The hacking of the systems of the luxury hotel chain follows similar breaches of point-of-sale systems at various hotels and retailers like Hyatt Hotels, Target, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and Hilton Worldwide Holdings.

Omni — in Dallas, Texas — said in a statement Friday that on May 30 this year, it discovered it was hit by malware attacks on its network, affecting specific POS systems on-site at some of its properties. “The malware was designed to collect certain payment card information, including cardholder name, credit/debit card number, security code and expiration date,” Omni said. There isn’t evidence that other customer information, such as contact information, Social Security numbers or PINs, was compromised, it added.

The chain did not disclose how many of its 60 properties were affected and the likely number of cardholders that could have been affected. As there is no indication that reservation or select guest membership systems were affected, users were unlikely to be affected unless they physically presented their payment card at a POS system at one of the affected locations. The malware may have been in operation between Dec. 23 last year and June 14 this year, although most of the systems were affected during a shorter timeframe, according to the hotel.

The hotel chain, which operates hotels and resorts in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, could not be immediately reached for comment over the weekend for further details.

Omni said after discovering the malware attack, it had immediately hired IT investigation and security firms and has now contained the intrusion. It did not specify why it had delayed to inform customers.

Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/omni-hotels-reports-hacking.html

On April 30, the House’s Technology Service Desk informed users about an increase in ransomware-related emails on third-party email services like Yahoo Mail and Gmail.

“The House Information Security Office is taking a number of steps to address this specific attack,” the Technology Service Desk said in an email obtained and published by Gizmodo. “As part of that effort, we will be blocking access to Yahoo Mail on the House Network until further notice.”

The ban on Yahoo Mail access suggests that some House of Representatives workers accessed Yahoo mailboxes from their work computers. This raises questions: Are House workers using Yahoo Mail for official business, and, if they’re not, are they allowed to check their private email accounts on work devices?

If they use the same devices for both personal and work activities, one would hope that there are access controls in place to separate the work and personal data. Otherwise, if they are allowed to take those devices outside of the House’s network, they could just as easily become infected there, where the ban is not in effect.

“The recent attacks have focused on using .js files attached as ZIP files to e-mail that appear to come from known senders,” the House’s Technology Service Desk said. “The primary focus appears to be through Yahoo Mail at this time.”

The increase in ZIP and RAR attachments that contain malicious JavaScript (JS) files has been observed by multiple security companies in recent months. Microsoft offers several recommendations, like using the Windows AppLocker group policy to restrict the execution of .JS files.

The House Information Security Office also banned access to appspot.com, the domain name used by applications hosted on the Google App Engine platform, Reuters reported.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/u-s-house-of-representatives-block-yahoo-and-google-apps.html

Knowledge about threats is often hidden in unstructured sources such as blogs, research reports and documentation, said Kevin Skapinetz, director of strategy for IBM Security.

“Let’s say tomorrow there’s an article about a new type of malware, then a bunch of follow-up blogs,” Skapinetz explained. “Essentially what we’re doing is training Watson not just to understand that those documents exist, but to add context and make connections between them.”

Over the past year, IBM Security’s own experts have been working to teach Watson the “language of cybersecurity,” he said. That’s been accomplished largely by feeding it thousands of documents annotated to help the system understand what a threat is, what it does and what indicators are related, for example.

“You go through the process of annotating documents not just for nouns and verbs, but also what it all means together,” Skapinetz said. “Then Watson can start making associations.”

Now IBM aims to accelerate the training process. This fall, it will begin working with students at universities including California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, Penn State, MIT, New York University and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County along with Canada’s universities of New Brunswick, Ottawa and Waterloo.

Over the course of a year, the program aims to feed up to 15,000 new documents into Watson every month, including threat intelligence reports, cybercrime strategies, threat databases and materials from IBM’s own X-Force research library. X-Force represents 20 years of security research, including details on 8 million spam and phishing attacks and more than 100,000 documented vulnerabilities.

Watson’s natural language processing capabilities will help it make sense of those reams of unstructured data. Its data-mining techniques will help detect outliers, and its graphical presentation tools will help find connections among related data points in different documents, IBM said.

Ultimately, the result will be a cloud service called Watson for Cyber Security that’s designed to provide insights into emerging threats as well as recommendations on how to stop them.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/ibms-watson-to-get-schooled-on-cybersecurity.html

Researchers from security firm PhishLabs claim that they’ve found 11 such applications since the beginning of 2016 hosted on Google Play, most of them created by the same group of attackers.

The apps are simple, yet effective. They load Web pages containing log-in forms that look like the target companies’ websites. These pages are loaded from domain names registered by the attackers, but because they are loaded inside the apps, users don’t see their actual location.

In some cases attackers registered domain names that are similar to those of the impersonated online payment services, PhishLab Security Threat Analyst Joshua Shilko said in a blog post.

