Belgium Bans TikTok On Government Phones

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 10, 2023 by itnerd

Belgium becomes the latest country to ban TikTok as news is out that Belgian federal government employees will no longer be allowed to use the Chinese-owned video app TikTok on their work phones, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said today:

De Croo said the Belgian national security council had warned of the risks associated with the large amounts of data collected by TikTok, which is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, and the fact that the company is required to cooperate with Chinese intelligence services. “That is the reality,” the prime minister said in a statement. “That’s why it is logical to forbid the use of TikTok on phones provided by the federal government. The safety of our information must prevail.” The European Commission and the European Parliament last month banned TikTok from staff phones due to growing concerns about the company, and whether China’s government could harvest users’ data or advance its interests.

It’s now getting to the point where I am wondering who is next to ban TikTok. Clearly there is momentum building around the world to get TikTok off of government phones. Thus you have to wonder when and not if that’s going to spread to everyone else. Perhaps that could happen as soon as the RESTRICT act is passed in the US?

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The Issues With Rogers Continue To Drag On…. And The Silence From The Telco Is Deafening

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 10, 2023 by itnerd

I’ve been covering the various issues that Rogers has had over the last week or more, along with providing a tip on how to get your Rogers email via a browser until Rogers resolves their issues. But one thing that really has shocked me is the lack of communication from Rogers about this. Customers are having to call in and wait over two hours to get someone to tell them that Rogers email service is down, or they need to factory reset their Rogers modem to get back on line, or whatever. I really don’t understand (though I have my suspicions which I will get to in a moment) why Rogers isn’t trying to communicate more to their customers as their silence is only going to create a situation where their customers not only don’t trust the telco, but are more likely to leave for the competition.

First to how the customers feel. Rogers when they had their massive outage last July promised to be “committed to Canadians”. But as it stands, it seems to be more of a marketing slogan rather than something that Rogers is actually serious about based on these Tweets:

And that last Tweet is what I would like to focus on. The cynic in me believes that Rogers isn’t communicating because they’re scared that this will scuttle their attempt to merge with Shaw as these latest problems would cast that merger in a bad light. I have no proof that this is the case. But I will say that Rogers in my experience has had decent customer service in the past. And from what I have seen in the last week or so, this has been a complete 180 from that. Which makes you wonder if trying to get the merger with Shaw over the finish line is the reason for their silence on this.

Whatever the reason is for Rogers simply deciding not to communicate about this outage with their customers, I can say this. Competitors such as Bell and Telus better be ready for an influx of Rogers customers. Because I think at this point it’s safe to say that Rogers silence to date is going to drive customers to them out of frustration. Because any good will that Rogers had left with their customer base after the July 2022 outage is now gone, and Rogers customers have had enough.

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If You’re Having Issues With Rogers Email Right Now, Here’s The Workaround Until They Figure Out How To Fix It

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 9, 2023 by itnerd

If you’re a Rogers customer, you’re no doubt aware of the fact that they’ve had numerous issues in the last week. I’ve documented them here and here. The one that has been most upsetting to customers is the fact that anyone who uses Rogers email service (in other words they have a @Rogers.com address) cannot get their email. And like I said earlier, this has been going on since at least Wednesday night as far as I can tell, and there seems to be no fix for this.

What the issue appears to be from as far as I can tell is that Rogers and Yahoo which is Rogers email provider have issues where email clients such as Microsoft Outlook or your smart phone can’t properly authenticate to Rogers and Yahoo. There also seems to be an issue where trying to create App Specific Passwords for Rogers email accounts in the Rogers Member Center does not work. This is leaving many users of Rogers email service dead in the water with no email.

The workaround for this is to open a web browser and go to https://mail.yahoo.com and enter your Rogers email account details there. The password that you should use is the one for Rogers Member Center. This will at least allow you to view and reply to email on the web. And while this is a sub optimal workaround for many, it’s the only workaround that exists right now.

A secondary issue is that you might have tried to reset your email password under the belief that you were using the wrong password. If that’s you, I have some bad news for you. The only way to truly reset your email password is to dial into Rogers to do that. The good news is that once you hit a human, it doesn’t take long to do that. The bad news is that I am hearing wait times of three hours or more to actually get to a human. And I am also hearing that people are getting disconnected while waiting for a human to come onto the line. Which punts you to the back of the line.

