#cybersecurity firm

LONDON: Cybersecurity firm Darktrace on Friday said it had accepted a $5.3-billion takeover bid from US private equity firm Thoma Bravo, which highlighted the British group’s “capability in artificial intelligence“.The cash bid comes after Thoma Bravo expressed takeover interest two years ago for Darktrace.“Darktrace is at the very cutting edge of cybersecurity technology, and we have long been…

There has never been a more pressing need for effective cybersecurity measures than in today’s digital environment. Businesses of all sizes need to give their cybersecurity defences top priority as cyber attacks develop and grow more sophisticated. However, not all businesses have the internal know-how to properly manage their cybersecurity. The cybersecurity industry fills this need.

Any organization must make the best cybersecurity firm selection carefully. The company you choose will be in charge of maintaining the continuity of your business operations, securing your sensitive data, and safeguarding your internet assets. We’ve put together a thorough checklist of things to think about when choosing a cybersecurity firm in order to assist you in making an informed decision.

Key Considerations When Choosing a Cybersecurity Firm

1.Determine Your Needs

You must first determine your organization’s unique cybersecurity demands before you begin your search for a cybersecurity firm. Think about things like your business sector, the kind of data you handle, your spending limit, and your legal obligations. Your choosing process will be guided by an understanding of your specific demands.

2. Skill and knowledge

Choose a cybersecurity company that has a successful track record. Examine their sector experience and ask about their knowledge of the unique threats and difficulties that your organization confronts.

3. Validation and Compliance

Make sure the cybersecurity company possesses the necessary certifications and compliances. A few certifications to look for include ISO 27001 compliance, Certified Information Security Manager (CISM), and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).

4. Services Offered

Think about the variety of services the company provides. Network security, data protection, incident response, and compliance management are just a few of the many facets that make up the large topic of cybersecurity. Select a company that can handle all of your cybersecurity requirements.

5. Personalization

Because each organization is different, your cybersecurity solutions should be customized to meet your particular needs. A smart company will adapt their services to match your aims and business style.

चेकपॉइंट की रिपोर्ट: बीते साल हैकर्स के निशाने पर सबसे ज्यादा हेल्थ ऑर्गनाइजेशन रहे, हर 10 सेकंड में एक साइबर अटैक हुआ

Hindi News Tech auto Cyberattack Rate Per Healthcare Organisation Up 37% In 2020: Cybersecurity Firm Check Point Report Ads से है परेशान? बिना Ads खबरों के लिए इनस्टॉल करें दैनिक भास्कर ऐप नई दिल्ली8 मिनट पहले कॉपी लिंक बीते साल कोरोनावायरस का कहर दुनियाभर में टूटा था। ऐसे में हॉस्पिटल और हेल्थकेयर ऑर्गनाइजेशन ने इस महामारी से लड़ने पूरी ताकत लगा थी। हालांकि, हैकर्स के निशाने पर सबसे ज्यादा…

Google Chrome आणि Microsoft Edge ब्राउजरमध्ये मेलवेयर, ३० लाखांहून जास्त युजर्सचा डेटा धोक्यात

नवी दिल्लीः मेलवेयरच्या Google Chrome आणि Microsoft Edge एक्सटेंशनला जवळपास ३० लाख लोकांनी डाउनलोड केले आहे. अवॉस्टच्या एका रिपोर्टमधून ही माहिती उघड झाली आहे. Avast रिसर्चर्स ने म्हटले की, त्यांनी क्रोम आणि ऐजवर असे २८ एक्सटेंशनची ओळख पटवली असून ते मेलवेयरने इन्फेक्टेड होते. यूजर्स इन ऐड-ऑन्स (ब्राउजर एक्सटेंशन) ला सोशल मीडिया प्लॅटफॉर्म जेस इंस्टाग्राम, फेसबुक, स्पॉटिफाई आणि वीमो वरून फोटो,…

Blockchain-based EVM unveiled for secure online voting

New Delhi, March 1 (IANS) Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has unveiled prototype of a new voting machine with Blockchain technology that works alongside an online election system so that all votes – whether cast at polling stations or on personal devices – are transmitted and processed together in a secure way.

