CyberWire Daily - Daily: Reports of venture capital's death seem much exaggerated. Quantum technology, adapted to the meanest understanding.

Episode Date: May 11, 2016

We run through some of the high points of May's Patch Tuesday. We get updates on Viking Horde Android malware and Bucbi ransomware. Venture capital seeks out IoT security investments as Pwnie Express and Bayshore Networks attract funding. Quintessence Labs' Dr. Vikram Sharma explains emerging quantum technologies. And IBM will train Watson to deal with cyber security issues.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and IBM will train Watson to deal with cybersecurity issues. I'm Dave Bittner in Baltimore with your CyberWire summary for Wednesday, May 11, 2016. Yesterday was Patch Tuesday, and both Microsoft and Adobe addressed vulnerabilities in their products. Microsoft issued a healthy round of 16 fixes. Redmond rates half of them critical, the others important. The critical patches include upgrades to Microsoft's old familiar Internet Explorer browser, the company's new browser Edge, the JScript and VBScript scripting engines in Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Graphics Component, Windows Journal, and Windows Shell. Several of the vulnerabilities addressed represent zero days that have been exploited in the wild. Adobe's patches include fixes to its PDF reader and Cold

Fusion products. The company also indicated that another upgrade to Flash Player will be out later this week. Sound patch management is, of course, one of the most important security best practices out there, so go easy on your sysadmins this week. They'll be busy. At least one of the zero days Microsoft fixed this month has been actively exploited in targeted attacks against South Korean enterprises. The vulnerability, CVE-2016-0189, is a remote code execution flaw in Internet Explorer. Researchers at Symantec think the exploit may have been delivered by either spear phishing or water holing. The campaign is thought to represent espionage, although both attribution and the actual payload the exploit dropped on

compromised machines remain unclear. One enterprise in the Republic of Korea that appears to have sustained a successful attack late last month is Hanjin Heavy Industries. The manufacturing conglomerate builds, among other products, warships and is a significant South Korean defense contractor. The Republic of Korea's Defense Security Command dates the incident to April 20th and says it's investigating. There's no attribution yet, but signs point, as they usually do on the peninsula, to North Korea. Google has purged the known Viking Horde bot-forming malware from its Play Store. Checkpoint identified a number of compromised apps in the store. These included Viking Jump, a gaming app, and other apps called Parrot Copter Wi-Fi Plus, Memory Booster, and Simple 2048.

According to Checkpoint, Viking Jump alone received 50,000 to 100,000 downloads. Buckabee ransomware, as we've noted, is back. Buckbee faded from the scene relatively soon after its discovery in 2014, but it's returned. And now it features a novel and troubling infection mechanism. Its controllers are installing it by brute-forcing remote desktop protocol passwords. Most ransomware has previously spread through the email attachment or compromised website vectors. Palo Alto researchers who are following Buckbee says its controllers are using a brute-forcing utility called RDP Brute and that they began their campaign by attacking

point-of-sale systems. The ransom demanded from Buckbee is 5 Bitcoin, which amounts to a bit more than $2,300. The extortionists somewhat implausibly identify themselves as the Ukrainian Right Sector. This is the name of an actual Ukrainian nationalist group that's strongly opposed to Russian activity in their country, but this self-identification seems as likely as not to be a false flag. Researchers think they discern a Russian provenance for some of the tools used. While that's not decisive in attribution, tools are traded and repurposed, and Russian cybercriminality can be difficult to distinguish from its Ukrainian neighbors. Still, finding Ukrainian nationalists at the root of a cybercrime wave

strikes some observers as too pat for plausibility, especially when one asks, who stands to gain from this? In industry news, despite the rumored difficulty security startups are said to be having attracting venture capital, money seems available for Internet of Things security players. Pony Express announced today that it's received $12.9 million in Series B funding from Ascent Venture Partners and others to fund the company's push into Internet of Things security. The company plans to move new bring-your-own-device, rogue device detection, and IoT solutions to market. Pony Express also announced the appointment of three executives

