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U.K. frauds hit record high with £1.1 billion


Accountancy giant, KPMG reported that the value of cyber crime and fraud cases reaching U.K. courts have totaled more than £1.1 billion ($1.36 billion) in 2016, which has been the highest amount in five years.

While numbers of fraud cases have dropped by a third but the amount stolen has been 55% more-which was reported as £124 million in 2015. Cyber crime, all over jumped 1,266 per cent jump compared to 2015. This surge is a huge concern for businesses and individuals which will not only put them at more risk but also slowdown the economy. KPMG has also warned that law enforcement agencies who don't have the resources to investigate every report of fraud will come under increasing strain as they investigate complex super cases.

KPMG found that £900 million of fraud stemmed from just seven super cases-with a value of £50 million or over. In 2015, super cases amounted to £250 million and the U.K. based accounting firm argued the rapid increase of super cases in recent years may be reflective of fraud being a lucrative and practical proposition for those with sufficient technological abilities. KPMG calculated the average value of loss in the surge to be around £5.2 million.

KPMG’s statistics included a £113 million cold-calling scam for which the culprit received an 11-year jail sentence in September. Feezan Hameed was caught after targeting 750 Royal Bank of Scotland customers in the biggest cyber fraud the Metropolitan police had seen.

The report also mentioned about a 51-year-old Leicester man who was imprisoned for six years for masterminding a £60 million fraud to supply free cable TV using illicit set-top boxes and promoted the business on internet forums as well on his own website.

Fraud against businesses was up seven-fold this year with internal fraud committed by employees and management the most common type of fraud to hit business operations.

Cyber attack threats have been widespread in recent months too with the European Union Security Commissioner acknowledging upcoming general elections throughout the continent could be at risk to foreign powers. President Donald Trump moved to accept the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion Russia had engaged in cyber attacks during the presidential election, according to the New York businessman's chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

Recently, Lloyds Banking group was also struck down with a DDoS attack where the cyber fiends tried to access personal banking websites of customers. The group is working with law enforcement agencies to identify the culprit behind the cyber attack.

More and more people are being targeted by fraudsters due to rapid rise of technology and online platforms as they get unrestricted access to a larger pool of victims.
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RBI is hiring Cyber Security Specialists

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The Reserve Bank of India is strengthening its information technology and cyber security cell.

It is planning to hire specialists for roles in cyber security, systems audit, research and innovation, project management and administration.

On Wednesday, it offered jobs on its website in a mass hiring drive. RBI had advertised for senior positions at ReBIT when it was set up but this is the first time a mass hiring drive is being initiated. The final date for applying is February 7.

Reserve Bank Information Technology Pvt Ltd (ReBIT) was set up in May last year as a separate subsidiary of the central bank.

The mandate of ReBIT is to focus on ‘IT and cyber security (including related research) of the financial sector and assist in IT systems audit and assessment of RBI-regulated entities,’ goes the hiring ad.
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'Carbanak' is back to exploit Google-run services

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One of the most successful cybercriminal gangs ever- Carbanak- is back with a bang, and now they've figured out how to abuse services run by Google to help them steal even more money.

The criminal organization is named Carbanak cybergang because of the name of the malware they used to compromise computers at banks and other financial institutions, experts estimated that the hackers swiped over $1 Billion from their victims.

Forcepoint Security Labs researchers said that while investigating an active exploit sent in phishing messages as an RTF attachment, they discovered that the Carbanak group has been hiding in plain site by using Google services for command and control.

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"The Carbanak actors continue to look for stealth techniques to evade detection," Forcepoint's senior security researcher Nicholas Griffin said in a blog post. "Using Google as an independent C&C channel is likely to be more successful than using newly created domains or domains with no reputation."

The investigators discovered that the “Carbanak cybergang” hit more than 100 financial institutions in 30 countries, it has been active at least since 2013 and there are strong indications that it may still be ongoing.
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Lloyds hit by DDoS attack

Lloyds banking group is the latest lender to suffer an online assault after 20million UK accounts were compromised after fending off two-day denial of service attack. At the time of the attack, the group attributed the breakdown to "technical problems".

The customers had trouble logging in to online accounts during the unsuccessful cyber-attack on 11-13 January 2017. Some customers were still unable to log into their accounts over the weekend. This has been one of the longest DDoS attacks ever.

