A few months ago, the CyberBrief reported on an early 2018 incident where a Chinese hacker managed to get his (or her, or their) way into the servers of a contractor working for the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center and steal nearly a terabyte of data. Yeah, that was a bad day. This, among other more recent incidents, has the government concerned that the cybersecurity industry hasn’t done enough to protect the vulnerable U.S. supply chain. And it’s probably true. According to a recent DoD report, while most cyber research is pretty heavy on things like cloud, data management and other IT services, the supply chain is often overlooked. But, considering the “infinite number of touch points” on a supply chain that can be exploited or corrupted, the time to secure our supply chains is now.

On Oct 4, Bloomberg reported that China had infected multiple U.S. bound products, including some sold by juggernauts like Amazon and Apple. This allegation has been vigorously denied by all the named companies, including the US Government but nonetheless, the article highlights very clearly how a supply chain attack like this could occur. Jennifer Bisceglie, head of Interos Solutions, asserts that “the average consumer does not really understand that technologies may be sharing information to Russia, China or North Korea.” And that’s a big deal considering that nearly 51 percent of all shipments to the top seven IT suppliers originate in China. So, what can we do about it? Well for starters, we all need to know where our important components are coming from. “Once a business understands who and where they are sourcing from, they might change who they partner with,” added Bisceglie.

Ignorance is bliss. But that bliss could cost us everything.

P.S. – We think Jennifer Bisceglie is pretty cool. In case you missed it, she was a featured speaker at the 2018 NCC Cyber Symposium. Fist bump to Jennifer…

There’s no doubt that social media has given a voice and a platform for millions of people who may have otherwise been unseen and unheard. While social media companies may (or may not) be altruistic at heart, the same platforms provide the perfect ecosystem for bad actors and motivated political campaigns to use marketing, manipulation and “psychographic targeting” to sway elections. Yeah, we know you’ve heard it before but as the data unfolds from Cambridge Analytica and the like, the picture of technological deception becomes more pervasive than any of us imagined.

Last week, social media giant Twitter published an archive of a whopping 10 million tweets from phony troll accounts sent between 2013 and 2018. (yup…that includes the election year, 2016) The tweets originated from over 3,800 different accounts connected with the Russian Internet Research Agency, and another 770 accounts are said to have originated from Iran. Researchers assert that the Russian trolls use the exact same techniques that drive genuine engagement and activism online. It’s pretty clear that part of our job as the cybersecurity community is to do whatever we can to continue to give a voice to the digitally marginalized, while doubling down on stopping the bad guys and keep from weakening our democracy when it matters most.

Last week, we reported on Facebook’s worst-ever security breach. As many as 30 million users have been affected by the breach and hackers have successfully accessed 29 million of them. Even so, hackers weren’t able to gain access to any third-party app data, something that could have had even more serious consequences. Facebook published a blog post to give more details. Here’s what we know…

For 15 million users, usernames and contact information was compromised. For another 14 million users, additional information was accessed, including education, work, gender, religion hometown, and more. Private messages, it appears, were not hacked. Still, this is a huge deal for Facebook. If you want to check to see if you are one of the 30 million Facebookers hacked, you can do so by accessing their Help Center.

Remember that Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day? Yeah, well…that for Facebook. The world’s biggest social media platform suffered another security breach as a staggering 50 million users were compromised by a sophisticated zero-day exploit that allowed hackers to steal account access. So, if you woke up anxious to check on Grumpy Cat’s (that’s the famous online cat, as if you didn’t know?) status and found yourself locked out of your Facebook account, you definitely weren’t alone. The social media giant admitted that an unknown hacker made away with secret access tokens for a user base as big as the population of Spain. As a security measure, Facebook reset all access tokens for the affected accounts, requiring users to login to Facebook and any apps that use Facebook for credentials.

Ned? Ned Ryerson! (classic Bill Murray)

Three twenty-something hackers were nabbed for creating and spreading the notorious Mirai botnet, a sophisticated piece of IoT malware. Mirai was originally designed to hack the popular video game, Minecraft, but when the source code was released in the wild, it didn’t take long for serious bad actors to get a hold of it and put it to use on much more nefarious hacks. In a Mr. Robot-style twist, rather than face serious jail time, the young hackers agreed to help the FBI investigate and neutralize other complex cybercrime cases. And it worked. The trio were credited, in part, for the 2017 takedown of the dangerous Kelihos botnet. The case of the Mirai Three demonstrates the government’s commitment to “hold criminals accountable while encouraging offenders to choose a different path to apply their skills.”