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Meet The Founder Who Is Safeguarding The Industrial Enterprise From Hackers

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When a hacker tried to poison Tampa-area city’s water with lye (sodium hydroxide) last week, the US public was exposed to an unfortunate reality of interconnectivity. Upon breaking through a vulnerable remote access point, a hacker was able to remotely increase the level of lye in the city’s drinking water from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million — 100 times its normal rate. By chance, a plant operator in Oldsmar, Florida recognized the breech by the hacker who leveraged similar capabilities of a plant manager or supervisor. What would have happened if the plant operator did not catch the change? What could have prevented this from happening in the first place? What if this happened at a pharmaceutical or biotechnology company creating life-saving products, or a power plant keeping city lights and security systems activated? In the last week, the public was simply exposed to a harsh reality: there are bad actors in the world who are looking to cause harm to innocent people, and it is essential to have the right safety measures in place. As a record number of companies and governmental organizations embark on digital transformation journeys to embrace Industry 4.0, they are leveraging Dragos for industrial strength cybersecurity.

Rob Lee, Founder & CEO of Dragos, the global leader in cybersecurity for industrial controls systems (ICS)/operational technology (OT) environments, contends the public need not freak out about every case. “Our infrastructure providers have done right by the community by investing in delivering safe and reliable services. However, as the digital transformation takes place and it converges with an ever increasing industrial focused threat landscape, reality is we have to do more than what has been done before to avoid disastrous scenarios,” says Lee.

Dragos, founded 6 years ago in Hanover, Maryland, maintains the safety and security of hundreds of customers in areas such as manufacturing, chemicals, utilities, transportation, energy, mining, and pharma across more than 20 countries. Dragos recently closed its Series C financing of $110 million, bringing its total funding…

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Meet The Billionaires Behind Signal And Telegram, Two New Online Homes For Angry Conservatives

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In 2018, Brian Acton, the billionaire WhatsApp cofounder, committed several fateful actions. He had quit Facebook a few months earlier, and in March, he took his rift with the company public by firing off an angry tweet—“It is time. #deleteFacebook”—just as the company that had bought his app descended into scandal over its data-sharing practices and status as a hotbed for conservative misinformation. Nearly at the same time, Acton was funneling $50 million into a new non-profit, the Signal Foundation, naming himself its executive chairman. The group’s overriding goal: finance a three-year-old app called Signal, which allowed users to send end-to-end encrypted messages.

Signal offered easy communication and secure, total anonymity. With the new funding, it wouldn’t need to cave to commercial interests and sell ads, something Acton hated about Facebook. Grandly, he envisioned Signal making “private communication accessible and ubiquitous,” he told Forbes in 2018, and the app has largely lived up to his expectations. It is especially valued among journalists and activists like the ones who planned the Black Lives Matter protests. But in an ironic twist, the app is poised to become a new digital haven for conservatives—just as Facebook before it. These right-wing users are drawn to it for the same reasons BLM organizers liked it: It offers the ability to plan and communicate en masse without worrying about the app exerting content-moderation policies or aiding authorities pursuing charges against them. Signal doesn’t appear to have any such policies and doesn’t have access to users’ messages, theoretically making it impossible to cooperate with a police investigation.

“The use of Signal and Telegram is really dangerous. They appear to be at this moment welcoming hateful users who’ve been kicked off other platforms or been made to feel unwelcome on other platforms,” says Harry Fernandez, a director at Change the Terms, a…

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Meet The Super Rich Czech Tech Company — And Its Russian CEO —Denying Links To The Huge SolarWinds Hack

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Maxim Shafirov is looking grizzled, grumbling through a stubbled muzzle about having just two hours sleep, hunched over his computer as the snow falls behind him in a window that looks out to a wintry St. Petersburg. The Russian native’s grouchiness is understandable.

Shafirov is the CEO of Czech company JetBrains, which was likely one of the biggest tech companies you’d never heard of, until Wednesday when reports cited government sources saying it was being investigated for links to huge cyberattacks on U.S. government agencies and tech giants, via the hack of another low-profile IT provider, SolarWinds, and scores of its clients, including federal agencies. For millions of coders, the Prague-based business’ tools are invaluable, providing all manner of software to make their app building that much easier. Founded in 2000, it claims over 8 million paying users in over 213 countries. Company revenue for 2019, according to the most recently-available results for the privately-held business, stood at $270 million, with year-on-year growth of 33%. Shafirov, in an upbeat moment in an interview with Forbes, says that despite the Covid-19 pandemic, its revenue growth this last year was 10%, indicating near $300 million for 2020. The business was a so-called “unicorn” worth more than $1 billion, according to a JetBrains spokesperson.

Few outside the tech world would’ve paid the company much attention until reports in the New York Times, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal indicated those investigating what’s become one of the most severe acts of cyber espionage in recent memory were looking at the possibility JetBrains was involved. The reports hint JetBrains, or one of its apps, TeamCity, was hacked, leading to an infiltration at SolarWinds, which, in turn, had one of its own tools compromised and used to hijack customer networks. Amongst the victims are the Department of Justice, which yesterday revealed 3% of its Office 365 emails had been compromised. It joined the Department of Energy, the Treasury, Microsoft,…

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Ransomware gangs now even calling victims to meet demands: Report

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Some ransomware groups have now resorted to cold-calling victims to pressure them into paying ransom demands if they come to know that the targeted organisations were attempting restoration from backups, said a media report.

Some of the ransamware gangs that have used this tactic include Conti and Ryuk, a spokesperson for New Zealand-headquartered cybersecurity firm Emsisoft told ZDNet this week.

This is a new pressure-building tactic that these cybercriminals have started adopting.

Previously used tactics against victims include doubling the ransom demand in case of failure to pay the ransom in an allotted time, threatening the victim organisations that the breach will be notified to a journalist, threatening leak of sensitive information, or actually starting the process of leaking information in a graded manner.

The trend of ransomware hackers cold-calling victims to harass them into pay appears to have started since at least August-September, according to a top executive at a leading incident response and cyber security provider, Arete Incident Response, said the report.

An outsourced call centre group is suspected to be working for all the ransomware groups resorting to cold-calling, according to cyber-security firm Coveware.

Ransomware remained a persistent threat in the third quarter of this year, Emsisoft had earlier reported.

“Threat actors continued to favour post-compromise deployment, often spending significant time preparing the target environment and exfiltrating data before delivering the ransomware payload,” the cybersecurity firm said in a blog post.

“We also saw more ransomware groups seek to weaponize stolen data, with threat actors such as Avaddon, Conti, DarkSide, SunCrypt and LockBit, among others, launching new data leak sites this quarter,” it added.

In Q3, India topped the list of 10 countries that accounted for the most ransomware submissions, according to the Emsisoft report.

–IANS

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