Insights blog.

The situation between Russia and Ukraine has been escalating since the start of January, when Russia stationed more than 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian Border. Although cyber security is not the primary concern in the current situation, there is a cyber security component that absolutely should not be overlooked.

We believe a war in the region would have a direct impact on the cyber threat landscape. Both Poland and Lithuania have recently raised their countries' alert level, just hours after Ukraine reported its defense ministry and two banks had been hacked. In the US, CISA has issued a recommendation for all organizations, regardless of size, to adopt a heightened posture when it comes to cybersecurity. Meanwhile, Russia launched a full scale attack on Ukraine territory, which is still developing, and its full reach still remains to be seen.

To gauge the impact of flawed pseudorandom number generators in network devices, Bitsight scanned the public Internet for RSA public keys and was able to factor the public modulus and recover the private keys for 41,225 network devices. Bitsight has also found that the prevalence of such vulnerable devices on the Internet has been declining in recent years; however, many still pose a risk to organizations that lack security controls to prevent the inadvertent exposure of unmanaged network assets to the public Internet.

Since its advent in May 2019, BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) has been observed to pose risks to information security worldwide. It is a vulnerability associated with a wide range of Microsoft operating systems that affords a bad actor leverage to remotely execute malicious code on affected devices. Remediation involves updating to the latest Microsoft security patches released to mitigate BlueKeep. Sectors that use Microsoft products extensively and persist in using outdated software are particularly susceptible to this threat.

A few weeks ago Google confirmed that there was malware pre-installed on a number of Android devices due to a supply-chain attack. The latest installment was discovered by security researchers from Dr.Web who have been investigating this situation for several years as it was already theorized by security researchers back in July 2017 that these infections originated as part of a supply-chain attack. In this instance, these devices were pre-installed with Triada, a form of Android malware that has been studied and reported on by Kaspersky and most recently Google in its attempt to surface this critical information to users and the wider community.

Today ElevenPaths, the Telefónica Group’s global cybersecurity unit, released a report highlighting cybersecurity trends for the first half of 2019. As a follow-up to a November 2018 report, ElevenPaths again takes a close look at how cybersecurity is trending in Spain and compares statistics for Spain against the whole of Europe.

In Spain, cybersecurity is becoming more of a priority among businesses across all industries. One way to quantify these cybersecurity postures is by looking at Spain’s security ratings across all markets. In Spain, Bitsight Security Ratings are on average 119 points below Europe as a whole. The highest performing industry is Real Estate, which has a security rating of 71 security rating points better than the European average. The lowest performing industries are Financial Services and Insurance, which are more than 200 security rating points lower than the average European rating. Given the sensitive data financial services companies possess, this report suggests there is a need for additional investment in cybersecurity and cyber risk management. As companies invest in digital transformation programs, their exposure to risk increases and requires an increased investment in risk management across their organization. 

September marked a month of heated discussion concerning data privacy issues, with continuing coverage in the media regarding breaches at major, global institutions. Bitsight looked into the types of breaches experienced by the finance sector over three years of data to determine whether web application compromise is on the rise as well as the impact of these events.

Want to know what it’s like to be a data analyst? Check out this Q&A with a member of Bitsight’s data science team to learn about what he does at Bitsight, his experience, and more.

Check out this Q&A with one of Bitsight’s data scientists to learn about what she does as a part of our data science team, her experience, and more.

Want to know what it’s like to be a member of Bitsight’s data science team? Read this Q&A with Bitsight’s Senior Data Scientist, Tom Montroy, to learn about his job, experience, and more.