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White House Cyber Chief: JP Morgan Underscores Critical Infrastructure Risk

October 9, 2014 Paul Roberts

The White House’s cyber security czar, Michael Daniel, said the Obama Administration is deeply concerned about the reported hack of systems belonging to banking giant JP Morgan Chase & Co. but sees the incident as part of a larger trend of attacks against U.S. critical infrastructure. Asked about the targeted attack against JP Morgan and other banks and financial institutions, Daniel said that the White House was concerned, but not surprised by the incident. “We have watched for several years the trend of malicious actors in cyber try to figure out how to target critical infrastructure,” he said. “Financial services is critical infrastructure.” The White House was concerned that a major U.S. bank would fall victim to hackers, but sees it in the context of a “broad trend,” rather than an isolated incident, he said. Speaking with Michael Farrell, the Cybersecurity Editor at Christian Science Monitor, Daniel hit on many of the now-common talking […]

AllSeen Alliance Announces Smart Lighting Framework

October 8, 2014 Paul Roberts

Smart lightbulbs aren’t anything new. In fact, products like the Philips Hue bulb have been in the market for years. The devices, which typically couple a standard incandescent or CF bulb with a wireless transmitter, allow lights to be managed via mobile device and also respond to environmental changes monitored by other sensors. But – as with much of the Internet of Things – each family of smart bulbs is something of an island: interacting- and communicating mostly with other smart home products from the same manufacturer. That’s good for the lightbulb maker, but bad for smart home advocates, see out-of-the box connectivity across product silos as a precursor to broad adoption of smart home technologies. It’s also been the case that the products that have been released have often fallen short in areas like security. In August, 2013, security researcher Nitesh Dhanjani disclosed a proof of concept hack […]

Europol Warns of Internet of Things Risk

October 6, 2014 Paul Roberts

In a newly released report, Europol’s European Cybercrime Center (EC3) warns that the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) threatens to strengthen the hand of organized cyber criminal groups and make life much more difficult for police and governments that wish to pursue them. EC3’s latest Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (iOCTA) says the “Internet of Everything” will greatly complicate the work of law enforcement creating “new opportunities for everything from cyber criminals to state actors to child abusers. The growing numbers of connected devices will greatly expand the “attack surface” available for cyber criminal activity, the EC3 warns. Cyber criminals may co-opt connected devices for use in common criminal activity (like denial of service attacks and spam campaigns). However, advancements like connected (“smart”) vehicles and infrastructure create openings for large scale and disruptive attacks. The report, which was published late last months, is a high level position paper and pulls data mostly […]

Infographic: Possible Attacks on The Internet of Things

September 24, 2014 Paul Roberts

The folks over at Trend Micro have put together a nice infographic that reminds us that all those smart devices connected to the Internet communicate through some well worn channels, namely: standard communications protocols like Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Bluetooth that connect devices to each other and the global Internet, as well as HTTP that are used to transmit data to and from cloud based resources like management interfaces. Of course those standard protocols also leave IoT devices vulnerable to a wide range of commodity attacks: from brute force password cracking on web based management consoles to Man in the Middle attacks that can sniff out authentication credentials and hijack sessions. Trend’s infographic does a good job of depicting the various layers in the IoT stack and some of the likely attack vectors for each layer. It also gives advice on how to protect yourself (use encryption, patch software vulnerabilities, disable unused ports). Nothing ground breaking […]

FDA Seeks Collaboration on Medical Device Security

September 24, 2014 Paul Roberts

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday put out a call for ideas and input on how best to secure medical devices and the healthcare system from cyber attack. In a federal notice, the FDA announced that it will hold an October workshop entitled “Collaborative Approaches for Medical Device and Healthcare Cybersecurity.” It also solicited input from stakeholders within the government and from the public health sector on medical device and healthcare cyber security. The workshop is scheduled for October 21 and 22 and will run from 9:00 AM to 5:00PM at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center Auditorium in Arlington, Virginia. [Read more Security Ledger coverage of connected medical devices here.] The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is looking for ideas about how best to implement aspects of both Executive Order 13636 for“Improving Critical Infrastructure” and follow-on guidance like the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) “Framework for Improving […]