What is a Cyber Attack?

A Cyber attack uses malicious code to manipulate computer logic, code, or data that often results in data compromise, identity theft, or data theft. It is a deliberate attempt to exploit computer systems, accounts, networks, or companies that depend on technology.

Types of Cyber Attacks

Cyber attacks can happen in different ways. In most instances, they occur due to security holes created by people as a result of carelessness, human error, or employee turnover. In other cases, security holes in the network are attacked directly. Criminals are getting craftier with their malicious acts these days and following is the list of the most common types of cyber attacks and how you can prevent them.

Social Engineering:

Social Engineering is a type of cyber attack where criminals psychologically manipulate a person into revealing their private information such as their credit card details. Phishing and voice manipulation in a call are some significant examples.

  • These kinds of cyber attacks can be prevented by developing one’s attention to detail. This can be done through training and educating themselves about such attacks.

Phishing Attack:

Phishing is the practice of sending malicious messages through telephone, emails, text messages, etc., composed to appear from reputed and familiar sources. They are sent by hackers to get victims to click on malicious links that give access to their private information.

  • Getting scammed by a phishing link can be prevented by educating one’s self about secure links and being careful before entering any private data on suspicious links. 
  • Additionally, you could also get phishing detection tools like anti-virus software, email filters, etc. They provide a warning when something suspicious is detected.

Malware Attack:

Malware refers to malicious software such as worms, trojan horses, viruses, spyware, etc., to exploit companies by encrypting, misusing, destroying, or preventing access to their data. Once entered inside the network, malware can also produce extra harmful software throughout the system. It can hide within applications, and you may never come to know about it unless something dangerous happens.

  • Malware attacks can be prevented by installing the latest and right anti-virus software and firewall setup. You should also make sure they are frequently updated.

Password Cracking Attack:

This type of attack is most usual in accounts that belong to celebrities and business enterprises. Hackers use brute force attacks and specialised software that can test numerous potential passwords to get access to these secure accounts.

  • The only way to stay away from this attack is by having a long and random password that is harder for the software to guess. 
  • Keep your passwords safe. Set different passwords for different accounts and keep changing them on a regular basis.

Denial-of-Service Attack:

In this attack, hackers make a website unavailable to customers by overwhelming it with data and traffic until the site crashes. E-commerce websites are the main targets of this attack. Even though it does not have a direct financial loss to the website owners, this attack can lead to loss of sales until the website is fixed and goes live again.

  • To prevent this attack, look out for unusual traffic patterns and monitor traffic reports of the website frequently. These can be your warning signs before the attack.

Man-in-the-Middle Attack:

Generally, data flows consistently from users to the server and the backend. This flow gets interrupted when a man-in-the-middle (a hacker) steps in and obstructs the data being sent. The sad thing is that users would not even know that their data is being breached.

  • To prevent becoming a victim of this attack, make sure you enter your information only on secure websites where the URL starts with HTTPS and not HTTP. 
  • Try not to visit a website when your browser prompts a security warning message. 
  • It would be best if you refrain from using an unprotected Wi-Fi connection.

 

In conclusion, ordinary users need to stay conscious during their time on the internet. Companies should have a qualified cyber security team to protect their information from such attacks. Employees should get training to spot possible cyber attacks.

 

With a steady increase in digital payments through phones across the world, cybercriminals are coming up with Juice Jacking to prey on naive users.

In recent times, there have been a lot of accusations that people losing their money. Hackers trick them into revealing their credit/debit card details and OTP over the phone.

The State Bank of India has issued a warning regarding the Juice Jacking aka USB charging Scam. This is a new age atrocious technique. This infects mobile phones with malware at public places like Airports and Train Stations.

What’s Juice Jacking?

Witty hackers have developed an innocuous-looking yet sophisticated USB port-like gadget that can be installed at the charging stations.

