Category: Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity overview – CESIN’s barometer

Cybersecurity overview
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The CESIN (Club of Information and digital security experts) just published the fourth edition of its annual barometer realized with OpinionWay within its 174 members, 84% are CISO (Chief information security officer) of big French companies. This annual study allows to better define the perception and reality of cybersecurity and its issues within the companies which are members of CESIN.

The most common cyberattacks and their impacts

During these twelve last months, although the attacks number tends to stabilize, 80% of the interviewed companies have been the victims of at least one cyberattack, and the consequences on the business (stopping of the production, unavailable website, revenue loss…) are more important than in 2017.

Each year, companies face five kinds of cyberattack on average.

Among the attacks suffered, phishing is the most frequent with 73% of companies affected, followed by the “Fake President” fraud with 50% of the respondents affected, then in third position is the ransomware and the malware infection.

Regarding cyber risks, Shadow IT is the most frequently encountered risk, 64% of the interviewed CISO estimate that this is a threat to deal with. Indeed, the implementation and use of non-approved and often free applications can escape the control of the Information systems department.

Cloud and IoT: the impact of the digital transformation on the security of Information systems

For 98% of the companies, digital transformation has a real impact on the security of Information and data systems and increases the cyberattacks’ perimeter. Particularly through the important use of Cloud, used by 87% of the companies, of which 52% store their data in public Clouds.

This use of Cloud represents an important risk because of the lack of control from the hosting provider regarding the company’s data (through administrators or others), or regarding the subcontracting chain used by the hosting provider, or even regarding the data not deleted. For 89% of the CISO, these issues imply the use of complementary securing tools to the ones proposed by the service provider in order to secure the data stored in the Cloud.

Concerning IoT (Internet of Things), the race for innovation and the increasingly common use of connected things lead to the apparition of new cybersecurity threats, notably due to security flaws in these devices.

A cyber resilience to develop

To face these cyber risks, the CISO develop many technical solutions.

However, despite all these solutions, the CISO are less confident comparing to last year regarding the company’s capacity to face these cyber risks, and less than one out of two estimates that their company is prepared to manage a large scale cyberattack. And yet, only 12% have implemented a real cyber resilience program, it is in process for 33% and 34% are planning to implement one.

Three essentially human issues for the future of the cybersecurity

  • Awareness of the user

According to 61% of the interviewed CISO, the main issue for the future of the cybersecurity is the training and the awareness of the users to the cybersecurity issue. According to the respondents, “even if the employees are aware, they are still not involved enough and do not necessarily follow the recommendations. An important education work remains.”

  • Governance of the cybersecurity

For 60% of the respondents, the governance of the cybersecurity needs to be placed at the right level. Although the compliance to the GDPR allowed the companies to be aware of the data protection issues, the confidence in the ability of the executive committee to take into account the cybersecurity issues stays uneven depending on the activity sectors.

  • Human resources

The lack of Information system security profiles observed by 91% of the CISO, is a real challenge for the companies while 50% of these companies plan to increase the workforce allocated to cybersecurity.

Global risks 2019: Climate and cyber risks at the heart of concerns

Global risks 2019
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Upstream to the Annual Meeting in Davos that took place on January 22 to 25 in Switzerland, the World Economic Forum presented its Global Risks Report, a report which highlights the main global risks and issues, based on a survey of 1000 international decision-makers from the public sector, private sector, academia and civil society. So what are the main risks that the World is facing?

Cyber risks in the top 5

For the third year in a row, environment-related risks are at the top of the decision-makers’ concerns. They hold the top three of the risks likely to occur in 2019, followed by technology risks which are Data fraud or theft in 4th place, and cyberattacks in 5th.

Thus in 2019, 82% of the interviewed experts expect data and money theft, and 80% expect services and infrastructures disruptions resulting from cyberattacks.

The 5 risks most likely to occur according to experts

  1. Extreme weather events
  2. Failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation
  3. Natural disasters
  4. Data fraud or theft
  5. Cyberattacks

The top 10 risks in terms of impact

  1. Weapons of mass destruction
  2. Failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation
  3. Extreme weather events
  4. Water crisis
  5. Natural disasters
  6. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse
  7. Cyberattacks
  8. Critical information infrastructure breakdown
  9. Man-made environmental disasters
  10. Spread of infectious diseases

Cyberattacks take the 7th place, and the critical information infrastructure breakdown the 8th place of the ranking, hence making it into the top 10.

Regarding technology, Børge Brende, the World Economic Forum’s President highlights that “Technology continues to play a profound role in shaping the global risks landscape. Concerns about data fraud and cyber-attacks were prominent again in the GRPS, which also highlighted a number of other technological vulnerabilities: around two-thirds of respondents expect the risks associated with fake news and identity theft to increase in 2019”. These concerns result from 2018 being traumatized by the increase of massive cyberattacks, breaches in IT security systems of States, massive data theft and the increase of artificial intelligence’s use for carrying out cyberattacks always more powerful.

Cyberattacks, the companies more and more efficient

Cyber resilience- Cyberattacks, the companies more and more efficient
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Last September, Accenture published the research “Gaining Ground On the Cyber Attacker 2018 State of Cyber Resilience” and highlighted the doubling of the cyberattacks number suffered by the companies (232 on average in 2018 versus 106 in 2017 at international level), but also the improvement of the companies’ ability to identify and counter these attacks.

The attacks number has more than doubled between 2017 and 2018…

This research deserves attention as it differentiates from many very alarmist reports. If everything is not perfect, in particular due to the ingenuity and increasing complexity of the attacks, the companies continue to improve their defense capacity, were able to strengthen their cyber resilience and stood efficient despite the threats. The companies are able to defend themselves better, particularly by detecting the attacks much earlier.

