicate this gang has no problem gaining access to victim organizations.
“The Venus group has problems getting paid,” Holden said. “They are targeting a lot of U.S. companies, but nobody wants to pay them.”
Which might explain why their latest scheme centers on trying to frame executives at public companies for insider trading charges. Venus indicated it recently had success with a method that involves carefully editing one or more email inbox files at a victim firm — to insert messages discussing plans to trade large volumes of the company’s stock based on non-public information.
“We imitate correspondence of the [CEO] with a certain insider who shares financial reports of his companies through which your victim allegedly trades in the stock market, which naturally is a criminal offense and — according to US federal laws [includes the possibility of up to] 20 years in prison,” one Venus member wrote to an underling.
“You need to create this file and inject into the machine(s) like this so that metadata would say that they were created on his computer,” they continued. “One of my clients did it, I don’t know how. In addition to pst, you need to decompose several files into different places, so that metadata says the files are native from a certain date and time rather than created yesterday on an unknown machine.”
Holden said it’s not easy to plant emails into an inbox, but it can be done with Microsoft Outlook .pst files, which the attackers may also have access to if they’d already compromised a victim network.
“It’s not going to be forensically solid, but that’s not what they care about,” he said. “It still has the potential to be a huge scandal — at least for a while — when a victim is being threatened with the publication or release of these records.”
The Venus ransom group’s extortion note. Image: Tripwire.com
Holden said the CLOP ransomware gang has a different problem of late: Not enough victims. The intercepted CLOP communication seen by KrebsOnSecurity shows the group bragged about twice having success infiltrating new victims in the healthcare industry by sending them infected files disguised as ultrasound images or other medical documents for a patient seeking a remote consultation.
The CLOP members said one tried-and-true method of infecting healthcare providers involved gathering healthcare insurance and payment data to use in submitting requests for a remote consultation on a patient who has cirrhosis of the liver.
“Basically, they’re counting on doctors or nurses reviewing the patient’s chart and scans just before the appointment,” Holden said. “They initially discussed going in with cardiovascular issues, but decided cirrhosis or fibrosis of the liver would be more likely to be diagnosable remotely from existing test results and scans.”
While CLOP as a money making collective is a fairly young organization, security experts say CLOP members hail from a group of Threat Actors (TA) known as “TA505,” which MITRE’s ATT&CK database says is a financially motivated cybercrime group that has been active since at least 2014. “This group is known for frequently changing malware and driving global trends in criminal malware distribution,” MITRE assessed.
In April, 2021, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how CLOP helped pioneer another innovation aimed at pushing more victims into paying an extortion demand: Emailing the ransomware victim’s customers and partners directly and warning that their data would be leaked to the dark web unless they can convince the victim firm to pay up.
Security firm Tripwire points out that the HHS advisory on Venus says multiple threat actor groups are likely distributing the Venus ransomware. Tripwire’s tips for all organizations on avoiding ransomware attacks include:
While the above tips are important and useful, one critical area of ransomware preparedness overlooked by too many organizations is the need to develop — and then periodically rehearse — a plan for how everyone in the organization should respond in the event of a ransomware or data ransom incident. Drilling this breach response plan is key because it helps expose weaknesses in those plans that could be exploited by the intruders.
As noted in last year’s story Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups, experts say the biggest reason ransomware targets and/or their insurance providers still pay when they already have reliable backups of their systems and data is that nobody at the victim organization bothered to test in advance how long this data restoration process might take.
“Suddenly the victim notices they have a couple of petabytes of data to restore over the Internet, and they realize that even with their fast connections it’s going to take three months to download all these backup files,” said Fabian Wosar, chief technology officer at Emsisoft. “A lot of IT teams never actually make even a back-of-the-napkin calculation of how long it would take them to restore from a data rate perspective.”
Shoggoth: Asmjit Based Polymorphic Encryptor
Watch ThreatWise TV: Explorations in the spam folder
The spam folder: that dark and disregarded corner of every email account, full of too-good-to-be-true offers, unexpected shipments, and supposedly free giveaways.
You’re right to ignore this folder; few good things come from exploring it. But every once in a while one of these misleading, and sometimes malicious, emails manages to evade the filters that normally siphon them off, landing them in your inbox instead.
