Insights blog.

On Thursday, February 23rd, Cloudflare announced a serious bug in its caching infrastructure that caused uninitialized memory to be printed on a number of its customers’ websites. This information included sensitive data such as passwords, cookies, tokens, private messages, and while it believes the bug was limited to roughly a thousand websites, it caused sensitive data to be dumped from potentially any Cloudflare reverse proxy customer. Some observers have stated this issue has similarities with “Heartbleed” and have thus referred to it as “Cloudbleed.”

Over the past couple of weeks, a major issue has surfaced affecting numerous companies that use MongoDB to store their data. Those who install MongoDB on a server and use default settings are exposing their data to the internet and allowing anybody to browse the databases, download information, and erase them entirely. Many companies are unaware of the vulnerability and that their information may be exposed to hackers. Criminals are reacting quickly and opportunistically by stealing data, then asking for a ransom. To make matters worse, some criminals asking for a ransom don’t actually have the data, so when the ransom is paid, companies are still left without answers. In addition to MongoDB, it was reported that clusters of Elasticsearch, an enterprise search engine has also been hit with ransomware.

Given the financial, reputational, and legal harm that can arise from cyber breaches, corporate shareholders and investors are increasingly concerned about the cybersecurity of the companies in their investment portfolio. How will investors begin to engage with companies on this issue?

Boards today have a vested interest in the cybersecurity posture of their companies. Because of this, board members are increasingly interested in being briefed on top cybersecurity threats and understanding the countermeasures that should be taken to avoid them.

A new security vulnerability in an older version of TLS / SSL was announced this week and has been named “DROWN” by its authors (Decrypting RSA with Obsolete and Weakened eNcryption). It’s estimated to affect up to 11 million servers using the TLS / SSL protocol, from websites to e-mail servers. This unique attack allows a third-party who has intercepted encrypted traffic between a client and an unaffected server, such as one only supporting TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2, to use another server that is using the same RSA private / public key-pair to act as an oracle to decrypt the intercepted traffic. This leads to a larger attack surface than would normally be exposed if the vulnerability were isolated to a single host since it allows an adversary to perform a “cross-protocol” attack by taking advantage of servers sharing the same TLS / SSL certificates.

Bitsight’s Third Annual Bitsight Insights Industry Benchmarking Report looked at some of the major SSL vulnerabilities affecting organizations, including Heartbleed, POODLE and FREAK. Bitsight’s analysis found that a sizeable number of companies across all industries were still running services that were vulnerable to these flaws. As mentioned in our report, businesses can leverage this information as a measure to ensure that proper controls are being met internally. In addition, companies can gain insight into the performance of their key third party vendors when it comes to ensuring that they aren’t running vulnerable services.

Recent breaches making headlines all share a troubling characteristic. In each breach detailed below, the intrusions of company networks lasted months - or in other cases, even longer than a year. While no company is impervious to a breach, one thing organizations can control is how quickly they respond to security incidents. The longer compromises remain neglected and unresolved, the more likely that a large-scale breach will occur, resulting in significant data loss.

Last week San Francisco became the information security capital of the world for the 2015 RSA Conference. Around 30,000 attendees, mostly security professionals and vendors, descended on the Moscone Center for a week of discussion about the industry and new technologies. With literally too many talks for one person to attend, it’s hard to build a session schedule. Yet, as with any industry conference, there are key themes that arise in sessions, conversations, and the show floor. As a first time attendee who tried to make the most of my first RSA Conference, here are my three key observations on the industry:

In recent years, the US government has become a leading advocate for continuous monitoring of security threats and vulnerabilities. But how effectively are departments and agencies in implementing these programs? And how do we measure success?

There has been a lot of debate recently about the role of senior executives and boards in managing cyber risk. If you’re involved in advising either of these groups today on cybersecurity, I urge you to focus on one thing: tugboats. 

Microsoft has announced that it is removing SSLv3 support in both Internet Explorer (according to VentureBeat) and Azure Storage (according to Redmond Mag) on Tuesday, February 10. The company is not the first to stop supporting the technology, but this announcement should be one of the final straws for companies still supporting it.

In his 2015 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama mentioned the importance of improving America's cybersecurity and what he believes it will take to make it happen. Below is a review of the most interesting statements and initiatives mentioned in the address or recent media coverage, and the potential impact each could have on American Information Security.

During last month's SANS webinar, Quantifying Security Performance: The What, Why and How of Security Ratings, Bitsight CTO and Co-Founder Stephen Boyer answered questions from attendees. Here are some of the most interesting questions people posed, and our answers for each one. There are also two clips from the webinar recording.

The last couple of years have been tough on higher education systems in terms of cyber security. In 2012, in particular, there was a near-record-high number of data breaches, with nearly two million exposed records reported. The following year saw Maricopa Community College in Arizona experience a data breach that affected 2.4 million people. In 2014, there have already been several high-profile .EDU data breaches. In our latest Bitsight Insights report, we found that many universities are struggling to secure their networks due to unique IT infrastructure requirements and persistent security problems. 

On July 21, 2014, Brian Krebs (once again) broke the news of a potentially major retail breach. Goodwill Industries and its 165 independent agencies across North America appear to be the most recent victims in the seemingly plagued retail industry.