Juice Jacking

Once the user plugs his/her phone, the device can bypass the security system of the phone. This leads to installing the malware in it and steals the entire contents of the phones. These include contact details, emails, messages, photos, videos, including sensitive financial information.

The SBI’s warning came a week after the California Los Angeles County District Attorney department sent alerts to the residents, travellers to avoid charging phones at public places, especially Airports.

Measures to protect against Juice Jacking

  • Best way to avoid Juice Jacking is to carry your portable chargers.
  • Always use two-pin AC outlet to charge your phones in public charging stations.
  • Never use USB ports to charge your phones in the charging stations.

We are in the contemporary world where technology is unstoppable. You have money; someone will try to steal it. You have data; cybercriminals will try to steal it. As everything’s turning digital these days, the amount of data to secure increased rapidly. NASSCOM predicts that India needs 1 million cyber security experts by 2020 and the demand for it keeps growing in both the government and the corporate sectors as we develop in the future.

As the technological transformation takes place across all the industries, there’s a need to protect the digital asset from data breaches making the companies ultimately secure becoming challenging than ever. The demand for cybersecurity professionals increased in all the sectors due to the abnormal increase in the cyber-attacks. To fight these security attacks, it has become crucial to train an adequate number of professionals in order to fill the skill gap by 2020.

Here are the top cybersecurity jobs roles that are seeing a sharp increase in the pay

 

  • Cyber Security Intern

The cyber security interns are the ones who work in the mini projects and gets to implement their theoretical knowledge into practice. They work performing various operations services like incident/event analysis, forensic investigation, security monitoring.

The average stipend of the Cyber Security Inters ranges from 10,000 per month to 25,000 per month

 

  • Penetration Tester

The penetration tester can be an entry-level job if you have the right skills for it. The penetration testers are the ones who find the bugs and vulnerabilities in the websites, android applications, iOS applications, networks and many more. They test to secure it from the attackers. They also provide the patch techniques to the bugs and vulnerabilities spotted.

The average salary of the Penetration Testers ranges from 6 lakhs to 18 lakhs per annum

 

  • Network Security Engineer

The network security engineer is a critical position in every organisation. This role can also be an entry-level job for the right skilled person. This person ensures that the security systems are implemented in the organisation to counter and stop In case any threats. The primary responsibilities include maintaining systems, identifying vulnerabilities and improving the automation.

The average salary of a Network Security Engineer ranges from 4 lakhs to 8 lakhs per annum

 

  • Cyber Security Analyst

A cyber security analyst can be an entry-level job for the right skilled person. These people are responsible for planning, implementing and upgrading security measures and controls. They continuously monitor security access and perform internal and external security audits to make sure there are no loopholes or security lapses. They are also responsible for conducting vulnerability testing, risk analysis, security assessments for managing the network. In addition to these tasks, the analysts also train the employees in security awareness, so they are aware of the best practices to be followed to avoid security breaches.

The salary of a Cyber Security Analyst starts from 6 lakhs per annum.

 

  • Security Architect

To become a Security Architect, it requires an experience of 3-5 years in the field of cyber security. A security architect plays a vital role in designing the network and computer security architecture for the company. They help in planning, researching and designing the security elements. The security architects first create a design based on the company needs and then works with the programming team to develop the final structure. They also form the security policy and procedure of the company.

The average salary of a Security Architect starts from 17 lakhs per annum

 

  • Cyber Security Manager

To become a cyber security manager, you must have at least 5years to 7 years experience in the cyber security field. The cyber security managers are responsible for the maintenance of the security protocol in the entire organisation. They create strategies related to different projects to increase network and internet security. They also review the security policies and update them according to the recent security threats. A Cyber Security Manager also performs regular checks on all the devices in the organisation to make sure there are no breaches in the security.