Fortunately, it’s easy enough to spot these emails if you know what to look for. We’ve investigated this folder once before, showcasing a variety of scams. With the holiday season in full swing, we thought this would be a good time to revisit how scammers are trying to trick unsuspecting users.
The holiday season is traditionally a time when this type of activity increases, and this year is no different. According to research published by credit reporting agency TransUnion, the average daily number of suspected digital fraud attempts was up 82 percent globally between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday (Nov 24–Nov 28) compared to the rest of the year (Jan 1–Nov 23) and 127 percent higher for transactions originating in the US.
This level of activity makes it all the more important to be aware of these scams. With that in mind, let’s dive into the spam folder to get a picture of the types of campaigns currently circulating.
While much of the spam circulating is innocuous, many emails are phishing attempts, and some are indeed malicious. To explore these scams, we used a dedicated computer, segmented from the rest of the network, and leveraged Cisco Secure Malware Analytics to safely open the emails before clicking on links or opening attachments. The point being, we do not recommend doing this at home.
By far, the largest category of spam we saw were surveys scams. According to these emails, if you fill out a simple survey you’ll receive “exclusive offers” such as gift cards, smartphones, smart watches, power drills, or even pots and pans.
There are even some campaigns that specifically target the holiday shopping season.
Clicking the links in these emails takes the recipient to sites where they are asked to fill out a survey.
These pages often include fake testimonials that say how easy the survey is and what they did with their free gift.
The surveys are straightforward, comprising 10-20 simple questions that cover demographic information and shopping habits.
After the survey is completed, these sites offer the choice of a handful of rewards. All the recipient must do is pay for shipping. They are then brought to a page where they can fill out shipping and payment information, and the reward is supposedly shipped.
However, the attempts to make payment often appear to fail, or the recipient is informed that the prize is no longer available.
An unsuspecting user may simply give up at this point, disappointed that they won’t be getting their free gift. What they may not be aware of, is that they have just given their credit card details away in a phishing scam.
In their 2021 Internet Crime Report, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) said that Non-Payment / Non-Delivery scams such as these led to more than $337 million in losses, up from $265 million in 2020. Credit card fraud amounted to $172 million in 2021 and has been climbing continuously at a conservative rate of 15-20 percent since 2019.
According to Cisco Umbrella, many of the sites asking for credit card details are known phishing sites, or worse, host malware.
Another topic that we covered the last time we explored these types of scams was package delivery spam. These continue to circulate today. There are a variety of shipping companies impersonated in these campaigns, and some generic ones as well.
Many of these campaigns claim that a package could not be delivered. If the recipient clicks on a link in an email, they’re brought to a web page that explains that there are outstanding delivery fees that need to be paid.
The recipient is further enticed by suggestions that the package contains a big-ticket item, such as an iPhone or iPad Pro. All the recipient is required to do is enter their credit card details to cover the shipping.
While no outright malicious activity was detected while examining these emails in Secure Malware Analytics, several suspicious behaviors were flagged. Chances are the bad actors behind these campaigns are phishing for credit card details.
Sometimes the simplest approaches can work just as well as the flashiest. This certainly holds true with spam campaigns, given the prominence of plain-text messages.
The topics covered in such emails run the gamut, including medical cures, 419 scams, romance and dating, pharmaceuticals, weight loss, and many of the scam types we’ve already covered. Many of these link to phishing sites, though some attempt to establish a dialog with the recipient, tricking them into sending the scammers money.
The IC3 report says that victims of confidence fraud and romance scams lost $956 million collectively, which is up from $600 million in 2020. Healthcare fraud, such as the miracle pills and prescriptions scams, resulted in $7 million in losses in 2021, but nearly $30 million in 2020. While these types of scams seem generic and easily spotted, they still work, and so it’s important to be aware and avoid them.
Many emails hitting the spam box attempt to trick users of various services into believing that there is a problem with their account. The problems cover all sorts of services, including streaming platforms, email providers, antivirus subscriptions, and even public records.
If the links are clicked, the recipient is presented with landing pages that mimic the respective services. Any details that are entered will likely be phished, leading to account takeover and/or access to personal records. However, some domains encountered in these cases may do more than just steal information, they could deliver malware too.
Another frequently encountered scam surrounds billing. Many of these appear to be unexpected bills for services the recipient never purchased.
These emails include attachments that are designed to look like official invoices. Interestingly, most of the attachments that we looked at this time were harmless. The goal is to get the recipient to call what appears to be a toll-free number.
