 A U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General report released this week outlines the inadequate cybersecurity practices being used to protect the United States' ballistic missile defense systems (BMDS ). Ballistic missile defense systems are used by the U.S.A. to counter short, medium, intermediate and long range ballistic missiles that target the United States of America. As these systems are controlled by computers and software, they are at risk for being targeted by state-sponsored attacks that attempt to gain control of the systems, damage them, or steal classified information & source code. On March 14, 2014, the DoD Chief Information Officer stated that the DoD must implement National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) security controls to protect their systems, which includes BMDS. In a heavily redacted report by the DoD, it has been shown that BMDS facilities have failed to utilize required security controls such as multifactor authentication, vulnerability assessment and mitigation, server rack security, protection of classified data stored on removable media, encrypting transmitted technical information, physical facility security such as cameras and sensors, and did not perform routine assessments to make sure that these safeguards were in place. There's more posted on OUR FORUM.  A new sample of the Shamoon data-wiping malware has been discovered in the wild, after a period of silence that lasted for about two years. Shamoon was first seen in attacks against Saudi Aramco oil provider in 2012 when it erased data on more than 35,000 computer systems belonging to the company. Four years later, it was spotted in attacks against private organizations in the same region that perpetuated until January 2017. In a report sent to BleepingComputer, the research team from Chronicle (cybersecurity subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc.) says that the new strain was uploaded to VirusTotal on December 10, from Italy. It consisted in the dropper and two modules, Wiper and Network, Brandon Levene, head of applied intelligence at Chronicle told us. They handle the disk wiping activity and the communication with the command and control (C2) server. Levene says that the author(s) of the new Shamoon dropped some resources that were removed some resources that were used to replace the destroyed files, a capability that still exists, though. The alternative to this is to overwrite to data and the hard disk MBR with random data. The variant analyzed by Chronicle has the trigger date and local time set to December 7, 2017, 23:51. The researchers note that this is about one year before it was uploaded to the VirusTotal platform. Further details posted on OUR FORUM.  Microsoft released Windows 10 Preview Build 18298 to Fast ring members of the Windows Insider Program this week. Rather than introducing one standout feature, this update makes a bunch of small improvements to various aspects of the operating system, from sign-in options to accessibility tools. The company's also released updates to Feedback Hub, Snip & Sketch and the Game bar via the Microsoft Store to upgrade those utilities. Preview Build 18298 is the first notable release to Windows Insider Program members in a while. That's probably because Microsoft suffered a series of failures involving Windows 10 updates over the last few months. The company infamously delayed the Windows 10 October 2018 Update to mid-November at least for people who aren't using certain hardware or software--and pulled a cumulative update because it was too unstable. It's hard to hype people up about upcoming versions of Windows 10 if the most recent versions are still unavailable on many systems. The show must go on, however, and that's where Preview Build 18298 comes in. The update introduced the ability to create a security key via the Settings app to quickly "unpin" folders and groups from the Start menu and to create bigger and brighter cursors that should be a little easier to see. For more turn to OUR FORUM. |
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