More recently, attackers used domain names similar to those of cryptocurrency companies, suggesting that the cryptocurrency industry is also targeted.

PhishLabs did not name the exact payment card companies and online payment services whose users were targeted by these fake apps. However, most of those companies provide links to their official mobile applications on their websites and users should always use those links instead of manually searching for them on the Play store.

“In one case, a targeted company explicitly states on their website that no mobile application exists for their company and that users should be wary of any mobile application using their brand,” Shilko said.

The danger is that if phishers manage to routinely bypass Google’s review process and upload such apps to the Google Play store, their attacks might extend to other industries in the future.

Another problem is that even when these apps are detected by third-parties and reported, it can take several days for Google to remove them from the app store, leaving a sufficiently large window of opportunity for attackers. It’s not clear how attackers promote these fake apps or if they rely only on users finding them themselves, but in general phishing attacks are most effective during the first several hours after they’re launched.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/phishing-apps-continue-to-play-google-play.html

Since August, the group has been engaged in an attack campaign focused on defense contractors, according to security researchers from Kaspersky Lab.

During this operation, the group has used a new version of a backdoor program called AZZY and a new set of data-stealing modules. One of those modules monitors for USB storage devices plugged into the computer and steals files from them based on rules defined by the attackers.

The Kaspersky Lab researchers believe that this module’s goal is to defeat so-called network air gaps, network segments where sensitive data is stored and which are not connected to the Internet to limit their risk of compromise.

However, it’s fairly common for employees in organizations that use such network isolation policies to move data from air-gapped computers to their workstations using USB thumb drives.

Pawn Storm joins other sophisticated cyberespionage groups, like Equation and Flame, that are known to have used malware designed to defeat network air gaps.

“Over the last year, the Sofacy group has increased its activity almost tenfold when compared to previous years, becoming one of the most prolific, agile and dynamic threat actors in the arena,” the Kaspersky researchers said in a blog post. “This activity spiked in July 2015, when the group dropped two completely new exploits, an Office and Java zero-day.”

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/pawn-storm-hacking-group-develops-new-tools-for-cyberespionage.html

The company recommended deleting the apps but did not name them, which may make it hard for people to know which apps put their data at risk.

The apps in question installed their own digital certificates on a person’s Apple mobile device. It would enable the apps to terminate an encrypted connection between a device and a service and view the traffic, which is a potential security risk.

Most websites and many apps use SSL/TLS (Secure Socket Layer/Transport Security Layer), a protocol that encrypts data traffic exchanged with a user. SSL/TLS is a cornerstone of Web security, ensuring data traffic that is intercepted is unreadable.

It is possible in some cases to interfere with an encrypted connection. Many enterprises that want to analyze encrypted traffic for security reasons will use SSL proxies to terminate a session at the edge of their network and initiate a new one with their own digital certificate, allowing them to inspect traffic for malicious behavior.

In that scenario, employees would likely be more aware or expect that kind of monitoring. But people downloading something from the App Store probably would have no idea of the access granted to their sensitive data traffic.

Apple checks applications to ensure that malicious ones are not offered in its store. Those checks are in large part the reason why Apple has had fewer problems with malicious mobile applications in its store.

Installing digital certificates isn’t itself a malicious action per se, but Apple may be concerned that users are not fully aware of the consequences of allowing an app to do so.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/apple-removes-data-spying-apps-from-store.html

A Reddit discussion has heard from furious users who spotted that the simplified policy effectively gives the company permission to sell its mailing lists to third parties for fun and profit.

AVG stated under ‘Do You Share My Data?’ in the Q&A about the new policy, which is automatically enforced on 15 October: “Yes, though when and how we share it depends on whether it is personal data or non-personal data. AVG may share non-personal data with third parties and may publicly display aggregate or anonymous information.”

AVG has hit back at the criticism in a blog post today, by which we mean confirmed that its stance is correct, explaining: “Usage data allows [AVG] to customize the experience for customers and share data with third parties that allow them to improve or develop new products.

“Knowing that 10 million users like a certain TV program gives broadcasters the data to get producers to make more of that type of program.

“This is also how taxi firms know how to distribute their fleets, and how advertisers know where to place banners and billboards, for example. Even at AVG, we have published non-personal information that we have collected regarding app performance.”

But AVG added in big, bold type: “We do not, and will not, sell personally identifiable data to anyone, including advertisers.”

This will placate some, but others fear that the lack of choice over this matter, which requires an active decision to opt out, is too clandestine. As ever, there are threats to move to everything from Linux Mint to the Commodore 64, some more serious than others.

Several Redditors have likened it to similar warnings in Windows 10′s Insider Programme which essentially say: ‘we can track you … but we won’t, unless we do.’

Courtesy-TheInq