In 2016, Europol, the Netherlands Police and leading anti-virus companies joined forces to create the No More Ransom project, which to date has helped over 6 million ransomware victims recover their files and avoid paying €1billion in ransom. The nomoreransom.org website provides advice for individuals and businesses on how to protect themselves against ransomware andRead more
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A hacker tried to poison the water supply in Oldsmar, Florida by dumping caustic soda into the water by adjusting the SCADA system in control of the water treatment plant. On Friday 5th February, an operator at the water plant noticed the mouse on his screen moving and accessing the control system software for theRead more
An innovative American insurance company, Corvus, has reported a drop of 65% in ransomware claims after they started insisting on vulnerability scans of the client’s network before providing cyber-insurance. Lauren Winchester of Corvus states in a recent blog post: Our automated scan locates threats like unprotected RDP upon quoting for new business and we notifyRead more
Server hardening is a set of disciplines and techniques which improve the security of an ‘off the shelf’ server. Server Hardening is requirement of security frameworks such as PCI-DSS and is typically included when organisations adopt ISO27001. What is the attack surface The aim of server hardening is to reduce the attack surface ofRead more
After analysing dozens of ransomware incidents over the last 4 years, researchers have identified their defining common characteristics – which can help security managers design targeted defences. Mandiant Intelligence have published a report that reveals the common attributes of ransomware incidents from around the world and across the industrial spectrum. The key findings are:Read more
Researchers have identified new attack vectors which leverage the RDP drive sharing feature to perform fileless attacks and plant malware. A standard feature of the Microsoft RDP implementation is the ability to share a drive from the client machine. This appears as a network share to the server device at \\tsclient. An attacker who wasRead more
Bluekeep is serious vulnerability in the RDP protocol affecting Windows systems. After months of waiting, active exploits have now been spotted in the wild for the first time, attempting to install cryptomining malware on the vulnerable systems. Security researcher Kevin Beaumont has been running a network of honeypots in an attempt to capture Bluekeep malware inRead more
Recent research from Sophos highlights your public RDP server as the primary attack vector against your data centre. During April and May 2019, Sophos deployed 10 standard out-of-the-box configured Windows 2019 servers into AWS data centres around the world. By default, Windows 2019 has RDP enabled. They configured each server with uncrackably long passwords andRead more
Microsoft included a fix for a serious RDP remote code execution vulnerability known as BlueKeep in the May patch Tuesday update. The vulnerability, which has become known as BlueKeep or CVE-2019-0708, remains unpatched on millions of internet connected systems. It affects all Windows-NT based operating systems ranging from Windows 2000 and Windows XP up toRead more
The Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is a favoured tool for many systems administrators, as it allows a connection to be made to another computer on your network and see the screen and use the mouse and keyboard as if you were physically sat in front of it. This means that for many, if not most,Read more
