Archive for January 21, 2020

Latest Trend Micro Report Helps Protect Industrial Environments By Trapping Malicious Attackers

Posted in Commentary with tags on January 21, 2020 by itnerd

Trend Micro today announced the results of a six-month honeypot imitating an industrial factory. The highly sophisticated Operational Technology (OT) honeypot attracted fraud and financially motivated exploits.

The six-month investigation revealed that unsecured industrial environments are primarily victims of common threats. The honeypot was compromised for cryptocurrency mining, targeted by two separate ransomware attacks, and used for consumer fraud.

To better understand the attacks targeting ICS environments, Trend Micro Research created a highly realistic, industrial prototyping company. The honeypot consisted of real ICS hardware and a mix of physical hosts and virtual machines to run the factory, which included several programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human machine interfaces (HMIs), separate robotic and engineering workstations and a file server.

Trend Micro urges smart factory owners to minimize the number of ports they leave open and to tighten access control policies, among other cybersecurity best practices. In addition, implementing cybersecurity solutions designed for factories, like those offered by Trend Micro, can help further mitigate the risk of attack.

To read more about the research, including the design and deployment of the honeypot itself, please visit: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/internet-of-things/fake-company-real-threats-logs-from-a-smart-factory-honeypot.

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OVHcloud Launches Its New Range Of Game servers In Canada & Beyond

Posted in Commentary with tags on January 21, 2020 by itnerd

As part of the complete revamping of its bare metal offering, OVHcloud today announced the launch of a brand-new range of Game servers. Entirely based on latest-generation components, the new range is powered by the latest AMD Ryzen 3000 processors to provide the highest performance in the gaming market. It will appeal not only to gamers but also to resellers and video processing professionals looking for powerful servers.

With this new range, OVHcloud offers high-performance business-grade servers powered by AMD Ryzen processors, initially designed for desktop computers. Through a strong partnership between OVHcloud and AMD, the leading European cloud provider enables its customers to fully utilize AMD’s processors.

OVHcloud maintains unique expertise in server cooling, with a watercooling system that has been developed in-house and deployed in its own data centres since 2003. When combined with optimized air flows, this system makes it possible to remove the use of air conditioning from data centres. Thanks to this high-performing process, OVHcloud is the only cloud provider able to cool AMD Ryzen processors optimally in order to use maximum frequencies for all cores.

  • The Game 1 range is available in OVHcloud’s data centres in Canada, the United States and Europe. Powered by Ryzen 5 3600X processors, these servers are intended for consumers, students and tech-savvy users who want to host games online.
  • The Game 2 range is powered by Ryzen 7 3800X processors and available in OVHcloud’s data centres in the United States, in addition to France. Game 2 servers will also be deployed in Canadian and European-based data centres in the coming months.
  • The Game 3 range is based on Ryzen 9 processors. These servers will be available as of February 2020 in OVHcloud’s French-based data centres.

Both Game 2 and 3 servers are designed for professionals who want to host multiple online games via the same computer. These servers will be ideally suited to the needs of video publishers, community managers and professionals that handle creative workloads.

All Game servers provide benefits that are unique to OVHcloud, including ECC memory, IPMI/KVM, watercooling, up to 1 Gbps public bandwidth, unlimited traffic, industry-first built-in Game anti-DDoS protection, and the company’s own global network with 20 Tbps capacity.

 

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Keyfactor Announces DevOps Integrations With Ansible, Docker, HashiCorp, Jenkins and Kubernetes

Posted in Commentary with tags on January 21, 2020 by itnerd

Keyfactor today announced DevOps integrations with automation and containerization industry leaders Ansible, Docker, HashiCorp, Jenkins and Kubernetes to offer security-first services and solutions designed to seamlessly integrate with existing enterprise tools and applications.

A rise in cryptographic-based attacks, like last year’s ASUS attack, exploit third-party software and its digital certificates, allowing attackers to connect to sensitive backend systems or push malware through updater tools. Recent research indicates a 39% likelihood that organizations will experience a similar server certificate or key misuse incident over the next two years.

According to research firm Gartner Inc., “proper secrets management, including certificate and key management, is crucial to security agile applications.”1

Digital certificates have long played an integral – if not routine – role in DevOps workflows, securing authentication across users, devices and applications. The secure identities the certificates establish reinforce key DevOps practices within infrastructure, pipeline, code and microservices integration, thereby bridging the DevSecOps gap and the ability to mitigate security risk.

Keyfactor offers cloud-hosted PKI-as-a-Service infrastructure through integrated certificate and key management, secure signing and secure IoT device design. The platform provides discovery, integration and orchestration capabilities, enabling teams to gain complete crypto-agility, extensibility and visibility.

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Is LastPass Down? That Depends On Who You Ask…. [UPDATED]

Posted in Commentary with tags on January 21, 2020 by itnerd

LastPass has been suffering from a major outage as users are reporting being unable to log into their accounts and autofill passwords. What’s odd is the company insists that everything is working properly, even though there’s an unusually high number of users reporting issues:

User reports about login issues have been flooding Twitter, but also the company’s forum, Reddit, and DownDetector. Users are reporting receiving the following error when trying to log in: “An error has occurred while contacting the LastPass server. Please try again later.” Both home and enterprise users are impacted. According to reports, LastPass’ support staff has been either non-responsive, or denying reports of any technical issue happening at all. Despite issues being reported as far back as three days, the company has not updated its status page to reflect the incident, nor do they provided any type of explanation or useful help to their userbase.

According to multiple user on Twitter, the problems appear to impact only users with LastPass accounts dating to 2014, or prior. On DownDetector, a company spokesperson said the company was still investigating the incident, stating that there are no glaring issues with its servers — which suggests the roots of this outage might be in a software component. “We are aware of and actively investigating reports from some LastPass customers who are experiencing issues and receiving errors when attempting to log in. At this time no service issues have been identified.” Contacted by ZDNet, the company described the outage as “an isolated issue with limited impact” and said that “engineers are working to resolve the issue.”

I had a look at Twitter and there’s lots of evidence implies that whatever issue that LastPass is having is not on that has a “limited impact” which is exhibited by this Tweet:

However, there’s this that seems to imply that this is a bit overblown as per this Tweet:

So it isn’t clear if this is still an issue, or if this is overblown. I’m going to watch this, but if you have any feedback on this, please leave a comment as I am sure that lots of users of LastPass would like some clarity.

UPDATE: This article suggests that the issue is resolved. But I am also seeing Tweets like this:

That to me implies that the issue isn’t 100% solved. But I would love to hear from LastPass users to confirm if this issue is actually resolved.

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