10 Cyber Security Questions with Radware’s Pascal Geenens
by Pascal Geenens
Radware’s Pascal Geenens walks us through 10 questions regarding the cyber security threat landscape, trends in the Darknet, motivations for attacks, and much more.
Q: What is the defining trend for the 2017 threat landscape?
The Internet of Things (IoT). Everyone will remember the epic attacks against Krebs, OVH and Dyn last year. DDoS attacks with new historical volumes of up to and beyond 600Gbps performed by large armies of 100,000s of IoT devices. The Mirai botnet played a lead role in these attacks. Mirai was devised to target and infect IoT devices which have their telnet access open and which can be easily compromised through factory default credentials. The deplorable security posture of IoT devices such as IP cameras and DVRs provide for easy victims. The fault is not on the consumer or the end-users; some of the devices would not even allow a user to change the factory default credentials through the admin GUI or even allow disabling of the telnet service. While consumers are not aware of the dangers of deploying the new smart technology that are invading their homes, they are exposing themselves to cyber-attacks and cyber ransom campaigns, while at the same time participating in the large scale DDoS attacks against online businesses and corporations.
Still today, and I’m sure for next couple of months, we are discovering new strains of Mirai as well as new botnets that are using techniques introduced by Mirai. Only few days ago researchers found a Windows malware that is supposed to provide a helper function to accelerate the harvesting of new victims for Mirai botnets. The Windows malware does not expose any bot-like behavior, all it does is scan for new victims and report them to the scan and load service from the Mirai botnet.
Read more: http://ow.ly/UAmp309hQq1