Polys, a project from the Kaspersky Innovation Hub developing a secure online voting…

WASHINGTON | Thousands of emails stolen from Republican committee’s aides

WASHINGTON — Thousands of emails were stolen from aides to the National Republican Congressional Committee during the 2018 midterm campaign, a major breach exposing vulnerabilities that have kept cybersecurity experts on edge since the 2016 presidential race.

The email accounts were compromised during a series of intrusions that had been spread over several months and discovered in April, a…

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates | Cybersecurity firm: More Iran hacks as US sanctions loomed

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — An Iranian government-aligned group of hackers launched a major campaign targeting Mideast energy firms and others ahead of U.S. sanctions on Iran, a cybersecurity firm said Tuesday, warning further attacks remain possible as America re-imposes others on Tehran.

While the firm FireEye says the so-called “spear-phishing” email campaign only involves hackers stealing information from infected computers, it involves a similar type of malware previously used to inject a program that destroyed tens of thousands of terminals in Saudi Arabia.

The firm warns that raises the danger level ahead of America re-imposing crushing sanctions on Iran’s oil industry in early November.

“Whenever we see Iranian threat groups active in this region, particularly in line with geopolitical events, we have to be concerned they might either be engaged in or pre-positioning for a disruptive attack,” Alister Shepherd, a director for a FireEye subsidiary, told The Associated Press.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations rejected FireEye’s report, calling it “categorically false.”

“Iran’s cyber capabilities are purely defensive, and these claims made by private firms are a form of false advertising designed to attract clients,” the mission said in a statement. “They should not be taken at face value.”

FireEye, which often works with governments and large corporations, refers to the group of Iranian hackers as APT33, an acronym for “advanced persistent threat.” APT33 used phishing email attacks with fake job opportunities to gain access to the companies affected, faking domain names to make the messages look legitimate. Analysts described the emails as “spear-phishing” as they appear targeted in nature.

FireEye first discussed the group last year around the same time. This year, the company briefed journalists after offering presentations to potential government clients in Dubai at a luxury hotel and yacht club on the man-made, sea-horse-shaped Daria Island.

While acknowledging their sales pitch, FireEye warned of the danger such Iranian government-aligned hacking groups pose. Iran is believed to be behind the spread of Shamoon in 2012, which hit Saudi Arabian Oil Co. and Qatari natural gas producer RasGas. The virus deleted hard drives and then displayed a picture of a burning American flag on computer screens. Saudi Aramco ultimately shut down its network and destroyed over 30,000 computers.

A second version of Shamoon raced through Saudi government computers in late 2016, this time making the destroyed computers display a photograph of the body of 3-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, who drowned fleeing his country’s civil war.

But Iran first found itself as a victim of a cyberattack. Iran developed its cyber capabilities in 2011 after the Stuxnet computer virus destroyed thousands of centrifuges involved in Iran’s contested nuclear program. Stuxnet is widely believed to be an American and Israeli creation.

APT33’s emails haven’t been destructive. However, from July 2 through July 29, FireEye saw “a by-factors-of-10 increase” in the number of emails the group sent targeting their clients, Shepherd said. The actual number of attacks likely was even larger as FireEye’s figures only include their own clients.

The emails, pretending to be from a Mideast oil and gas company, targeted organizations in the Mideast, North America and Japan.

The recipients included companies involved in the oil and gas industry, utilities, insurance, manufacturing and education, FireEye said.

Several clues lead FireEye to believe APT33 has the backing of Iran’s government. The hackers uses Farsi, work an Iranian workweek of Saturday through Wednesday and correspond during Iranian office hours, FireEye said. Its list of targets also includes American firms in petrochemicals and aviation, as well as allied nations, like members of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, Shepherd said. The GCC encompasses Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“Since we started tracking APT33 in 2013, their sophistication has definitely improved. . We wouldn’t put them on the same level as some of the more-sophisticated Russian groups, for instance, in terms of capability,” Shepherd told the AP. “But they are a very capable group and they manage to meet their objectives, which is to compromise institutions in both the government and private sector and steal data.”

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Cybersecurity firm: US Senate in Russian hackers' crosshairs

PARIS/January 12, 2018(AP)(STL.News)— The same Russian government-aligned hackers who penetrated the Democratic Party have spent the past few months laying the groundwork for an espionage campaign against the U.S. Senate, a cybersecurity firm said Friday.

The revelation suggests the group often nicknamed Fancy Bear, whose hacking campaign scrambled the 2016 U.S. electoral contest, is still busy trying to gather the emails of America’s political elite.

