New Episode Alert EP138

Are you ready for US election interference? 😠

September 14, 2020

In episode 138 for September 14th 2020: School districts under cyberattack, Google Chrome's new ad blocking feature, and Microsoft's latest alert about foreign interference in the 2020 US election.

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Schools across the US are under cyberattack

School has started back up in the US and if a hybrid or mostly remote learning school environment wasn't challenging enough, there has also been a large increase in denial of service and ransomware attacks on schools just in the last week alone. Two school districts (

and

) were forced to shut down or postpone classes on the first day due to a ransomware or other attack. These attacks also can have pretty serious consequences. For example, the attack on the Hartford school district took out all systems that communicate transportation routes for the buses that transport students to the school. And the recent Miami-Dade incident shut down the entire remote learning platform for over 200,000 students and teachers.

Ransomware attacks in general have been on the rise, even before the COVID-19 pandemic started months ago. But were all of these recent attacks conducted by highly skilled, overseas hackers? Possibly not as we saw in the recent shut down of the Miami-Dade school district where

for launching a distributed denial of service attack on his own school. The bottom line is that DDoS tools and techniques are easily available and accessible for even low skilled attackers. Or what we call in the industry, Script Kiddies. I mean, hacking your school district is great way to get yourself a day off for you and your friends, right?

Google Chrome starts blocking ads that slow down the browser

Google announced a new feature in the Google Chrome web browser that will

. This move is an effort to reduce CPU and network usage which can lead to performance issues. Resource heavy ads are known for causing web pages to load slower and can have the side effect of draining the battery on your phone or even gobbling up mobile data, which is especially concerning for those without unlimited data plans.

This recent feature also has a great privacy benefit, and that's the prevention of many different privacy violating ads and behaviors such as ad scripts that mine cryptocurrency, loading large and poorly compressed images, and loading large video files before a user gesture. Google says that this new feature will be available in version M85 slated for release later in September.

New cyberattacks targeting U.S. elections

that hackers with ties to Russia, China, and Iran are attempting to attack people and groups involved with the 2020 US presidential election. And these attacks are not focused on just one particular candidate. Both Trump and Biden campaigns have not only had the two candidates targeted but also campaign staffers and those that consult on key issues. In the report, three specific hacking groups were mentioned. Strontium (or also known as Fancy Bear), which operates from Russia, has attacked more than 200 organizations including political campaigns, advocacy groups, parties and political consultants. Zirconium, operating from China, has attacked high-profile individuals associated with the election, including people associated with the Joe Biden for President campaign and prominent leaders in the international affairs community. And Phosphorus, operating from Iran, has continued to attack the personal accounts of people associated with the Trump for President campaign. Microsoft also stated that the majority of these attacks were unsuccessful due to Microsoft's built in security tools and that they have notified affected users.

This latest report from Microsoft shouldn't be a surprise here. As we saw in 2016, Russia attempted to influence the US election and despite what some politicians may say about that situation, election interference is truly a bipartisan issue, with both Republicans and Democrats at risk.

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AugustMonthly ShowEpisode 103In our August monthly episode we start our three part series on targeted attacks. In this episode we focus on OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) and reconnaissance techniques used by attackers in phishing and BEC (Business Email Compromise) attacks. Kyle Lovett, Principal Penetration Tester at Veracode, joins us to demonstrate some of the tools and techniques used by attackers and professional penetration testers when conducting these targeted attacks.

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