We looked into the security implications of the changing banking paradigm with PSD2 in place. Our research highlights the current and new risks that the financial industry will have to defend against, and predict how cybercriminals will abuse and attack Open Banking.
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We uncovered personally identifiable information (PII) stolen from a China-based hotel chain being sold on a deep web forum we were monitoring. Further analysis revealed that the stolen data was not only the PII of Chinese customers, but also included the hotel chain’s customers from Western and East Asian countries. The sample data we saw was unencrypted (in plaintext), some of which were in CSV, SQL, and TXT dumps.
We believe this stolen data is related to the data breach (reported on August 29) that exposed up to 130 million PII. The news that reported the data breach matched with an advertisement we saw in the dark web selling the stolen data for eight bitcoins (equivalent to more than US$58,000 as of September 5, 2018).
Read MoreWebsite defacement — the act of visibly altering the pages of a website, notably in the aftermath of a political event to advance the political agenda of a threat actor— has been explored in our various research works. We broke down top defacement campaigns in a previous paper and, in another post, emphasized how machine learning in our security research tool can help Computer Emergency Readiness Teams (CERTs)/Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) and web administrators prepare for such attacks. The latter took off from the analysis done in our most recent paper, Web Defacement Campaigns Uncovered: Gaining Insights From Deface Pages Using DefPloreX-NG. Here we expound on why machine learning (ML) was an ideal method for our analysis to better understand how web defacers operate and organize themselves.
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Already a vital part of the critical infrastructure of the internet, satellites are set to take on a more significant role with the emergence of 5G cellular network technology and the continuing expansion of the internet of things (IoT). While terrestrial networks handle peak load well, disaster handling and critical infrastructure scenarios are served well by satellites, which are unaffected by most ground-based events. Ensuring the security of satellites, therefore, acquires even greater importance and warrants more initiatives to that end.
Read MoreThe ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM ASIACCS) is an avenue for cybersecurity research breakthroughs, techniques, and tools. At the ACM ASIACCS 2018 in Incheon, South Korea, we presented our research using DefPloreX-NG, a tool for identifying and tracking web defacement campaigns using historical and live data. “DefPloreX-NG” is a play on the phrase “defacement explorer.” The appended “NG” acronym means “Next Generation,” signifying improvements from the previous version of the tool. DefPloreX-NG is equipped with an enhanced machine learning algorithm and new visualization templates to give security analysts and other professionals a better understanding of web defacement campaigns.
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