While we haven’t called any of these numbers, the experience usually unfolds like a standard customer service call. In the end the “agents” simply claim the charges—which never existed in the first place—have been removed. Meanwhile the scammers steal any personal or financial information provided during the call.
While most billing scams we encountered played out as described above, a few did indeed contain malware.
In this example, the email appears to come from an internet service provider, informing us that our monthly bill is ready.
An invoice appears to be attached, stored within a .zip file. If the recipient opens it and double clicks the file within, a command prompt appears.
This may seem unusual to the recipient, especially since no invoice appears, but by this point it’s too late. The file contains a script that launches PowerShell and attempts to download a remote file.
While the remote file was no longer available at the time of analysis, there is a high likelihood it was malicious. But even though we were unable to determine its contents, Secure Malware Analytics flagged the script execution as malicious.
Knowing about prevalent scams, especially during the holiday season, is a first step in guarding against them. Granted the bad actors who distribute these spam campaigns do everything they can to make their scams look legitimate.
Fortunately, there are several things that you can do to identify scams and defend against them:
But even the best of us can be fooled, and when overseeing a large operation it’s more a matter of when, rather than if, someone clicks on the wrong link. There are elements of the Cisco Secure portfolio that can help for when the inevitable happens.
Cisco Secure Malware Analytics is the malware analysis and malware threat intelligence engine behind all products across the Cisco Security Architecture. The system delivers enhanced, in-depth, advanced malware analysis and context-rich intelligence to help better understand and fight malware within your environments. Secure Malware Analytics is available as a standalone solution, as a component in other Cisco Security solutions, and through software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid delivery models.
Cisco Secure Email protects against fraudulent senders, malware, phishing links, and spam. Its advanced threat detection capabilities can uncover known, emerging, and targeted threats. In addition, it defends against phishing by using advance machine learning techniques, real time behavior analytics, relationship modeling, and telemetry that protects against identity deception–based threats.
Cisco Umbrella unifies multiple security functions in a single cloud service to secure internet access. By enforcing security at the DNS layer, Umbrella blocks requests to malware before a connection is even established—before they reach your network or endpoints. In addition, the secure web gateway logs and inspects all web traffic for greater transparency, control, and protection, while the cloud-delivered firewall helps to block unwanted traffic.
Cisco Secure Endpoint is a single-agent solution that provides comprehensive protection, detection, response, and user access coverage to defend against threats to your endpoints. The SecureX platform is built into Secure Endpoint, as are Extended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities. With the introduction of Cisco Secure MDR for Endpoint, we have combined Secure Endpoint’s superior capabilities with security operations to create a comprehensive endpoint security solution that dramatically decreases the mean time to detect and respond to threats while offering the highest level of always-on endpoint protection.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Britain's data watchdog has slapped financial penalties totaling £435,000 (c $529,000) on five companies it says collectively made almost half of million marketing calls to people registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).…
Scammers have scammed their fellow cybercriminals out of more than $2.5 million on three dark web forums alone over the last 12 months, according to Sophos researchers.…
North Korea has hit a new low, using the death of over 150 people to exploit a zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer.…
Two more US states have launched aggressive action against made-in-China social media app TikTok.…
Apple says it will provide end-to-end encryption for most iCloud services, having abandoned its previously announced – and then quietly shelved – plan to check the legality of on-device photos prior to cloud synchronization.…
San Francisco legislators this week changed course on their killer robot policy, banning the police from using remote-control bots fitted with explosives. For now.…
ESET researchers analyzed a supply-chain attack abusing an Israeli software developer to deploy Fantasy, Agrius’s new wiper, with victims including the diamond industry
The post Fantasy – a new Agrius wiper deployed through a supply‑chain attack appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Public sector bans of Chinese platform TikTok on the grounds of national security have arisen in both Taiwan and additional US states following last week’s ban in South Dakota.…
Microsoft has warned Europe to be on alert for cyber attacks from Russia this winter, just as a series of attacks hit Russian organizations – including the country's second-largest bank.…
The Canadian branch of Amnesty International was the target of an attack it has pinned on a Chinese state-sponsored actor.…
As 2022 draws to a close, the Threat Research Team at McAfee Labs takes a look forward—offering their predictions for 2023 and how its threat landscape may take shape.