Now I’ve spoken to my sources within Rogers and this is something akin to a 9-1-1 event for them and it is being actively being worked on. While they are trying to get everything working again as quickly as possible, they’ve told me that this is something that may not be resolved until sometime next week at the earliest. If that’s true, then that may be enough to push people over the edge and make them switch ISPs. And Rogers is very aware of that from what I have been told. I’ve also heard that Rogers CSRs have been given permission to work out deals with individual customers based on how mad the customer is. So if you’re in this boat, you might want to keep that in mind.

Now I’ve written about why you should never rely on your ISP’s email service as it’s a means to lock you into a using a your ISP. While I didn’t write about this scenario in that article, this scenario may encourage you to seek other options for your email. Thus I encourage you to read that article and take action as you see fit. In the meantime, I am keeping an eye on this as I have numerous clients who use Rogers email, and who are stuck in this scenario. Which means I will post a follow up the second that I hear this is resolved. Whenever that is as there seems to be no light at the end of this tunnel.

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New BEC 3.0 Attack Utilizes Google Workspace to Send Malicious Crypto Links

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 9, 2023 by itnerd

Last week, researchers at Avanan, a Check Point Software company wrote about BEC 2.0, a variant of BEC attacks that remains a significant problem for security services and companies. This week, Avanan will discuss BEC 3.0, a variant of these scams using legitimate services to unleash an attack.

Avanan’s latest research discusses how hackers are utilizing Google’s services within comments on Google Workspace documents to redirect users to a fake cryptocurrency site. This attack, still ongoing, has been targeted at nearly 1,000 companies in the last two weeks. 

In this attack, hackers utilize the comments feature in Google Workspace (ex: Google Sheets or Google Docs) to send out legitimate Google emails, however, containing malicious redirects using a legitimate Google Scripts URL, a coding platform hosted by Google. Clicking on the provided link redirects users to a fake cryptocurrency page. 

You can read the follow up research here.

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Guest Post: ESET Announces Eighth Annual Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship in North America

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 9, 2023 by itnerd

If this year’s International Women’s Day theme teaches us anything, it’s that in order to have true gender equity, it is essential for society to provide economic opportunity in spaces where women are underrepresented. 

To embrace women and support their journey, ESET, a global leader in IT security, will once again #EmbraceEquity with its eighth annual Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship, awarding the prize to four women in North America.

ESET will be providing $10,000 USD scholarships to two women in the United States and $5,000 CAD scholarships to two women in Canada. Applicants are required to be enrolled in a graduate or undergraduate program majoring in a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field. In addition, the students will be asked to detail their career goals, and what steps they plan to take to “pay it forward” for other women pursuing careers in STEM.

Celeste Blodgett, Vice President of Human Resources at ESET is thrilled with how successful the scholarship has been over the years. “At ESET we believe in a culture of inclusion and a culture of equity – without opportunity, there can be no equity,” she said. “Year after year, we choose to support and empower women through the ESET Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship so they may pursue their passions in cybersecurity and STEM. This work is critical for us to break down barriers of entry into the field to support the next generation of female cybersecurity experts.”

Applications are now being accepted and are due by April 7, 2023, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Those who are ineligible to apply are encouraged to share this opportunity with friends and family.

A 2022 (ISC) Women in Cybersecurity Report found that women accounted for 30% of global cybersecurity workers who are under the age of 30; additionally, they accounted for just 14% of those 60 or older. Slowly and through every generation, there is progress being made but there is still so much more to do.

“Shifts are happening within the industry and while at first glance, they might seem dramatic, it is more of a trickle-down effect and there needs to be resources in place to speed up the culture of equity in the workplace,” said Blodgett. “I’ve been lucky enough to hear the stories of the inspiring women who have applied for the scholarship, showing both their passion in the technology field and desire to do good in the world. I look forward to awarding the ESET scholarships to another round of strong, inspiring candidates this year.” 