“They’re still very active — in making preparations at least — to influence public opinion again,” said Feike Hacquebord, a security researcher at Trend Micro Inc., which published the report . “They are looking for information they might leak later.”

The Senate Sergeant at Arms office, which is responsible for the upper house’s security, declined to comment.

Hacquebord said he based his report on the discovery of a clutch of suspicious-looking websites dressed up to look like the U.S. Senate’s internal email system. He then cross-referenced digital fingerprints associated with those sites to ones used almost exclusively by Fancy Bear, which his Tokyo-based firm dubs “Pawn Storm.”

Trend Micro previously drew international attention when it used an identical technique to uncover a set of decoy websites apparently set up to harvest emails from the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign in April 2017. The sites’ discovery was followed two months later by a still-unexplained publication of private emails from several Macron staffers in the final days of the race.

Hacquebord said the rogue Senate sites — which were set up in June and September of 2017 — matched their French counterparts.

“That is exactly the way they attacked the Macron campaign in France,” he said.

Attribution is extremely tricky in the world of cybersecurity, where hackers routinely use misdirection and red herrings to fool their adversaries. But Tend Micro, which has followed Fancy Bear for years, said there could be no doubt.

“We are 100 percent sure that it can attributed to the Pawn Storm group,” said Rik Ferguson, one of the Hacquebord’s colleagues.

Like many cybersecurity companies, Trend Micro refuses to speculate publicly on who is behind such groups, referring to Pawn Storm only as having “Russia-related interests.” But the U.S. intelligence community alleges that Russia’s military intelligence service pulls the hackers’ strings and a months-long Associated Press investigation into the group, drawing on a vast database of targets supplied by the cybersecurity firm Secureworks, has determined that the group is closely attuned to the Kremlin’s objectives.

If Fancy Bear has targeted the Senate over the past few months, it wouldn’t be the first time. An AP analysis of Secureworks’ list shows that several staffers there were targeted between 2015 and 2016.

Among them: Robert Zarate, now the foreign policy adviser to Florida Senator Marco Rubio; Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who now runs a Washington consultancy; and Jason Thielman, the chief of staff to Montana Senator Steve Daines. A Congressional researcher specializing in national security issues was also targeted.

Fancy Bear’s interests aren’t limited to U.S. politics; the group also appears to have the Olympics in mind. Trend Micro’s report said the group had set up infrastructure aimed at collecting emails from a series of Olympic winter sports federations, including the International Ski Federation, the International Ice Hockey Federation, the International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation, the International Luge Federation and the International Biathlon Union.

The targeting of Olympic groups comes as relations between Russia and the International Olympic Committee are particularly fraught. Russian athletes are being forced to compete under a neutral flag in the upcoming Pyeongchang Olympics following an extraordinary doping scandal that has seen 43 athletes and several Russian officials banned for life. Amid speculation that Russia could retaliate by orchestrating the leak of prominent Olympic officials’ emails, cybersecurity firms including McAfee and ThreatConnect have picked up on signs that state-backed hackers are making moves against winter sports staff and anti-doping officials.

On Wednesday, a group that has brazenly adopted the Fancy Bear nickname began publishing what appeared to be Olympics and doping-related emails from between September 2016 and March 2017. The contents were largely unremarkable but their publication was covered extensively by Russian state media and some read the leak as a warning to Olympic officials not to press Moscow too hard over the doping scandal.

Whether any Senate emails could be published in such a way isn’t clear. Previous warnings that German lawmakers’ correspondence might be leaked by Fancy Bear ahead of last year’s election there appear to have come to nothing.

On the other hand, the group has previously dumped at least one U.S. legislator’s correspondence onto the web.

One of the targets on Secureworks’ list was Colorado State Senator Andy Kerr, who said thousands of his emails were posted to an obscure section of the website DCLeaks — a web portal better known for publishing emails belonging to retired Gen. Colin Powell and various members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign — in late 2016.

Kerr said he was still bewildered as to why he was targeted. He said that while he supported transparency, “there should be some process and some system to it.

“It shouldn’t be up to a foreign government or some hacker to say what gets released and what shouldn’t.”

___ James Ellingworth in Moscow contributed to this report.

___ Raphael Satter can be reached at: http://raphaelsatter.com