This year saw the continued evolution of scams, which is unlikely to slow down, as well as greater adoption of Chrome as an operating system. It also saw the introduction of AI tools that are easy and accessible to virtually anyone with a phone or laptop, which will continue to have significant implications, as will the fluctuating popularity of cryptocurrency and the emergence of “Web3.”
Advances such as these have set the stage for 2023, which will continue to reshape our interactions with technology—advances that bad actors will try to exploit, and in turn, us.
Yet as the threat landscape continues to evolve, so do the ways we can protect ourselves. With that, we share McAfee’s threat predictions for 2023, along with insights and advice that can help us enjoy the advances to come with confidence.
By Steve Grobman, Chief Technology Officer
Humans have been fascinated by artificial intelligence (AI) for almost as long as we’ve been using computers. And in some cases, even fearful of it. Depictions in pop culture range from HAL, the sentient computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Skynet, the self-aware neural network at the center of the Terminator franchise. The reality of current AI technologies is both more complicated and less autonomous than either of these. While AI is rapidly evolving, humans remain at the heart of it, and whether it’s put to beneficial or nefarious use.
Within the last few months, creating AI-generated images, videos, and even voices are no longer strictly left to professionals. Now anyone with a phone or computer can take advantage of the technology using publicly available applications like Open AI’s Dall-E or stability.ai’s Stable Diffusion. Google has even made creating AI-generated videos easier than ever.
What does this mean for the future? It means the next generation of content creation is becoming available to the masses and will only continue to evolve. People both at work and at home will have the ability to create the AI-generated content in minutes. Just as desktop publishing, photo editing, and inexpensive photorealistic home printers created major advances that empowered individuals to create content that previously required a professional designer, these technologies will enable sophisticated outputs with minimal expertise or effort.
Advances in desktop publishing and consumer printing also provided benefits to criminals, enabling better counterfeiting and more realistic manipulation of images. Similarly, these emerging next-generation content tools will also be used by a range of bad actors. From cybercriminals to those seeking to falsely influence public opinion, these tools will empower scammers and propagandists to take their tradecraft to the next level with more realistic results and significantly improved efficiency.
This is especially likely to ramp up in 2023 as the U.S. begins the 2024 presidential election cycle in earnest. Globally, the political environment is polarized. The confluence of the emergence of accessible next-generation generative AI tools and what is sure to be a highly contested 2024 election season is a perfect storm for creating and distributing disinformation for political and monetary gain.
We’ll all need to be more mindful of the content we consume and the sources that it originates from. Fact-checking images, videos, and news content, something that’s already on the rise, will continue to be a necessary and valuable part of media consumption.
By Oliver Devane, Security Researcher
Cryptocurrency scams
In 2022 we saw several online scams making use of existing content to make crypto scams more believable. One such example was the double your money cryptocurrency scam that used an old Elon Musk video as a lure. We expect such scams to evolve in 2023 and make use of deep fake videos, as well as audio, to trick victims into parting ways with their hard-earned money.
The financial outlook of 2023 remains uncertain for many people. During these times, people often look for ways to make some extra money and this can lead them vulnerable to social media messages and online ads that offer huge financial gains for little investment.
According to the IC3 2021 report, the losses for financial scams increased from $336,469,000 in 2020 to $1,455,943,193 in 2021, this shows that this type of scam is growing by an enormous amount, and we expect this to continue.
Unfortunately, scammers will often target the most vulnerable people. Fake loan scams are one such scam where the scammers know that the victims are desperate for the loan and therefore are less likely to react to warning signs such as asking for an upfront fee. McAfee predicts that there will be a large increase in these types of scams in 2023. When looking for a loan, always use a trusted provider and be careful of clicking on online ads.
Metaverses such as Facebook’s Horizon enable their users to explore an online world that was previously unimaginable. When these platforms are in the early stages, malicious actors will usually attempt to exploit the lack of understanding of how they work and use this to scam people. We have observed phishing campaigns targeting users of these platforms in 2022 and we expect this to increase dramatically in 2023 as more and more users sign up for the platforms.
By Craig Schmugar, McAfee Senior Principal Engineer
More than 25 years ago, Windows 95 became the platform of choice not just for millions of users around the globe, but for malware authors targeting those users. Over the years, Windows has evolved, as has the threat landscape. Today, Windows 10 and 11 make up the majority of the desktop PC market, but thanks to the rise of the mobile Internet, device diversity has greatly evolved since the advent of Windows 95.