The bank, which is led by boss Antonio Horta-Osorio and the breakdown of the group also affected Halifax and Bank of Scotland when they were bombarded with millions of fake requests.

Lloyds revealed little at the time of the attack, despite a flood of Twitter complaints.

Usually in a DDOS attack the criminals demand a large ransom, to be paid in bitcoins, to end the onslaught. Customers of TSB, the challenger bank that was spun-out of Lloyds in 2013 and shares its technology, were also hit by sporadic disruption to their internet banking services. However, no money or data were stolen from either Lloyds or TSB and no ransoms were demanded or paid during the attack, which is thought to have originated overseas.

The National Cyber Security Centre is working with the bank on the attack.

The IT security experts at Lloyds “geo-blocked” the source of the attack. This effectively drops a portcullis over the server launching the attacks, but also stops legitimate customer requests from that area too. The cybercriminals then move to another server, and the geo-blocking game begins again.

The DDoS attack, in which criminals flood websites with traffic to slow them down and stop them from working, is just the latest in a stream of cyber assaults on British banks, sparking mounting concern among regulators.

It explains the intermittent nature of the service issues at Lloyds during the period of the attack.

Last November, some £2.5m was stolen from 9,000 customers of Tesco Bank in what was the largest ever hack against a UK lender.

Several other major British banks have been hit by service outages over the past two years when their systems were flooded with fake requests.
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Israeli soldiers became victim of evaesdropping by Hamas via fake Facebook profiles

According to the official blog post of the Israel Defense Force (IDF), Hamas operatives used social website, Facebook, to lure their soldiers to download and use malicious apps on their phones that led to  eavesdropping.

IDF soldiers received friend request from pretty ladies on Facebook, who seemed genuine and interested them. Women used to send them interesting photos of herself to convince them that they real.

And these photos were indeed real! but are stolen from real people's Facebook accounts.

Once they convince soldiers that she is real, their next step is to send them link to download the malicious payload app without letting them known anything.

The fake profile wants to continue talking to  the soldiers but not on the Facebook, so she insists them to download a specific messaging app, if they wish to continue talking to them.

To continue talking to them, they tell them to use an app store apkpk to download a video chat app called Wowo Messenger.

The soldiers who were not tech savy were  not able to point  the glaring red flags there, and later found themselves a victim of powerful eavesdropping.

IDF's blog post wrote: "It can turn a mobile device into an open book- leaving contacts, apps, pictures, and files accessible to Hamas. What's more, it can stream  video from the camera and audio from the microphone."





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Mac's new malware can be used against Linux

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Antivirus vendor Malwarebytes has discovered a new Mac malware, called "Fruitfly," which can also be used against Linux systems.

Malwarebytes identifies the code as "OSX.Backdoor.Quimitchin." Discovered this year, Malwarebytes says this Mac backdoor contains routines that allow it to execute in some limited capacity on Linux systems.

"The script also includes some code for taking screen captures via shell commands," the team says. "Interestingly, it has code to do this both using the Mac "screencapture" command and the Linux "xwd" command. It also has code to get the system's uptime, using the Mac "uptime" command or the Linux "cat /proc/uptime" command."

According to a blog post published by anti-malware provider Malwarebytes, the malware contains code that captures screenshots and webcam images, collects information about each device connected to the same network as the infected Mac, and can then connect to those devices.

Some of these features are also doubled by code that allows Fruitfly to run on Linux machines, albeit researchers have not spotted a Linux variant in the wild.

"The only reason I can think of that this malware hasn’t been spotted before now is that it is being used in very tightly targeted attacks, limiting its exposure," said Thomas Reed, the Malwarebytes analyst that analyzed Fruitfly after a system administrator had contacted him after he noticed suspicious traffic in his network.
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AI can give wings to your business and cybersecurity in 2017


Artificial intelligence has been a debatable trending topic in 2016. While some praised the technology as useful from military campaign strategy to predictive analysis, others believed on its reliance as a fraught with danger. Its effect however cannot be ignored and 2017 will see the AI reshaping our daily lives in unprecedented ways-from businesses to government landscape.

