Cybersecurity Roundup: School Attacks, Kaspersky, Juniper Networks, SafeBreach
… corporate users, double the same figure in the first half of 2018.
Financial malware, commonly identified as banking trojans, is aimed at stealing finances and financial data, as well as providing threat actors with access to user and financial organizations’ assets and machines, making it one of the most lucrative threats for cybercriminals.
Rob Cataldo, Kaspersky’s vice president of U.S. enterprise sales, tells us since phishing emails remain the most common vector of financial malware infection, there are two main complications to consider.
“The first is that cybercriminals are becoming increasingly more sophisticated at creating believable emails that appear to be coming from trusted sources,” he said. “They are spending additional time and resources to eliminate obvious mistakes made in previous cyberattack attempts that instantly tipped off most corporate users into knowing an email was fraudulent. The second challenge is that many users are more concerned with productivity at work than employing a zero-trust mentality that can sometimes require taking an extra step to validate legitimate email sources.”
As is the case with most threats, financial malware’s key motivator is monetary gain, Cataldo said. While governments and business organizations have been investing in new methods to protect financial service providers, malicious users have been investing in sophisticated techniques on how to bypass them, he said.
“As such, so long as these financial malware campaigns continue to siphon funds into the pockets of the criminals or organized crime rings behind them, we can’t expect them to slow down,” he said. “Only organizations who invest in the training, tools and processes necessary to make the cost of breaching their defenses more expensive than the adversaries’ potential payout will dramatically curb this trend.”
To protect businesses from potential financial malware attacks, Kaspersky suggests the following tips for MSSPs and cybersecurity vendors with competencies in these areas:
- Provide effective cybersecurity awareness training platforms for their customers’ employees, especially those handling financial assets and transactions.
- Deliver endpoint security platforms that enable customers to identify and implement updates and patches for all software- and forbid the installation of programs from unknown sources.
- For endpoint level detection, investigation and timely remediation of incidents, the delivery of endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions can catch even unknown banking malware.
- Provide timely and comprehensive threat intelligence that can feed into security information and event management (SIEM) and security controls in order to detect modern financial threats.
“We believe employers can also do their part in minimizing successful phishing attacks by incentivizing employees for good behavior rather than penalizing them for oversights,” Cataldo said. “For example, companies could look to formally recognize or even financially reward employees who successfully pass ongoing security awareness trainings or those who report a relevant amount of suspicious emails to their security team over a given time frame.”
Juniper Networks Unleashes Enhanced Connected Security Platform
Juniper Networks has unveiled enhancements to its Connected Security platform, extending security to wherever an application resides — in private or public data centers, as well as IoT deployments.
These upgrades add …