to lead this effort, CFO Kasia Gauthier, Vice President of Sales and Service Beau Thurmond, and Vice President of Marketing Dimitri Vlachos. The other firm attracting venture investment this week is Bayshore Networks, which raised $6.6 million in Series A funding from Trident Capital Cybersecurity and existing Angel Investors. Bayshore's offerings will center on security for the industrial Internet of Things. And finally, in the field of artificial intelligence, IBM is turning Watson, their question-answering computer system, against problems in cybersecurity. Those problems prominently include, but aren't limited to, the challenges posed by cybercrime. You may recall that Microsoft's AI chatbot Tay was grounded earlier this year for picking up a bit of a

potty mouth and a whole lot of attitude from the humans she was hanging out with. Watson will be exposed to a better sort of influence. IBM has engaged eight universities to help train their artificial intelligence Jeopardy winner to know a cyber threat when it sees one. So, to play along with Watson's Jeopardy theme, this is how you'll hear our interview with IBM's Caleb Barlow on how he envisions Watson contributing to cybersecurity. What is? Tune in to tomorrow's Cyber Wire podcast. In a darkly comedic look at motherhood and society's expectations, Academy Award-nominated Amy Adams stars as a passionate artist

who puts her career on hold to stay home with her young son. But her maternal instincts take a wild and surreal turn as she discovers the best yet fiercest part of herself. Based on the acclaimed novel, Night Bitch is a thought-provoking and wickedly humorous film from Searchlight Pictures. Stream Night Bitch January 24 only on Disney+. Do you know the status of your compliance controls right now?

Like, right now. We know that real-time visibility is critical for security, but when it comes to our GRC programs, we rely on point-in-time checks. But get this, more than 8,000 companies like Atlassian and Quora have continuous visibility into their controls with Vanta. Here's the gist. Vanta brings automation to evidence collection across 30 frameworks, like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. They also centralize key workflows like policies, access reviews, and reporting, and helps you get security questionnaires done five times faster with AI. Now that's a new way to GRC. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com slash cyber.

That's vanta.com slash cyber. That's vanta.com slash cyber for $1,000 off. Cyber threats are evolving every second and staying ahead is more than just a challenge. It's a necessity. That's why we're thrilled to partner with ThreatLocker,

a cybersecurity solution trusted by businesses worldwide. ThreatLocker is a full suite of solutions designed to give you total control, stopping unauthorized applications, securing sensitive data, and ensuring your organization runs smoothly and securely. Visit ThreatLocker.com today to see how a default deny approach can keep your company safe and compliant. And I'm joined by Dr. Vikram Sharma. He's from Quintessence Labs, one of our academic and research partners. I want to talk today about quantum technology. To start off, can you just give us an overview of what are we talking about when we're talking about quantum technology? Quantum technology covers a whole range of new applications that we might find over the coming years,

which source from harnessing unique quantum effects. Within our context, you have, of course, the potential advent of quantum computing, which, once it's out to commercial or useful scale, will allow us to tap into a whole range of problems that today's even supercomputers find intractable. So when I talk to people, particularly when I talk to people who are working with encryption, quantum computing is something that makes them a little bit nervous. They talk about that we have these unbreakable encryption schemes, except for quantum.

Well, that's actually a very interesting question, Dave. As we look into some of the problems that quantum computers will be well prepared to solve, we see that some of the underlying algorithms which are used for security today could potentially be under threat. That's because the quantum computer is able to solve the problems which are at the root of security for those algorithms very, very rapidly. So that's the threat. What are the opportunities that are available to us when it comes to quantum technology? Well, there is the area of quantum key distribution, which is not a new field in and of itself.

It was first conceived over 30 years ago by a couple of folks at IBM. And this offers us the promise of being able to transport keys securely between two locations in such a way that if there was any eavesdropping on that key material as being transported between the two locations, that eavesdropping on that key material as being transported between the two locations, that eavesdropping would be visible. Because at the quantum level, if you look at anything, you disturb it. Ah, the old Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Vikram Sharma, thanks for joining us today. And don't forget, if you have a question for one of our research partners, you can send them in at questions at thecyberwire.com.

And now a message from Black Cloak. Did you know the easiest way for cyber criminals to bypass your company's defenses is by targeting your executives and their families at home? Black Cloak's award winning digital executive protection platform secures their personal devices, home networks, and connected lives. Because when executives are compromised at home, your company is at risk. In fact, over one-third of new members discover they've already been breached. Protect your executives and their families 24-7, 365, with Black Cloak. Learn more at blackcloak.io. 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.

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