Cyber Security News Update – Week 5 of 2020

FedEx is back in the news for…phishing scams. According to the Tullahoma News, “Law enforcement is warning about a new FedEx phishing scam. The company’s customers from across the country, including locals, have received a text message showing a tracking code and asking to click and set delivery preference. The link is fraudulent.”

W2 Scam

“According to a report from AppRiver, the phishing emails purport to users that their W2 is now ready. The clickable links in the message lead to domains that were registered the same day as the attack, says the report. Navigating to the URL will lead to a well-designed phishing page that poses as a legitimate ADP login page and from here the attackers will gather the victims ADP credentials.”

Expect to see more of this as the tax deadline in the US approaches, if you do not have proper email security service. According to Security Magazine, there’s a “tax themed email phishing campaign is targeting ADP users.”

Phishing Phrontier

When your computer gets hacked, that one thing. When a life-saving medical device gets hacked, that’s another. Unfortunately, that’s quickly becoming the new reality. According to Security Week, “Several potentially serious vulnerabilities have been found in patient monitoring products made by GE Healthcare.”

“The vulnerabilities were discovered by CyberMDX researchers during an investigation into GE’s CARESCAPE Clinical Information Center (CIC) Pro product. The analysis ultimately resulted in the discovery of six flaws across CIC Pro, patient monitors, servers, and telemetry systems.” That’s unsettling.

Zero-day Threats

The greatest challenge in security today is being able to quickly identify unknown, or zero-day, threats. That was confirmed this week in a new study that revealed “massive gaps in detection time of unknown threats.”

The study from BitDam, The Blind Spots of Email Security, found that “Malicious files and links regularly bypass all the leading email security products, leaving enterprises vulnerable to email-based attacks including Ransomware, Phishing and data breaches (and more specifically, Emotet, Dridex, Maze, Lokibot, Wannacry and more).” That’ll keep you up at night.

Body Count

Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft. When will you learn? “Nearly 250 million Microsoft Customer Service and Support (CSS) records were found exposed to the Internet in five insecure Elasticsearch databases,” according to an article on Security Week.

“The records on those servers contained 14 years’ worth of logs of conversations between support agents and customers, all of which could be accessed by anyone directly from a browser, without any form of authentication.” Nice.

iPhone Hack

If the richest man in the world can get his iPhone hacked, what chance have you got? According to an article on SC Magazine, “An iPhone belonging to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likely was hacked by Saudi Arabian prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) or operatives working on his behalf.”

Apparently, bin Salman was trying to strike back at “Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, which had reported extensively about the October 2018 murder by the Kingdom of the Post’s journalist Jamal Khashogi.” The scary thing is the hack had been used to exfiltrate data from Bezos’ phone for three months.

Healthcare Breach

Another week, another healthcare data compromise. This week’s victim? PIH Health, a 2-hospital nonprofit healthcare network based in Whittier, CA. according to the HIPAA Journal, “PIH Health discovered the email accounts of certain employees had been accessed by unauthorized individuals as a result of a targeted phishing attack on its employees. The summary on the OCR breach portal indicates up to 199,548 patients were potentially affected by the attack.” Just another day in cyberspace.

And that’s the week that was.