Over five years ago, Android overtook Windows as the world’s most popular OS and with this shift bad actors have been pursing alternative methods of attack. The ultimate vectors are those which impact users across a spectrum of devices. Email and web-based scams (some of which are outlined in the blog above) are as prolific as ever as these technologies are ubiquitous across desktop and mobile devices.
Meanwhile, other technologies span across desktop and mobile experiences as well. For Google, such cross-platform capabilities are highlighted by increased adoption of ChromeOS and a few underlying technologies. This includes 270 million active Android users and a 270% increase in Progressive Web Application (PWA) installations [https://chromeos.dev]. ChromeOS’ ability to run Android applications, combined with its wide-spread adoption, provides the climate for increased attention by those with ill intentions.
Similarly, adoption of PWAs provide bad actors with additional incentive to deliver deceptive and imposter attacks through this multi-OS channel, including ChromeOS, iOS, MacOS, and Windows.
Finally, on the heels of COVID restrictions that impacted schools in various countries, Google reported 50 million students and educators worldwide [https://chromeos.dev] using ChromeOS. Many users will be unaware of malicious Chrome extensions lurking in the Chrome Web Store.
All of this means that the stage is set for a marked increase in threats impacting Chromebook in the year to come. In 2023, we can expect to see Chromebook users among millions of unsuspecting victims that download and run malicious content, whether from malicious Android Apps, Progressive Web Apps, or Chrome Web Store extensions, users should be leery of popups and push notifications urging them to install untrusted apps.
By Fernando Ruiz, Senior Security Researcher
Editor’s Note: Web3? FOMO? If you’re already lost, you’re not alone. Web3 is a term some use to encompass decentralized internet services, technologies like Bitcoin and Non-Fungible Tokens (digital art that collectors can purchase with cryptocurrency). Still confused? A lot of people are. This New York Times article is a good primer on what is currently considered Web3.
As for FOMO, that’s just an acronym meaning the “Fear of Missing Out.” That nagging feeling, most often felt by extroverts, that others are out there having more fun than them and that they’re missing the party.
Whether you invest in cryptocurrency or just see the headlines on Twitter, no doubt you’ve seen that the price of cryptocurrency has sharply declined during 2022. These fluctuations are becoming more normal as crypto becomes even more mainstream. It’s very likely that the value of crypto will rise again.
When the last upturn in valuation happened near the start of the pandemic, the hype about crypto also skyrocketed. Suddenly Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were everywhere. Out of that, rose the concept of Web3, with more companies investing in new applications over blockchain (the technology that is the backbone of cryptocurrency).
McAfee predicts that the popularity of cryptocurrency will rise again, and consumers will hear much more about Web3 concepts like decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), self-sovereign identity (SSI) and more.
Some amateur investors, remembering the rapid rise of the value of Bitcoin earlier this decade, won’t want to miss out on what they think will be a great opportunity to get rich quick. It’s this group that bad actors will seek to exploit, offering up links or applications that play on these users’ crypto/Web3 FOMO.
As crypto bounces back and initial awareness of decentralization grows in the general population, consumers will begin to explore these Web3 offerings without fully understanding what they mean or what dangers they should be aware of, leaving them open to scams as they invest time and money into crypto or creating their own NFT content. These scams could entice users to click on a link or download an app that appears to legitimately interact with some blockchains, but in actuality:
Additionally, when consumers DO hold crypto, NFT, digital land, or other blockchain financial assets they are going to be targeted for more sophisticated threats that can drain their funds: smart contracts, exchanges, digital wallets, and synchronization services can all be associated with hidden authorizations that allow a third party (potentially a bad actor) to take control of the assets. It’s important that users read the terms and conditions of any app they download, especially those that will be accessing ANY type of financial institution or currency, whether traditional or crypto.
Social engineering will also continue to be a top entry point for cybercriminals. The complexity of the attacks will evolve as the technology does, which will require more preparation and understanding of how Web3 applications and tools work in order to safely interact with them.
What has emerged from the world of Web3 thus far, while exciting, has also expanded attack surfaces and vectors, which we expect to see grow throughout 2023 as Web3 evolves.
The post McAfee 2023 Threat Predictions: Evolution and Exploitation appeared first on McAfee Blog.