The average salary of the Cyber Security Manager starts from 12 lakhs per annum

 

  • Chief Information Security Officer

To become a CISO, you need to have at least 10+ years of experience working in the Cyber Security field. According to the reports, there are over 80% of the companies who has CISO on the team. This shows a trend where the companies are aware of the threats in the cybercrime and the potential damage an attack can cause. The CISO is the highest level when it comes to security. They ensure that the cyber security plan is aligned with the company’s vision, operations and technologies. The CISO works with the team to identify, maintain, develop and implement in such a way that there are no security breaches in the organisation. They respond to the incident and set up standards and controls to mitigate security threats without disturbing the business. They are also responsible for overseeing the security policies in the organisation.

The average salary for a top CISO ranges from 2 crores to 4 crores per annum

 

These are the top cyber security jobs in India that’ll be trending in 2020. Plenty of other roles that exist like the information risk auditors, data hostage analyst, firewall, security device development professionals, intrusion detection specialist, cryptologist, and many more goes unfilled due to the unskilled people. So if you’re still doubting about pursuing your career in cyber security now is the time to start. If you already are seeking, Kudos you have lots of options to explore in the upcoming year.

 

The Chinese phone makers OnePlus suffer another data breach. This time the unauthorized party attacked the OnePlus online store. Some undisclosed number of customers details got exposed.

Last week while monitoring their systems, their security team discovered some unauthorized access of some of the user’s information. The company informed its users that all the payment details, passwords and accounts are safe, but the name, email address, mobile number and shipping address details got exposed.

The company did not provide any information regarding the vulnerability that the attackers exploited to compromise the online store. Still, they did inspect the server thoroughly to ensure that there are no similar vulnerabilities to prevent any data breach in the future.

“We took immediate measures to stop the attacker and reinforce the security to make sure there are no similar vulnerabilities. Right now, we are working with the relevant authorities to investigate this incident further”, said OnePlus.

The affected users may receive spam or phishing emails as a result of this incident. These are usually the next step into tricking the customers into sharing their passwords and the credit card details. Though your OnePlus might not be involved in the data breach, we would recommend you to change the password of your OnePlus online store accounts.

OnePlus

 

“We are continually upgrading our security program, and we are partnering with the world-renowned security platform next month and will launch an official bug bounty program by the end of December 2019”, said the company.

This wasn’t the first data breach that OnePlus reported. In January 2018 OnePlus experienced a data breach where the company’s website was hacked by the unknown attacker to steal payment and the credit card details up to 40,000 OnePlus customers.

In the digitally connected society, smartphones have become an extension to all of us. Advanced camera and video features are playing a massive role in this. Users can take out their phones to capture the moment with just a single click. However, it’s a double-edged sword. These mobiles are continuously collecting, storing and sharing the information without our knowledge making it a jackpot to the hackers.

For the better understanding of how the smartphone cameras may be opening up the users up to the privacy risks, the Checkmarx Security Research Team cracked into the applications that control the camera to identify the potential abuse scenarios. The team began with the Google Pixel 2xl and Google Pixel 3 reaching the Google Camera App, ultimately finding multiple concerning vulnerabilities coming from permission bypass issues. After digging deeper, they also found that the same vulnerabilities impact the camera app of the other smartphone vendors in the Android ecosystem, namely Samsung presenting hundreds of millions of significant users across the world.

Google & Samsung Camera Vulnerabilities

After the detailed analysis, the research team found that the Google Camera App can be attacked through a rogue application that has no permissions to do so. Additionally, specific attack scenarios also enable storage permission policies, giving them access to stored videos and photos. The GPS metadata embedded in the images to locate the user by taking the picture or the video and parsing into proper EXIF data. This technique is applied to the Samsung devices too.

In doing so, they determined a way to enable the rogue application to force the camera permissions even if the phone is locked and the screen is off. They could do the same even when the user was in the middle of the call.

Mitigation Recommended

For proper mitigation and best practice, please ensure that all the apps on your devices are updated.

The owner of WhatsApp, Facebook, has recently warned about its security flaw.

