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Security expert collapsed from exhastion

Breach fatigue or too big to fail?

Lou Covey

As we prepare for the annual October holiday season with Cybersecurity Awareness Month there is an important question to ask. Are we as a society at the point of fatigue over every new security breach, or are the companies getting breached just too big to fail?

Security giant Fortinet announced a data breach this week that was remarkable in two ways. One was how small the breach was (less than 500GB) Two was how calm Fortinet seemed to be about. Security gadfly Dr. Chase Cunningham posted a flippant comment about the breach on Linkedin, encouraging his followers to “buy on the breach.” He pointed out that with big public companies, in security or not, generally take a hit on their stock for a day or two after a breach, but the stock rises to new highs as the dust clears. And no one seems to care about the downstream customers whose data might have been stolen.

A 2010 study published in the Journal of Cost Management concluded that a company could be more profitable if it annoyed unhappy customers more than they already were. The success of that strategy increased with the size of the company, according to the study, and when there were fewer competitors for a customer to turn to.

The reasons for the success were simple. If a pissed off customer decided to go a smaller provider, there were always new customers who signed up, simply because they were the biggest. If there were no smaller competitors, the customer never went away. In the process, the offending company rarely has to pay out to make the customer whole. The study pointed our that companies like United Airlines have notoriously bad customer service, but they rarely lose market share because of it.

Kevin Szczepanski, co-chair of Barclay Damon's Data Security, is much more forgiving

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In this screenshot, camera footage shows a group of alleged neo-Nazis outside the home of Raw Story investigative reporter Jordan Green.

Scam Bucket: Innocence is no replacement for digital vigilance

Lou Covey

On Mastodon a poster asked last week, “Looking for an article or blog or text, that succinctly describes, at grade 1 level English, why ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’ is a crazy and bad argument, and perhaps also includes what some good arguments are.” We thought that is an excellent idea for a Scam Bucket post. Let’s get to the biggest argument against that philosophy.

It may not be scandalous, like a drug addiction, pornography or drug dealing, but there is personal information that everyone wants to keep from someone like passwords, account number and routing number to your bank account, and social security numbers

People who ascribe to the philosophy will readily agree to those limitations of what should be available to public knowledge. What they may not be willing to admit that they have done something in their life that they are ashamed. As Jesus Christ once proclaimed, “No one is without sin. No, not one.”

Sometimes, the error is made in ignorance. Clicking on a link in an email that connects to a porn site. Being rude to a waiter or failing to give a tip. Road rage someone recorded without knowledge or consent. Sometimes it was a mistake they made when they were younger and didn’t know any better… or knew better and did it anyway.

Then there are things that people are totally innocent of but were accused of it anyway. An average of 200–300 people are arrested every year for felonies but are exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. If the arrest was reported in the news, it is likely the exoneration was not. So the news of the arrest still exists even though they did not commit the crime.

John Gilmore, director of research at the data-scrubbing service DeleteMe, related a story of Jordan Greene, a journalist who covered neo-Nazi rally in North Carolina. Members of the group picked out his face in a photo of the rally, ran it through facial recognition, found where he lived and showed up at his house holding burning flares.

A recent scam has arisen ...

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Crossing the Compliance Chasm

Tarique Mustafa

There is a wide gap between regulatory compliance mandates and practical implementation and enforcement that I like to call the “Compliance Chasm”. That chasm is defined by the activity to protect consumers and consideration for the economic and operational impact on business enterprises. Finding that balance requires thought, not the more popular whack-a-mole enterprise strategy that reacts to new compliance mandates.

The frequency and size of regulatory fines are rising for non-compliance. In January 2023, Meta was fined $418 million for GDPR violations by Meta properties’ Facebook and Instagram. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission follows up in May that same year with a $1.3 billion fine for additional violations. And those were just the latest fines imposed on web giants, that also included Google and Amazon.

The targets of those fines might be justified in saying compliance is an impossible task. By 2025 the volume of data/information created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide is forecast to reach 181 zettabytes. Nearly 80% of companies estimate that 50%-90% of their data is unstructured text, video, audio, web server logs, or social media activities.

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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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Beyond NIS2 – why regulations should just be the starting point for building better protection

Chris Rogers

NIS2 is an EU framework designed to provide “legal measures to boost the overall level of cybersecurity in the EU.” More specifically, it focuses on cybersecurity preparedness, crisis management and cooperation across member states as part of a harmonised “culture of security”.

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Voters mareking ballots at voting station

Election security is not a technology problem. It is how naive we are

Lou Covey

When it comes to election security, the technology we use to vote and count those votes is not the problem. The problem is how naive we are.

Election security has been at the forefront of daily news cycles for more a decade. The concerns about illicit use of technology to input and count the votes turned out to be largely overblown. Every U.S. state other than the Commonwealth of Louisiana, uses paper ballots, matching the practice of every other western democracy. Lawsuits have bankrupted people and organizations claiming the technology was changing votes. Those that have complained the loudest about election interference are now facing prosecution for the crimes.

Now the tech focus is on the use of artificial Intelligence to create deepfake video and audio. A recent pitch from Surfshark,

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FBI statistics showing the break down of elder fraud. $1.2 million in investment scams is on the top. which is twice as much as the second, tech support scams

Elder fraud festers out of control

Lou Covey

As legislatures around the world try to get a handle on the growth of ransomware, another category of cybercrime is festering out of control: Elder fraud.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported more than 100,000 people in the US, 60 years and older, lost $3.4 billion total to digital scams. The IC3 pointed out that the elderly are half as likely to report a loss. So the actual crimes and losses are probably much higher.

In contrast, the total ransomware payouts last year from reporting companies was $1.1 billion according to Chainanalysis. While the total number of fraud reports to the IC3 appears to have leveled off after years of growth, elder fraud increased by 14 percent year on year.

“Combatting the financial exploitation of those over 60 years of age continues to be a priority of the FBI,” wrote FBI Assistant Director Michael D. Nordwall, who leads the Bureau’s Criminal Investigative Division, in the report. “Along with our partners, we continually work to aid victims and to identify and investigate the individuals and criminal organizations that perpetrate these schemes and target the elderly.” 

Who is vulnerable?

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