REQUIREMENTS, DETAILS AND HOW TO APPLY

ESET will award scholarship to a woman who is currently enrolled as a graduate/undergraduate student in North America, majoring in a STEM field of study.

How do I qualify for the scholarship?

You must be enrolled in or accepted to an accredited college or university within North America. (The graduate/undergraduate program does not have to be a cybersecurity program; however, in your application, you should make clear that you aspire to have a career in the cybersecurity industry.)

New this year: ESET has decided to forego minimum GPA requirements so anyone interested and passionate in science, technology and cybersecurity can apply.

What is the deadline for submission?

Submissions will be accepted from March 8, 2023 – April 7, 2023 at 11:59 p.m. EST.

ESET will announce the winner in May 2023.

What do I submit / How do I submit my application?

Applicants can apply and learn more about the scholarships by visiting our application pages. If you’re a US student, you can apply here; if you’re a Canadian student, apply here.

Additional details

  • Essays may be submitted in English or Spanish for US students.
  • Essays may be submitted in English or French for Canadian students. 
  • Finalists may be required to supply additional personal or professional references.
  • Judging is conducted by a panel of ESET staff, including cybersecurity experts.
  • Winners will be asked to provide a photo of themselves, which may be used for promotional purposes.
  • If the application or essays are incomplete, they will not be considered.
  • Immediate family members or dependents of ESET employees are not eligible to participate.

Questions? Email us at US-scholarship@eset.com [US-only inquiries] or CA-scholarship@eset.com [Canada-only inquiries] with any questions, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

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Acer Gets Pwned…. But The Company Downplays Extent Of The Hack

Posted in Commentary with tags , on March 9, 2023 by itnerd

This is not a good look for computer maker Acer. The company has confirmed that they have been pwned by hackers:

Acer has confirmed someone broke into one of its servers after a miscreant put up for sale a 160GB database of what’s claimed to be the Taiwanese PC maker’s confidential information.

“We have recently detected an incident of unauthorized access to one of our document servers for repair technicians,” an Acer spokesperson told The Register on Tuesday. “While our investigation is ongoing, there is currently no indication that any consumer data was stored on that server.”

According to a Monday post on cyber crime hangout BreachForums by a rapscallion going by the name Kernelware, the “various confidential stuff” allegedly stolen from Acer totals 160GB, including 655 directories and 2,869 files.

Kernelware claimed the stolen goods included confidential slides and presentations, staff technical manuals, Windows Imaging Format files, binaries, backend infrastructure data, confidential product documents, Replacement Digital Product Keys, ISO files, Windows System Deployment Image files, BIOS components, and ROM files.

“Honestly, there’s so much shit that it’ll take me days to go through the list of what was breached lol,” Kernelware bragged. 

This data is now up for sale. But the thing is, I am not a believer that customer data is not part of that. Because LastPass said something similar when they got pwned, and we all know how that ended.

Tim Schultz, VP of Research & Engineering at  SCYTHE:

   “As companies shift away from paying ransoms, threat actors are adapting by increasing their focus on IP data theft to increase the potential business impact of each compromise. In the near term, we’ll see the same playbook similar threat actors have taken upon stealing IP and attempting to monetize it.

   “A longer-term challenge for Acer is that the internal information stolen included data on tools and infrastructure that can aid future threat actors. Asset inventory is a challenge for most organizations, and policies around technology business operations can be very difficult to change quickly in the event a threat actor is able to identify a vulnerability.”

Hopefully Acer is transparent about what was and wasn’t stolen during this hack. Because until they are transparent about this, I am really thinking that they are downplaying how serious this hack is.