 

The attackers attempted to execute snooping attack on both the iOS and the Android devices. They do it by exploiting the bug that lets them hide malicious code in the specially crafted MP4 video files. This flaw is classified to be of a critical severity ad it attacks an unknown code block of the MP4 Handler in WhatsApp. This boobytrapped clip can be used in remote code execution assault.

If the victim watches the video, the attackers can run a range of software on the phone, steal the sensitive information like the bank details, or target other people using your phone.

They can also run software which leads to the denial of service (DNS) attack, which in turn stops the victim from using the Internet, WhatsApp or other functions on their phones.

This flaw affects the android users running versions released before 2.19.274 and iOS users running versions released before 2.19.100. To be safe, we would recommend you to update your WhatsApp immediately.

How to protect yourself from being clobbered by hackers?

One way is to switch off auto-download feature for your media files in WhatsApp. Another way is to make sure that no one can send you dodgy videos. The WhatsApp has recently launched the new privacy feature which will stop you from being dragged into the groups you don’t want to be a part of. So starting from today, you get to choose who can add you to groups and who can’t. This helps you block dodgy people and stop your annoying friends from adding you into groups.

The update might be a frivolous feature, but its a great privacy feature because people in groups can see each other’s phone numbers. If you can control who adds you into the groups, then you have another way to protect your identity.

Where to find this feature?

1. Once you’ve updated your WhatsApp go to WhatsApp settings.

2. Scroll to Accounts.

3. Click on Privacy

4. Choose Groups.

5. You can now select who can add you into groups among the three available options. “Everyone” where it would be no different from what it is now or “My contacts” where only the ones in your contacts can add or “My contacts except” where you can exclude people from your contacts especially those annoying and dodgy contacts.

 

In a statement, WhatsApp wrote: “WhatsApp groups continue to connect family, friends, co-workers, classmates and more. As people turn to groups for essential conversations, users have asked for more control over their experience.
Today we’re introducing the new privacy setting and invite system to help you decide who can add you to groups.
With these new features, users will have more control over the group messages they receive.
These privacy features will be rolling out to some users today and will be available worldwide in the coming days to all those using the latest version of WhatsApp.”

 

It might sound ironic but yes, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account was hacked.

The Co-Founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, Jack Dorsey had to face an embarrassment as his account was hacked by the hackers named the chuckling squad.

Random tweets and posts were posted from Jack’s account. A series of offensive tweets, racist comments, praise for Fuhrer Hitler and bomb at the twitter headquarters were posted. The hackers named themselves the Chuckling squad. They even shared the link to the discord server where the hackers were bragging about the hack just before the attack taking place.

Twitter later confirmed that they regained the control of the account within 30 minutes and quashed the bomb threat. Later that evening the team came out with the statement blaming Dorsey’s mobile phone company for this attack. As the company let an unauthorized person tweet via text message.

How did this happen???

According to the description, the attack appears to be a sim swap attack. the telecommunication network issue sim cards as identity cards to their users by . Sim Swap happens when the hacker could convince the telecom to switch a particular phone number to a different sim card. This usually happens by tricking the low-level employees or by bribing them.

Click to Join

But this is not exactly that happen in this attack. Cyber security researcher Kevin Beaumont said that the account seems to be attacked by a third party called Cloudhopper which twitter gained 10 years ago. Cloudhopper allows users to tweet through messages. It had access to Jack’s account which made easy for the attackers to tweet through text messages.

This incident raised concerns about how social media user’s, even the prominent ones can be hacked and used for misinformation.

The fact that the platform’s owner took 30 minutes to regain control is perplexing. This incident makes us think twice about our account safety. This is not the first time for the CEO of a Company to suffer an attack. Back in 2016, another hacking group known as OurMine security hacked celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg, Sunder Pichai including Dorsey and Travis Kalanick.

Google uncovers a set of websites which were installing malwares into the iPhones. The websites had malwares targeting only iPhones users. According to their report these websites were visited more than a thousand times till now. They were active for pretty long time now.