… But where a third of the attacks were successful in 2017, the part of successful attacks decreased to 1 on 8 (12,5%) in 2018.

A report that blows hot and cold

Security teams have made great progress but there is still more work to be done. Companies now prevent 87% of all targeted attacks, but are still facing two to three security breaches per month on average.

Companies might be cyber resilient in two to three years, but the pressure and the threats’ complexity increase every day. If 90% of the respondents expect the investment in cybersecurity to increase in the next 3 years, only 31% think that it will be sufficient.

The new technologies are essential, but the investments are lagging behind. If 83% of the respondents agreed that new technologies are essential, only two out of five are investing in AI, machine learning and automation technologies.

Confidence around cybersecurity measures remains high, but a more proactive approach of the cybersecurity is needed. If more than 80% of the respondents are confident in their capacity to monitor breaches, on the other hand 71% said that cyberattacks are still a bit of a black box, they do not know how or when they will affect their organization.

The board of directors and management are more engaged with cybersecurity. 27% of cybersecurity budgets are authorized by the board of directors and 32% by the CEO. The role and responsibilities of the CISO must improve towards more transversality in the company.

5 steps to cyber resilience

Accenture highlights five steps to optimize the companies’ defense and move towards the ultimate aim of cyber resilience in a world that continues to change towards new threats territories (artificial intelligence, omnipresence of the cloud, social networks, smartphones, internet of things) for more and more complex threats difficult to counter and a need becoming strategic: the data protection.

  • Build a strong foundation by identifying high value assets, in order to better protect them including from internal risks. It is necessary to ensure that controls are implemented throughout the value chain of the company.
  • Test the IT security by training cybersecurity teams to the best hackers’ techniques. The role plays staging an attack and defense team with training coaches can allow to bring out the improvement points.
  • Employ new technologies. For a company, it is recommended to invest in technologies able to automate cyber defense and in particular to use the new generation of identity management which relies on multi-factor authentication and the user behavior monitoring.
  • Be proactive and anticipate threats by developing a strategic team (“threat intelligence”) in charge of evolving an intelligent security operation center (SOC) relying on a collect and mass analysis of the data (“data-driven approach”).
  • Evolve the role of the CISO (Chief information security officer). The CISO is closer to professions, they find the right balance between security and risk taking and they communicate more and more with the executive management, which now holds 59% of the security budget versus 33% a year ago.

Conclusion

The Accenture study highlights a real growing awareness on cyber threats by companies, and the implementation of investment to better protect themselves. The race is now launched to tend to cyber resilience, between more and more organized attackers and more and more sophisticated defense system. See you at the end of the year to make an assessment of the forces involved.

The DNS KSK-2010 security key revocation by ICANN, it’s this week!

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After the first changing of the cryptographic key in last October, it is now, on January 11, that the old KSK key (Key Signing Key) of the root zone will be deactivated.

The process initiated in October 2018 to improve the security of the root zone, with the deployment of the Key Signing Key-2017, finds its achievement with the revoking of the root of the old key KSK-2010.

As indicated by Paul Hoffman, ICANN’s Principal Technologist, “The ICANN organization does not expect problems with the revocation. However, this is the first time a KSK in the Domain Name System (DNS) root has been revoked, so the ICANN org and the DNS technical community will be watching carefully for at least 48 hours after the publication of the revoked KSK-2010.”

To note, during the rollover on October, the negative impacts were extremely limited and it would seem that only two Internet services providers were impacted by interruptions during the process.

Of course, ICANN encourages solutions providers to no longer ship KSK-2010 in their products. ICANN should later publish a white paper about the full rollover process, including the lessons learned from this operation. ICANN communities will then be able to open discussions regarding upcoming rollovers that could happen.

GDPR – What is the impact on your SSL certificates?

GDPR – What is the impact on your SSL certificates?
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The European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect on 25th May and its impact on the management of your SSL certificates portfolio is not neutral.

All Certification Authorities have previously always relied on the WHOIS of the domain name that needs to be certified in order to validate that the certificate applicant has the domain name technical operator’s agreement.

In order to validate an order, one of the authentication steps involved sending an email to one of the email addresses (admin or technical) found on the WHOIS.

However, the GDPR has left its mark and registrars no longer have the right to provide domain name owner personal data without the owner’s explicit consent. This means that the WHOIS database is unusable in terms of Certification Authorities being able to send out validation emails.

Faced with this situation, the Certification Authorities propose sending domain validation emails to one of the following generic addresses by default:

admin@domain.com
administrator@domain.com
postmaster@domain.com
webmaster@domain.com
hostmaster@domain.com

What if none of these addresses exist or is it too complicated to create?

There is an alternative solution. The Certification Authorities are able to validate that you have the domain name technical operator’s agreement through TXT record verification in the DNS zone of the domain name to be certified.

By verifying the presence of this TXT record, the Certification Authority is able to:

  • issue the certificate if it is a simple DV certificate (Domain validation)
  • continue to the next authentication steps if it is an OV (Organization Validation) or EV (Extended Validation) certificate.

Even with this in mind, the GDPR is changing the game and is having a significant impact on the SSL industry.
If the generic email validation method is not possible and we have to use TXT record verification method then we will indeed see an increase in certificate processing times.

What are the benefits of using Nameshield to manage your SSL certificates portfolio?

As a Registrar, Nameshield offers a unique market advantage for its SSL clients.
Nameshield carries out a pre-authentication process before each order reaches the Certificate Authority. This makes it possible to anticipate any blocking factors and if necessary to act quickly to resolve them:

  • Modification of a WHOIS
  • Edition of the zone to set up a TXT record (if the DNS are those of Nameshield)
  • Creation of alias admin @, administrator @, webmaster @, postmaster @, hostmaster @ (if the MX are those of Nameshield)

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call our dedicated SSL service.