Indian author, Shashi Shekhar Vempati of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has recommended spurring AI-based innovation and establishing AI-ready infrastructure to prepare India’s jobs and skills markets for an AI-based future and to secure its strategic interests.

Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics, customer service and consumer services.

In businesses, AI can prove very useful in overcoming fragmentation caused by scaling. Technology like ScenGen takes working parts that seem disparate and combines them into a functioning whole by predicting and testing how each piece operates and organizing them more effectively. Incorporating AI to consolidate employees, tasks, and systems will reap immediate benefits.

One feature of AI is its ability to think more quickly through a problem than a human mind could. When such applications work in your business, there are far less chances of pratfalls and owners can focus on more important issues.

AI can facilitate strategising through projection. Its ability to create strategies for every possible future scenario will give businesses wings.

The next big opportunity, in terms of both impact and technology, is cyber security.

Cyber attacks are among the biggest threats to businesses, governments, and institutions today. The Identity Theft Resource Center notes that nearly 178 million personal records were exposed in data breaches in 2015; high-profile breaches announced in 2016 include the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Research VP at Gartner, Earl Perkins made a shocking revelation about security, saying that 99% of exploited securities are already known.

Unfortunately, a determined hacker cannot be stopped from firewalls. For now, it’s just humans who try to anticipate what the other human might do before they do it. But AI can be a valuable ally for defense against hackers. Amit Kulkarni, president and CEO of cognitive surveillance company Cognetyx said that AI can be trained to constantly learn patterns in order to identify any deviation in it, much like a human does.

Machine learning, a component of AI, applies existing data to constantly improve its functions and strategies over time. It learns and understands normal user behavior and can identify even the slightest variation from that pattern. AI can also use this data to improve its own functions and strategies.

Private sector businesses and corporations have already deployed AI systems, and as the White House notes, even some governments are using the technology because AI can save time and money by going through structured data quickly, as well as comprehensively reading and learning unstructured data, statistics, words, and phrases. Essentially, AI could save tax dollars as well as national secrets.

Indeed, AI is the future and remaining current and abreast of every new advance therein is absolutely vital to maintaining relevance in the exponentially digitizing future.
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80% of the Internet of Things(IoT) are unsecured

A recent study on Mobile and IoT Application Security, which was conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by IBM and Arxan Technologies,  found out that  80 percent of Internet of Things (IoT) aren't secured and have a lot of vulnerabilities which needs to be tested. 

The study surveyed 593 IT and IT security practitioners to find out how much companies are prepared to handle the risks that are created by vulnerabilities in IoT apps.

According to the survey, there is nearly  84 percent of respondents are very concerned about the malware threat to mobile apps, while  66 percent of the respondents are more concerned about a threat to IoT apps. However, 79 percent of respondents say that they are more worried about the risk involve with mobile apps, while  75 percent of them think that the use of IoT apps increases security risk very significantly.

Study also found that respondents are more concerned about getting hacked through an IoT app, 58 percent, rather than a mobile app, 53 percent.

Arxan Technologies Chief Marketing Officer Mandeep Khera told SC Media “the biggest surprise was that a vast majority of the respondents believe that they are likely to get hacked but most of them are not doing much to protect themselves.” “Just seems counter-intuitive,” she said.

Khera warned that the reason behind this might be  lack of inertia, lack of awareness, and lack of budget.

“IoT is still fairly new and due to lack of a big visible hack or a regulation, organizations have hard time justifying security initiatives,” Khera said. “However, a hack is coming and in some segments like connected medical and connected automobiles, companies are starting to make good progress in terms of security.”

Khera said that one of the biggest problems that is that most professionals do not understand the potential vulnerabilities and the potential impact of hack on these devices. And to handle these problems the security executives need to know about the  IoT app protection. 

"Proactive testing, fixing vulnerabilities and binary code as well as cryptographic key protection are some of the ways that companies can mitigate the risks and better secure IoT devices and while companies may go through the software development lifecycle with security in mind, once they throw those out in the wild on end point devices or mobile, binary code and cryptographic keys are vulnerable and easy for hackers to attack", Khera said.  

Brad Bussie, CISSP, Director of Product Management, STEALTHbits Technologies told SC Media, “IoT apps are still new enough that usability is outflanking security because security has a reputation of getting in the way. The new IoT apps also lack a common set of standards because of the sheer number of IoT devices providing countless applications.”