Yes its true, a terrifying report from the Google researchers confirms that your iPhones may be hacked by visiting innocent-looking websites. The cyber security researchers from Google’s Project Zero has uncovered a set of websites that were secretly hacking iPhones for years now.

iPhone users don’t have to do anything to get hacked. Their iPhones get hacked by merely visiting these websites. Another bad news is that these websites have thousands of visitors every week and none of the users has any idea that they were getting hacked.

The researchers stated that the attack has been carried out by a set of websites that targeted only iPhone users landing them in these pages without any discrimination. The attackers could even install a monitoring plant into the user’s phones and easily access their devices.

Apple has no idea about this attack existence in the first place let alone about the fact that it has been taking place for years now. This is called a Zero-day attack as the company has no idea about this attack which made it easier for the attackers to exploit the iPhones.

The trump card with the Zero-day attacks over normal attacks is that the company won’t have any knowledge of the existence of the malware which makes it a difficult fix.

Typically, it’s not easy to hack the iPhone devices. Hence the iPhone exploits are very expensive. The vulnerabilities in the iPhone’s OS, kernel, browser, and sandbox help malicious code to keep running.

According to BEER, Google has collected 5 iPhone devices from different chains and has found 14 vulnerabilities in these 5 devices of which 7 were in the safari browser,5 in the iOS kernel and 2 separate sandbox escape issues exploiting iOS 10 to iOS12. Two of these 14 vulnerabilities found in these chains were Zero-day and unpatched at the time of discovered. Surprisingly this campaign remained undetected for almost two years.

Though Apple has already patched most of the vulnerability exploits by uncovered iPhone exploits. we recommend you to always keep your devices up to date to avoid being the victims of such exploits.

Beware!!! A hidden malware has affected the most popular and widely used Android App. CamScanner, an Android phone-based PDF creating an app with 100 million+ user downloads has recently been found to be running a malicious module.

The CamScanner App had a recent update through which malware was installed into the user’s devices. The malware is not in the actual app but it’s in a third-party advertisement library module.

The Kaspersky security researchers found this malware after the users have reported some unusual behaviour in their mobile devices. They also posted negative comments on the play store indicating some unwanted features included over the past few months.

The Kaspersky researchers have come across this malware previously in some of the pre-installed apps of Chinese smartphones. Hence it became easy for them to identify this malware in the first place.

As soon as the Kaspersky researchers found this malware, they reported the Google play store about their findings. Google took down the free version of the CamScanner app promptly.

The attacker used a trojan dropper to install more malicious software into the user devices without them knowing. A Trojan dropper installs more malicious software into the user’s devices.

Once this malicious software has installed into the user devices, the attacker hijacks the user’s device, the attacker gains remote access to the user’s device. The attacker gains complete control of the user’s device including the user’s data, camera, and other information in the phone.

The attacker can steal all the sensitive information like the bank details and other important data in the user’s device. The attacker can operate the user’s device for any purpose they wish to use it for.

The CamScanner app developers have removed this malicious module, and the app has been reinstated.

The researchers advised that the version of the app varies for different devices and hence some of the devices may still contain the malware affected version in them.

The app developers stated that this malware has only affected the free version as the paid versions do not have a third-party advertisement library module in them. Hence google did not take down the paid version of the app.

Though Google has taken down the malicious app promptly, the last few years have been very challenging for Google to step up its efforts to take down all the potentially harmful apps and add more exacting malware checks for new apps. Any legitimate app can go, rogue, victimizing millions of users overnight.

From this attack, we can conclude that even from an official store, an app with good reputation, positive reviews, millions of downloads by millions of loyal user base can still turn into a malware overnight.

Therefore, we strongly recommend you to use a very good anti-virus on your device which can identify and block any malicious activity on your device.

While giving the app permissions make sure you allow only the ones that help with the functionality of the app.