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Rogers Continues To Have Issues That Are Making Customers Irate

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 9, 2023 by itnerd

When my phone started to ring an hour ago, I knew I was going to have a busy day. I say that because I woke up this morning to Rogers continuing to have issues with various parts of their network. I have clients who have no email. I also have clients with no Internet. And Down Detector seems to confirm this:

I suspect that as the day goes on, user reports of problems will increase seeing as it’s 8AM as I type this. So, given that I documented that Rogers was having issues earlier this week, I think it’s safe to say that they haven’t fully recovered from those issues. In fact it may be getting worse. And it’s testing the patience of their customers:

https://twitter.com/utube1362/status/1633804481384050689

Rogers really has some serious explaining to do as on the surface, they have the reliability of Twitter at the moment. And that’s not good company to be in. If Rogers were smart, they would communicate with their customers about what is going on, what steps they are taking to restore service, and when that is going to happen. But from what I see on Twitter and what my clients are reporting to me, that’s not happening. And that really reflects poorly on Rogers. And it’s now to the point where my clients are asking me what they should do, and I have no choice but to respond that they should consider moving to Bell if they can. That won’t help my clients with email issues, but it will help the ones with Internet issues.

Rogers needs to do better. And they need to do better now.

UPDATE: I’ve posted a workaround for those who have issues with sending or receiving Rogers email here.

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“Tool Bloat” Slows Cloud Threat Resolution Time: Palo Alto Networks

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 8, 2023 by itnerd

According to a survey conducted by Palo Alto Networks, 39% of global organizations reported a surge in breaches over the past year. The security vendor polled over 2500 respondents in the US, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, Singapore and the UK:

  • 90% said they are unable to detect, contain and resolve cyber-threats within an hour
  • 42% reported an increase in mean time to remediate
  • 30% reported a major increase in intrusion attempts and unplanned downtime


Part of the challenge appears to be the complexity of their cloud security environments – partly caused by tool bloat.

  • 76% said that the number of cloud security tools they use creates blind spots
  • 77% said they struggle to identify what tools are necessary to achieve their objectives

A previous Palo Alto study revealed that organizations rely on over 30 tools for security, including 6–10 cloud security products.

I have two comments on this. The first is from Dave Ratner, CEO at HYAS:

   “The growing complexity of cloud environments, whether it is hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, or simply a growing infrastructure, means that it’s easy to lose the visibility of what’s actually going on inside the environment.  Without the proper visibility, it’s increasingly difficult to ensure proper controls, which provides great opportunities for bad actors to hide without being seen, communicate with their command-and-control for instructions and data exfiltration without being detected, and otherwise perform nefarious actions at will.  

   “What’s required is the proper level of visibility and observability into the environments to detect, in real-time, any and all anomalous communications — only then can organizations actually enforce their controls, cut down on the mean-time to detect anomalous communications, and shine a light on the bad actors’ hiding spots.  

   “While this visibility may have been performed in the past through deep packet inspection or other mechanisms, the growth and complexity of the cloud environments makes that nearly impossible at scale; nevertheless, organizations which monitor and track their DNS traffic can actually address this problem in a light-weight, easy to deploy, easy to manage, and inexpensive to operate manner.  This allows organizations to shift left, move into a true business resiliency and business continuity program, detecting and shutting down anomalies in the network before they become significant breaches and issues.”


Bryson Bort, Founder and CEO at SCYTHE follows up with this:

   “A threat can only hack what they can touch: surface area is the technical range of this. The more code (software) with the more features accessible (beware default configurations!), the more opportunities you have provided a potential threat. A large percentage of software is installed with the default configurations (this is now part of the threat’s text matrix for their attacks) or sub-optimally configured (likely increasing risk).

   “First step, which takes a just few minutes: map all of your tools by category of what they defend (assets, users, etc) against the NIST CSF defensive phases: Identify (Configuration Management), Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. Now you know what’s generally covered and you’ve identified overlap where you are over-exposed. Now, make the tools work for you! Invest in validating your assumptions (does this block/see what I think it does?) and optimizing how they’re configured.

   “Security is defined by the threat, so a Continuous Threat and Exposure Management approach is the best practice by driving real threat behaviors safely in your environment and continuously so it’s helping you adapt to the rate of change of your business.”

The complexity of managing cloud environments has clearly become the next battleground between threat actors and those who defend against them. Hopefully those who are on the side of the good guys read reports like these and take action to prevent bad things from happening to them.

