CyberWire Daily - The CyberWire 1.8.16

Episode Date: January 8, 2016

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In today's show, we offer an update on disruption of Ukraine's power grid. Distributed denial of service attacks increasingly serve as misdirection for data theft. The Juniper backdoor story grows a bit more complicated. Flaws in streaming TV and home security products prompt consumer worries about the Internet of Things. And the U.S. government is asking Silicon Valley for help developing counterterrorism intelligence. I'm Dave Bittner in Baltimore with your Cyber Wire summary for Friday, January 8, 2016. ISIS follows its unforgivable murder of a journalist with a chilling intrusion into her Facebook account. Observers read the intrusion as Dash's search for her contacts. Evidence tying disruption of Ukraine's power grid to Russia accumulates.

EyeSight partners says, quote, it is a Russian actor operating with alignment to the interest of the state, end quote, and here too inspiration may conceivably have served as a stand-in for direct command and control. Since EyeSight goes on to add, whether or not it's freelance, we don't know. The user account compromise Linode recently sustained was accomplished by denial-of-service attacks that served, observers say, as a misdirection for data theft. This is a continued trend in distributed denial-of-service incidents. Such attacks draw the attention of security and IT staff when the real action is elsewhere. Cisco's Talos Security takes a look at the RIG exploit and sees interesting similarities to Angler. Lookout finds and Google removes 13 malicious brain test apps from Google

Play. Checkpoint reports finding a vulnerability in the EasyCast streaming television dongle that can provide attackers access to a user's home network. This flaw, together with those recently found in some Comcast Xfinity products, arouse more consumer-level worries about the Internet of Things. The U.S. federal government mops up issues emerging from the backdoor Juniper networks disclosed in some products. A University of Illinois researcher reports that Juniper added the insecure algorithm that enabled the backdoor after it had already implemented a more secure algorithm. This raises questions of intentionality, but Juniper hasn't added much to its initial disclosure. Mozilla retreats from banning SHA-1 as it finds the consequences of deprecation more widespread than initially envisioned. In meetings today, the U.S. government is asking for the tech industry's help against terrorism.

The government is particularly interested in whether industry might be able to help find actionable early warning of attacks in social media. The encryption debate continues in at least three of the five I's, Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. Sentiment in industry seems generally against policy proposals that would weaken encryption. Those interested in a quick summary of the industry position might look to the evidence AOL, Apple, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Yahoo jointly submitted to Great Britain's House of Commons.

You'll find a link to their testimony in today's Cyber Wire. 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.

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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. Joining me is John Petrick, editor of the Cyber Wire. John, imagine I'm sitting home minding my own business and suddenly there's loud banging on the door and the door gets swung open and I'm facing down the gun barrel of police officers, of special weapons and tactics units.

What likely has happened to me here? You've just been SWATed. All right. You know what a SWAT team is, of course. I do know what a SWAT team is. As a matter of fact, I was a big fan of the television show SWAT when I was a young lad. Right. Special weapons and tactics, heavily armed police who are trained and prepared and equipped heavily armed police who are trained and prepared and equipped to go into very risky situations,

hostage situations, active shooter situations, things like that. What swatting is, and there's nothing funny at all about it, is for someone to spoof a call to a 911 service, let's say, in which they say something like, Joe Smith has got a gun, he's threatening to kill his family. He's locked inside his house. Here's his address. So effectively, you're making a false police report. And it's dangerous because, of course, you're calling in a SWAT team. And these guys are going to come in prepared for the worst. So when you say spoofing the call, are the bad guys making it look like the call is coming from inside my house? Sometimes they do.

Sometimes the more capable spoofers have done that, have actually made it look to the 911 operators that the call is coming from your phone number. This has been done in some cases by cyber criminals who've been upset with investigative journalists who've exposed them. So this is more than just an innocent practical joke. Lives could actually be on the line here. Lives could be at risk. There's certainly been injuries to swatting incidents. There was one that happened not far from our Baltimore headquarters earlier this summer out in Ellicott City, Maryland, where a man was injured with a rubber bullet in a swatting incident.

All right. Disturbing stuff, but thanks for filling us in. Thanks, John. 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. Thank you. 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. Thank you. With Domo, you can channel AI and data into innovative uses that deliver measurable impact. Secure AI agents connect, prepare, and automate your data workflows, helping you gain insights, receive alerts, and act with ease through guided apps tailored to your role. Data is hard. Domo is easy. Learn more at ai.domo.com. That's ai.domo.com That's ai.domo.com