Cybersecurity News This Week: Explore The Ink This Week 08/14/20

Go Inside the Ink to See What’s New in Cybersecurity News This Week

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THE THREAT OF THE WEEK & HOW TO STOP IT

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In an Alert released today, the US Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning that a creative group of cybercriminals has launched a phishing scam featuring legitimate-looking but malware-infected MS Word documents attached to seemingly innocuous emails.

CISA warns that “Cyber actors (are) using emails containing a Microsoft Word document with a malicious Visual Basic Application (VBA) macro code to deploy KONNI malware. KONNI is a remote administration tool (RAT) used by malicious cyber actors to steal files, capture keystrokes, take screenshots, and execute arbitrary code on infected hosts.”

They then detail the attack:

• KONNI malware is often delivered via phishing emails as a Microsoft Word document with a malicious VBA macro code
• The malicious code can change the font color from light grey to black (to fool the user to enable content), check if the Windows operating system is a 32-bit or 64-bit version, and construct and execute the command line to download additional files.
• Once the VBA macro constructs the command line, it uses the certificate database tool CertUtil to download remote files from a given Uniform Resource Locator.
• The Command Prompt silently copies certutil.exe into a temp directory and renames it to evade detection.
• The cyber actor then downloads a text file from a remote resource containing a base64-encoded string that is decoded by CertUtil and saved as a batch (.BAT) file.
• Finally, the cyber actor deletes the text file from the temp directory and executes the .BAT file.

So how can you protect your company from threats like this one that can devastate your business and your bottom line? One of CISA’s suggested mitigations is to “Maintain situational awareness of the latest threats” and “Exercise caution when opening email attachments, even if the attachment is expected and the sender appears to be known.” We can help with that.

THE THREAT

Cybercriminals are dropping cleverly-designed phishing emails laden with extremely dangerous malware. How can your business avoid this danger?

STOP IT

Make staffers more suspicious of every email, link, PDF, and attachment (plus other sources of phishing danger) through security awareness training with ID Agent’s cost-effective solutions including BullPhish ID.

• Regular security awareness training reduces your company’s risk of a data breach by about 70%.
• 90% of incidents that end in a data breach start with a phishing email.
• 65% of ransomware attacks are delivered via phishing.
• Cybercriminals attack every 39 seconds, on average 2,244 times a day.

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