Amidst all the Corona Virus chaos, cyber hackers have yet to take a break from their malicious activities, disrupting services and stealing data from various organizations in 2021.
Mimecast, the email management and services provider, had an incident with the SolarWinds hacker group. The hacker group managed to gain access to Mimecast’s network and compromise a digital certificate used to authenticate and encrypt connections between its (Mimecast) systems and Microsoft Office 365. Mimecast advised clients of the threat on 26 January 2021 and that during their investigation it was found that some data may had been exfiltrated.
According to Mimecast: “Our investigation also showed that the threat actor accessed, and potentially exfiltrated, certain encrypted service account credentials created by customers hosted in the United States and the United Kingdom. These credentials establish connections from Mimecast tenants to on-premise and cloud services, which include LDAP, Azure Active Directory, Exchange Web Services, POP3 journaling, and SMTP-authenticated delivery routes.”
Customers using Microsoft 365 integration with Mimecast are to revoke the compromised digital certificate as soon as possible and re-authenticate the connections with a new digital certificate provided by Mimecast. – read more on Mimecast’s blog page
The African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC’s) conducted an internal investigation with the results finally released reporting over 4 million IP addresses stolen. AFRINIC is responsible for the allocation and management of IP addresses on the continent of Africa.
AFRINIC was contacted by the FNB (USA’s Federal Bureau of Investigation) back in 2019 and began investigating the incident two years ago. Prior to the FBI’s report, the provider was tipped off by internet Investigator Ron Guilmette. Local tech news publication, MyBroadband, working with Guilmette reported on the R1.3 Billion IP address heist implicating AFRICNIC co-founder and engineer Ernest Byaruhanga as the mastermind.
IP (internet protocol) addresses are part of what makes the internet work and allows devices to communicate efficiently with each other. An IP address is like a mailing/shipping address for computers. Public IP addresses are unique to the country, ISP and/or company they belong to. AFRINIC sells these addresses to Internet Service Providers (MWEB, Afrihost, Cool Ideas, Vumatel, etc.) and private institutions (banks, organisations, etc.) which can range from tens to thousands of unique variations, depending on their needs. – read more at Business Insider
Cyber Security is a multi-faceted industry where technology meets human engineering and intelligence. In the years since the birth of the internet, cyber security has evolved in leaps and bounds, keeping up with the ever-changing digital world. In 2021, we now need and utilise digital tools to protect the technological world we have built for ourselves, from the simple antivirus software installed on computers to advanced firewalls to protect networked devices and cloud AI/ML to detect and report malicious activity.
The weakest link, however, is still the component between the keyboard and the chair – the human being user. People are perfectly imperfect, meaning that no two people are exactly alike. We all see things with unique perspectives, learn differently, are faster or slower than the next person and have individual wants/needs, passions/desires and distastes/issues … the list goes on.
Hacking is an exploitation of these differences and individualities through a digital platform, taking advantage of personal emotions, connections, ignorance, fear, or anything else that may allow someone to manipulate another person. This presents a unique challenge to secure digital information when the security hazard is in fact the variable of human nature. – Read more at Bizcommunity.