Bussie said vendors continue to manufacture insecure devices. 

“I always take this back to a simple principle when analyzing risk (Probability of Event) x (Cost of Event) = Risk Value,” Bussie said. “Many companies appear to be running this equation and coming to a simple conclusion; it is cheaper to manufacture devices and applications without proper security.”
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Encrypted mail service used by Snowden relaunches after three years

Edward Snowden used to use the Lavabit, an encrypted email service while gathering information against Central Intelligence Agency and other United state agencies.

In 2013, Ladar Levison, founder of the encrypted email service Lavabit, took the strong step of shutting down the company rather than abide by the federal law enforcement request. Lavabit had more than 410,000 user accounts at that time.

That time, the FBI had requested them to access the email account of one of their most prominent user's account, Edward Snowden. They didn't give them his SSL encryption key because that could have help the government to obtain the credentials for other users as well.
“The SSL key was our biggest threat,” Levison says.

After this incidence,  Levison became a hero of the privacy community for his tough stance. For last three years, he has tried his best to ensure that he’ll never have to help the feds break into customer accounts again.

On Friday, he launched a new version of Lavabit which has a new architecture that fixes the SSL problem and includes other privacy-enhancing features, and now it will prevent government agencies like the NSA and FBI from stalking the Lavabit users.

“This is the first step in a very long journey. ... What we’re hoping for is that by the end of this year we’ll be more secure than any of the other encrypted messaging apps out there on the market,” Levison added.

“We have installed FIPS 140-2 hardware security modules which allow us to use a TLS key without having to access it directly. Any attempt to extract the key will trigger a tamper circuit causing the key to self-destruct. The only account capable of extracting the key is the HSM supervisor. To prevent this we set the passphrase blindly thus locking us out,” the company explained.

While, Edward Snowden said that he too plans to reopen his account,  “if only to show support for their courage.” 
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Spain arrests Russian programmer at FBI’s request


Spanish officials have arrested a 31-year-old Russian computer programmer from Barcelona airport on January 13  after  Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Interpol requested them.

Stanislav Lisov was on a holiday trip with his wife.  The policemen immediately searched and took his phone, notebook, and tablet computer.

Darya Lisova, wife of the programmer told RT that, “We were detained at the airport in Barcelona, when we came to return a rented car before flying out to Lyon, to continue our trip and visit friends. When we were getting out of the car, two police officers approached showed us the badge and said they were detaining my husband.”

According to his wife, there are no official charges against him, but still, he is held in Brians prison in the Martorell municipality of Catalonia.

While the Russian embassy in Spain has confirmed the detention of the programmer by the Spanish officials. The Russian embassy has released a statement mentioning that they are working hard “to protect the interests of the Russian citizen and provide him with the necessary consular assistance.” Meanwhile, his family has hired a lawyer.

“We’ve already had two lawyers. The first could not cope with the responsibilities, so we hired a second. He is now familiarizing himself with the case. So far, we have not been able to figure out what exactly they suspect him of doing,” said Lisova.

However, The FBI and Interpol have refused to comment.
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NHS Trust hacked by a Trojan Malware

The UK'S largest NHS TRUST has been a victim of a cyber attack reportedly caused by a Trojan Malware, probably because it's still running Windows XP.

According to the reports, there has been no data compromise, and there is no cancellation of any appointments due to the attack.

Barts Health Trust runs The Royal London, St Bartholomew's, Whipps Cross, Mile End and Newham hospitals. The attack forced systems to be briefly taken offline. But now everything is running fine.
 "The virus has been quarantined, and all major clinical systems are now up and running. No patient data was affected, there was no unauthorized access to medical records, and our antivirus protection has now been updated to prevent any recurrence," a Barts spokesperson told ZDNet.

 Barts Health NHS Trust put up a notice on its website: "We are urgently investigating this matter and have taken a number of drives offline as a precautionary measure.

"We have already established that the Cerner Millennium patient administration system and the clinical system used for Radiology are not affected. We have tried and tested contingency plans in place and are making every effort to ensure that patient care will not be affected."

Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Foundation Trust became the victim of a similar attack in October.
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