Threats

More Orgs Suffered Successful Phishing Attacks in 2021 Than in 2020

Enterprise organizations appear to be falling even further behind in their battle against phishing threats despite heightened awareness of the problem and efforts to curb it.

A new study shows that in 2021 more organizations experienced at least one successful email-based phishing attack than the year before. There were also more opportunistic and targeted phishing attacks last year compared with 2020, as well as phishing attacks involving ransomware and business email compromise (BEC).

Researchers recently analyzed data from a survey of 600 IT and security professionals and another survey of 3,500 employees from seven countries, including the US, UK, France, Germany, and Australia. The researchers also analyzed data gathered from some 100 million simulated phishing attacks and more than 15 million emails that end users reported as being suspicious.

Seventy-eight percent of organizations experienced a ransomware attack in which a phishing email was the initial infection vector. Seventy-seven percent reported a phishing-related BEC incident — an 18-point increase from 2020. Overall, 12% more organizations reported being victims of an indiscriminate or opportunistic phishing attack, while organizations reporting more targeted spear-phishing and BEC attacks went up 20%.

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President
Bitdefender and Barracuda Distributor for Msp’s
“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

Hackers slip into Microsoft Teams chats to distribute malware

Hackers slip into Microsoft Teams chats to distribute malware

Security researchers warn that some attackers are compromising Microsoft Teams accounts to slip into chats and spread malicious executables to participants in the conversation.

More than 270 million users are relying on Microsoft Teams every month, many of them trusting the platform implicitly, despite the absence of protections against malicious files.
Simple but efficient method

Researchers at Avanan, a Check Point company that secures cloud email and collaboration platforms, found that hackers started to drop malicious executable files in conversations on Microsoft Teams communication platform.

The attacks started in January, the company says in a report today, and the threat actor inserts in a chat an executable file called “User Centric” to trick the user into running it.

Once executed, the malware writes data into the system registry installs DLLs and establishes persistence on the Windows machine.
“In this Teams attack, hackers have attached a malicious Trojan document to a chat thread. When clicked on, the file will eventually take over the user’s computer” – Avanan

Manage Microsoft Teams settings for your organization
Here you can turn on or turn off file sharing and cloud file storage options. read Article and turn off file sharing

Users can upload and share files from cloud storage services in Teams channels and chats. Cloud storage options in Teams currently include Dropbox, Box, Citrix files, Google Drive, and Egnyte. Turn on the switch for the cloud storage providers that your organization wants to use.

Using either the above solution and fixing the issues or

Use Bitdefender/MspPortal Partners malware protection in combination of Barracuda/MspPortal Partners Spam, Phishing malware protection

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President Bitdefender /MSP Aggregator – Distributor “Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

Google Releases Security Updates for Chrome (Must Apply)

Google Releases Security Updates for Chrome (Must Apply) (Review update)
02/15/2022 07:25 AM EST

Original release date: February 15, 2022

Google has released Chrome version 98.0.4758.102 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system. One of these vulnerabilities has been detected in exploits in the wild.

CISA encourages users and administrators to review the Chrome Release Note and apply the necessary update as soon as possible.

I have always supported Firefox. As bad as I personally think Facebook is, I think Google products and browser are worse.

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President Bitdefender /MSP Aggregator – Distributor “Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

The Texas attorney general’s office sued Meta’s Facebook on Monday

Mon, February 14, 2022, 10:10 AM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Texas attorney general’s office sued Meta’s Facebook on Monday, alleging that the social media giant violated state privacy protections with facial-recognition technology that collected the biometric data of millions of Texans without their consent.

The lawsuit accuses Facebook of capturing biometric information from photos and videos that users uploaded without consent, disclosing the information to others and failing to destroy it within a reasonable time.

“This is yet another example of Big Tech’s deceitful business practices and it must stop. I will continue to fight for Texans’ privacy and security,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement.

The lawsuit was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, which cited a person familiar with the matter as saying that the state was seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in civil penalties

“The scope of Facebook’s misconduct is staggering,” the lawsuit said. “Facebook repeatedly captured Texans’ biometric identifiers without consent not hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times — but billions of times,” the lawsuit said.

You think Apache Log4j Security Vulnerabilities is bad look at Mimikatz Malware

Mimikatz Malware

Attacks everything basically once there it will run additional tools to encrypt and do a search find for all machines to encrypt

The susceptible world is Windows of course.

Keep yourself up to date with Bitdefender (An update process has been completed successfully. (Product version: 7.4.1.111. Engines version: 7.90522 (10841006) This may sound like an add to promote Bitdefender but nobody needs Ransomeware.

Use there Gravity Zone basic with the Add-on of ATS/Sandboxing. Lock down in the policy also with no additional costs. This is a tech dashboard

I am having Bitdefender look at this and possibly develop a unencrypted key for the Ransomeware

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President

Bitdefender / – Distributor

“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

Disclosure MspPortal Partners only sells and works with MSP’s and Resellers.

CyberSecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency Catalog

CyberSecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency
Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog
Great place to start if you are curious if you need to do an update. Lot of Apple and Google and of course Microsoft updates.
Even Solarwinds now called N-able name change..go figure lastest 11-17-2021
Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog
Site URL

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President

Bitdefender /MSP Aggregator – Distributor

“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

New Phishing Attack on Microsoft O365

August 26, 2021
New Phishing Attack on Microsoft O365 Users Leverages Open Redirects to Avoid Detection
Widespread credential phishing campaign abuses open redirector links
Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team Link Article

MspPortal Partners along with Barracuda does have  a solution
Read what Essentials complete will provide for you Includes ESS, Message Archiver and O365 Backup
One Drive, Exchange, Sharepoint,Teams (PDF)

MspPortal Partners will be offering to all partners a Bitdefender Gravity Zone Policy review and update

MspPortal Partners

Will be offering to all partners a Bitdefender Gravity Zone Policy review and update

Free of charge

This will only be offered to MspPortal Partners for a limited time through the middle of October 2021 on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8 am to 11:30 am MST/NO DST

If you are not one of the 425 partners you are more than welcome to change out your existing Distributor/Partner

Existing partners and new partners are welcome go to the website www.mspportalpartners.net and fill out the contact form

MspPortal Partners specializes in Bitdefender Gravity Zone Malware protection

Roy Miehe | MspPortal Partners Inc. | Ceo/President

Bitdefender / Distributor

“Where Service and Technical Skills Count”

Microsoft Windows Zero-Day Under Attack

Dark Reading Staff 9-8-2021

Microsoft has issued an advisory containing mitigations and workarounds for a remote code execution flaw in Windows it says is being exploited in targeted attacks.

CVE-2021-40444 exists in MSHTML, the proprietary browser engine built into Windows that allows the operating system to read and display HTML files. MSHTML, also known as Trident, was mainly used by Internet Explorer but is also used by Microsoft Office, Broadcom notes in its advisory on the vulnerability. It allows developers to add Web browsing into their applications.

Microsoft reports the targeted attacks it has observed use specially crafted Office documents. In explaining how an attack would work, it says an adversary could create a malicious ActiveX control to be used by an Office document that hosts the MSHTML browser-rendering engine. An attacker would have to convince a victim to open the file. Officials note victims with fewer user privileges on the system could be less affected than those with administrative user rights.

The company credits four external researchers with finding the vulnerability: Dhanesh Kizhakkinan, Genwei Jiang, and Bryce Abdo of Mandiant, and Haifei Li of EXPMON, in addition to Rick Cole with the Microsoft Security Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC).

Read the full advisory for more details.