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SAP Introduces SAP Datasphere 

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 8, 2023 by itnerd

SAP SE today announced key data innovations and partnerships that give customers access to mission-critical data, enabling faster time to insights and better business decision-making. SAP announced SAP Datasphere solution, the next generation of its data management portfolio, which give customers easy access to business-ready data across the data landscape. SAP also introduced strategic partnerships with industry-leading data and AI companies – Collibra NV, Confluent Inc., Databricks Inc. and DataRobot Inc. – to enrich SAP Datasphere and allow organizations to create a unified data architecture that securely combines SAP software data and non-SAP data.

Until today, accessing and using data located in disparate systems and locations – across cloud providers, data vendors and on-premise systems – has been a complex challenge. Customers have had to extract data from original sources and export it to a central location, losing critical business context along the way and recapturing it only through ongoing, dedicated IT projects and manual effort. With today’s announcements, SAP Datasphere helps eliminate this hidden data tax, enabling customers to build a business data fabric architecture that quickly delivers meaningful data with business context and logic intact.

SAP Datasphere

Available today, SAP Datasphere is the next generation of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud solution. It enables data professionals to deliver scalable access to mission-critical business data. With a unified experience for data integration, data cataloging, semantic modeling, data warehousing, data federation and data virtualization, SAP Datasphere enables data professionals to help distribute mission-critical business data – with business context and logic preserved – across their organization’s data landscape. SAP Datasphere is built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which includes strong enterprise security capabilities, such as database security, encryption and governance.

No additional steps or migrations are required for existing customers of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, who will benefit from new SAP Datasphere functionality in their product environment. New functionality includes data cataloging that automatically discovers, manages and governs data; simplified data replication to deliver data and its constant updates in real-time; and enhanced data modeling that preserves the rich business context of data in SAP applications. Additional application integration capabilities that link data and metadata from cloud solutions from SAP to SAP Datasphere are planned.

Messer Americas, a leading industrial and medical gas company in North and South America, needed simple and secure access to data from SAP and non-SAP solutions within the company to strengthen data-driven decision-making and free up IT resources to focus on other strategic tasks. With SAP Datasphere, Messer Americas was able to build a modern data architecture that maintained the context of its enterprise data.

Strategic Partnerships

SAP and its new open-data partners will help hundreds of millions of users across the world make informed business-critical decisions rooted in massive amounts of data. SAP’s strategic partners provide the unique strengths of their ecosystems and enable customers to combine all their data like never before. 

Initial partners include:

  • Collibra plans to have a tailored integration with SAP, enabling customers to achieve an enterprise governance strategy by building a complete data catalog with lineage across their entire data landscape – both SAP and non-SAP data. Collibra makes trusted data discoverable across any organization. 
  • Confluent plans to connect its data streaming platform, empowering companies to unlock valuable business data and connect it with external applications in real time. Confluent’s cloud-native offering is the foundational platform for data in motion – permitting the uninhibited flow of real-time data from various sources across an organization.
  • Databricks customers can integrate their Data Lakehouse with SAP software so data can be shared with semantics preserved, helping customers simplify their data landscape.
  • DataRobot enables customers to leverage multimodal automated machine learning capabilities on top of SAP Datasphere and bring it directly into their business data fabric on whichever cloud platform it resides.

For more information, visit the Announcement Blog.

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The City Of Hamilton Ontario Bans TikTok And “Paused” Their TikTok Account

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 8, 2023 by itnerd

The bad news for TikTok continues to pile up. Hot on the heels of a likely ban in the US, comes news that the city of Hamilton Ontario which is just west of Toronto is going not only ban TikTok from city issued devices, but they have also “paused” their TikTok account which they created this year:

In a notice on Friday, the city’s director of communications pointed directly at federal and some provincial government bans as motivation for a similar directive targeted for city staff.

He said the ban was “out of an abundance of caution” after consultation with the IT division, senior leadership and social media team.

“In addition, the city’s Communications TikTok account will be paused and made dormant while staff await result of the Federal Office of the Privacy Commissioner probe alongside privacy regulators from provinces of Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta,” Matthew Grant said in an update.

Well, that’s not good if you’re TikTok as it’s all these bans and investigations into the social media app are going to make the average citizen think twice about having it on their phones. If I were ByteDance, I would extremely concerned as these bans clearly have momentum now.

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