This Week In Cybersecurity

This week the U.S. Air Force invites hackers to try and hack into an orbiting satellite, your employer may be infecting your home network, sextortion pays big for scammers, an iOS vulnerability may have silently infected your device just by receiving an email, and this week’s tip will help you secure your home network.

Hack An Air Force Satellite

Since 2016, the U.S. military has hosted a bug bounty program to allow white-hat hackers to look for vulnerabilities in certain software. The programs, Hack the Pentagon, Hack the Army, and Hack the Air Force, have been popular and fruitful. Forbes reports that, thanks to the efforts of ethical hackers, the U.S. Department of Defense has managed to fix more than 12,000 vulnerabilities that might never have been found by the good guys.

These bug bounty programs have paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to the hackers who found bugs. Last year the U.S. Air Force asked hackers at the DEF CON security conference, to break into an F-15 fighter jet. The challenge was hosted through a partnership between the U.S. Department of Defense and the HackerOne hacking platform. Sixty participating hackers uncovered 460 vulnerabilities and earned $290,000 in bounties, reports Forbes.

This year, the Air Force is offering up a real, orbiting satellite to hackers. The first round of competition started this week with subsequent rounds of testing to see which hackers qualify to attack the live, orbiting satellite.

Is Working From Home A Threat To Your Home Network??

Fear that your work computer is a “zombie” computer controlled by a threat actor has likely not been high on the list of concerns for most new work-from-home employees in recent weeks. But the unfortunate fact is that your work computer might be the device that lets a threat actor into your home network. According to research conducted by cybersecurity companies, Arctic Security and Team Cymru, more than 50,000 U.S. organizations have sent their employees to a work-from-home environment with malware-infected computers.

To learn more about how this happened and what you can do to help protect your home network, read the following Between The Hacks blog



Sextortion Scammers Make Over $500k in 5 Months

As reported by BTH two weeks ago, sextortion attacks are again, on the rise. Cybersecurity company Sophos reports that, “Millions of ‘sextortion’ spam messages sent between Sept. 1, 2019 and Jan. 31, 2020 generated nearly a half-million US dollars in profits for Internet criminals.” Many of these spear-phishing attacks are extorting victims for as much as $800 USD of bitcoin.

This report not only shows how much money these attacks are making, but Sophos also follows the money to see where it goes. This interesting and detailed report shows how a large-scale phishing attack can be very profitable, even with a low response rate.

iOS Vulnerability Allows Attackers To Remotely Infect A Device Through Email

Cybersecurity automation company, ZecOps, reported on two vulnerabilities that are being exploited in the wild. These 0-day iOS vulnerabilities allow attackers to remotely infect an iOS device by sending an email that consumes a significant amount of memory. The email does not have to be opened by the owner of the device, just having the iOS email client receive the email is enough to exploit the vulnerability and infect the device. These vulnerabilities have existed in iOS since at least September of 2012.

Today, The Register reported that Apple has, “patched a pair of critical vulnerabilities in iOS that are being exploited by what appears to be government-backed hackers to spy on high-value targets.”

If you have not yet installed this patch, do so now, especially if you are a senior executive, journalist, managed security service provider, or an other high value target.

Tip of the Week

Test Your Home Network Security

We talk a lot about home network security in this blog. With a rapid increase in the number of IoT devices being installed in homes, and with so many people working from home now, the topic is more important than ever.

Today, I am going to recommend a free service from Steve Gibson of the Gibson Research Corporation (GRC), named Shields Up!. This is an online port scanner that is hosted by GRC so that users, like you and me, can scan the IP address of their router and see if any ports have been opened up in their firewall.

In a typical home, there should be no open ports and the report should show that your IP address is in stealth mode, where your IP address doesn’t even answer the queries of the scanner. Start out doing a scan of common ports and file sharing and move on to UPnP and some of the other scanning features. Gibson shares a lot of information and you’ll likely learn a bit while you verify the cybersecurity state of your firewall.

Picture of the Week