Podcasts

AI making life hard for consumers and cybersecurity

Lou Covey

The AI industry supposedly to make life easier for humanity. Since it first burst onto the scene it has, arguably, made life more difficult. Consumers and the cybersecurity industry, in particular, are struggling professionally, emotionally, and mentally to understand the value, if not the efficacy, of the technology.

Cyber Protection Magazine evaluated three surveys, from Armorcode, Arkose Labs, and Appdome, over the past few weeks. They agreed the public image of AI is untrustworthy, full of false promises, and something to be feared. In spite of this image, customers believe they must adopt and adapt to the technology, even if they don’t want to.

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Salesman arguing with a customer

Poor marketing endangers society

Lou Covey

n the past few weeks, as various security companies have published multiple studies about the state of cybersecurity, a common theme has arisen: Executives running the companies that purchase security tools and services are not sure their purchases have made them any safer. This widespread position in the market confirms results of a months’ long investigation by Cyber Protection Magazine that marketing practices in the industry are failing to do the job and, in the process, making society less safe.

While every report skews data to convincing customers to add their company’s tools and services to their budgets. However, every report also reports that between 60 and 90 percent of managers have significant concerns and doubts that the tools they have, and the tools they are considering, will not do the job that needs doing. The reasons for that lack of confidence are three-fold.

Three reasons for lack of trust

First, stuff is moving fast. Governments are legislating controls and protections faster than normal. Sometimes this rules don’t make sense and many in the industry think they are holding back innovation and adoption. Criminals and nation states are stepping up attacks that bypass established protections, and lawsuits for negligence are growing. Second, while understanding the need for security best practices is at an all-time high, that’s mainly because weaknesses due to work-from-home, generative AI and news about data breaches is also high. That means while understanding of the need is high, inexperience and ignorance is creating new opportunities for attacks.

“Many executives may not exactly understand how (the tools) work,” said Cache Merrill, founder of software outsourcing company, Zibtek. “. When there is a concern on the functionality of the tools or when attention is on what the tech teams understand without listening to them, anxiety is experienced. To put it simply, if they cannot see it, they will not put faith in it.”

Carl DePrado, an SMB IT consultant based in New York, aid, “The sheer number of cybersecurity products and services can be overwhelming. This contributes to a sense of vulnerability, as they may not feel confident that they have covered all their bases.”

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SE Asia casinos that shut down during pandemic were turned into social-engineering call centers to scam wealthy individuals

Pig butchering: Proving the Luddites right

Lou Covey

Pig-butchering may be proving the Luddites were right. The social-engineering scam bypassed ransomware as the most profitable cybercrime approximately two years ago. After government regulations and law enforcement took a big bite out of returns for ransomware this past year, public-private partnerships are taking aim at the new champ.

TL;DR
* Pig butchering eclipses losses from ransomware
* Top targets are tech savvy people under 50
* Human error trumps cyber awareness
* Public/private partnerships making inroads at dismantling scam operations
* Tips to avoid scams
* Podcast with Arkose CEO
Between 2020 and 20023, scammers reaped more than $75 billion from victims around the world. Approximately 90 percent of the losses came from of purchasing fraudulent cryptocurrency, according to the US Treasury Department’s, Financial Crimes Enforcement Center. In comparison, ransomware attacks in that same period harvested $20 billion worldwide in ransoms and cost approximately another $20 billion in recovery costs.

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Getting serious about PQC

Lou Covey

t seems like everyone should be concerned, based on the level of urgency the companies present, but in the end, no one has yet built a quantum computer capable of breaking even the most standard 256-bit encryption. To that statement, the industry responds with, “Yet.”

This year, however, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued the first, approved algorithm standards to produce encryptions capable of fighting off quantum computing attacks. So we thought it would be a good idea to put together a batch of experts to explain why the rest of us should care.

The invitation was put out to a dozen experts in the PQC industry, but also to the companies tasked with implementing their products into the internet. Unfortunately, none of the PQC companies ended up accepting the invitation when they learned they would on the same platform discussing their approaches. But we did get acceptances from representatives from the other group. Our final panel was Karl Holqvist, CEO of of Lastwall;; Tim Hollebeek, industry strategist for Digicert; and Murali Palanisamy, chief solutions officer of AppviewX.

The three companies both compete with and complement each other services, but all were active in the development of the standards with NIST. Our conversation is available on our podcast Crucial Tech.

However, there are still questions regarding the urgency, timing, and whether the introduction of quantum computing on an encryption-busting level is even possible in the near future.

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Cyberint midyear report shows declinen in ransomware attacks per victim

Have we reached peak ransomware?

Lou Covey

Cybercrime reports flowing out of marketing departments still highlight the danger of ransomware. However, a closer look at the numbers reveals a much different story and poses the question: Have we reached peak ransomware?

Last year, ransomware attacks hit all-time highs with paid ransoms exceeding $1.1 billion and attacks exceeding 5000, according to FBI and Interpol reports. However, looking at midyear reports from Cyberint, SonicWall and Check Point and a dozen others, attacks and ransoms paid have crashed. Still, the crime is not to be discounted, and industry recommendations are to double down on efforts to combat the “scourge”.

There are three reasons why the ransomware industry is hitting a wall.

Law enforcement agencies, working In cooperation, have found the means to identify and shutdown ransomware gang operations around the world.
Potential victims have learned hard lessons regarding the gangs’ willingness and ability to decrypt data, and becoming repeat targets. They are deciding in greater numbers to ignore ransom demands, cutting into revenue streams.

The “honor among thieves” philosophy does not relate to these criminals. Ransomware service providers are stiffing their affiliates, causing a fracturing of the criminal industry into multiple, independent gangs.

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Data thefts keep rising in spite of investment in security tools and services

Do corporations really care about your security?

Lou Covey

“Your security is important to us,” is a common phrase on corporate websites and emails, usually after some data breach that affects customers. To prove that statement, corporations invest billions of dollars in the cybersecurity industry. Most market projections say the industry is worth about $180 billion. About 15 percent of that market goes to data security. But all the indications are that we are losing the war in personal identity security That leaves is with the question: Do corporations really care about customer security?

Probably not

US Department of Health and Human Services reported recently that. in the US, there have been 2,213 breaches since 2020, with 152.1M affected individuals. That is almost half of the American population. But that is just breaches involving medical data.

The FBI reports, in the same period, more than 350 million stolen personal information records, exceeding the known population of the country. Worldwide, the number of personal identity information (PII) records exceeds one billion people.

So how bad is it? “I always tell people assume your social security number has been breached. Just assume that,” said John Meyer, senior director for Cornerstone Advisors, an organization providing security consultation to financial organizations.

So we are spending tens of billions of dollars to protect data from exfiltratation on almost a weekly basis from attacks bypassing current defenses. Is it worth the investment? Does protecting that data even matter?

Well, yes… sort of

Data security professionals say it is and it does. Communications, industry intellectual property, state secrets, and control of crucial systems must still be protected. Most professionals we talked to cite ransomware attacks as the primary reason for investing in security precuts and services.

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Black Kite research report covet

Mining data is daunting but crucial

Lou Covey

The cybersecurity industry seems addicted to research but isn’t all that good at it. Mining the massive amount of data produced is daunting but crucial to everyone.

Surveys and studies are an important part of marketing form the cybersecurity industry. Cyber Protection magazine receives a lot of them. We read them all. In the two months before the RSA Conference, more than one a day came into our inbox. However, they are not a great source of independent data and insight.

Ignoring the cherry-picked data highlighting a particular company’s product or service, there are a few nuggets that, taken together, produce some interesting insights. Out of 60+ reports, we took a pass on any that were repetitive, were suspect methodologically, or effectively plagiarized from another source. We chose to look at seven with a solid methodology, representation of industry-wide concerns, and originality. The reports came from Dynatrace, Black Kite, SlashNext, Metomic, Originality AI, Logicgate, and Sophos. We found three common themes: The impact of AI on security, government regulation compliance, and understanding of security concerns on the C-suites and board levels.

Understanding security issues.

Almost every study has a common complaint. CISOs say application security is a blind spot at the CEO and board levels. They say increasing the visibility of their CEO and board into application security risk is urgently needed to enable more informed decisions to strengthen defenses.

However, Dynatrace’s study said CISOs fail to provide the C-suite and board members with clear insight into their organization’s application security risk posture. “This leaves executives blind to the potential effect of vulnerabilities and makes it difficult to make informed decisions to protect the organization from operational, financial, and reputational damage.”

Recent news shows the study may have a point. Marriott Hotels admitted that a 2018 breach was the result of inadequate encryption of customer data. In 2018 the company claimed their data was protected by 128-bit AES encryption when customer identity was only protected by an outdated hashing protocol. One can imagine the discussion between the CEO and the IT department:

CEO: is our data encrypted?
IT manager: Yeah, sort of.
CEO: OK, good enough

If the CEO doesn’t understand the difference between a hash and AES encryption, that’s a problem.

And there many be evidence that ignorance is widespread. Apricorn reported that the number of encrypted devices in surveyed companies had dropped from 80 percent to 20 percent between 2022 and 2023. Some of that could be attributed to work-from-home (WFH) growth in companies. It is also likely that companies over-reported what was encrypted simply because they did not understand what “encryption” meant. Once they learned the meaning, adjustments were made.

That lack of a foundational security technology could be a reason for the devastating growth in ransomware in the past two years.

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