Secure environment (IoT)

The growing popularity of car sharing services has led some experts to predict an end to private car ownership in big cities. But information security specialists have started raising some pertinent questions: how are the users of these services protected and what potential risks do they face in the event of unauthorized access to their accounts?

These summaries are a representative snapshot of what has been discussed in greater detail in our private reports during Q2 2018. They aim to highlight the significant events and findings that we feel people should be aware of.

At Kaspersky Lab we analyze the technologies available on cybersecurity market and this time we decided to look at what OS developers are offering for embedded systems (or, in other words, the internet of things). Our primary interest is how and to what degree these OSs can solve cybersecurity-related issues.

We continue to research how proliferation of IoT devices affects the daily lives of users and their information security. In our previous study, we touched upon ways of intercepting authentication data using single-board microcomputers. This time, we turned out attention to wearable devices: smartwatches and fitness trackers. Or more precisely, the accelerometers and gyroscopes inside them.

Our colleagues from Cisco Talos published their excellent analysis of VPNFilter, an IoT / router malware which exhibits some worrying characteristics. We’ve decided to look a bit into the C&C mechanism for the persistent malware payload.

If you want to make the world safer, start with the smart things in your home. Or, to be more specific, start with your router – the core of any home network as well as an interesting research object. And that router you got from your ISP as part of your internet contract is even more interesting when it comes to research.

It would seem that no gadget has escaped the attention of hackers, yet there is one last bastion: “smart” devices for animals. For example, trackers to monitor their location.

In January, we uncovered a sophisticated mobile implant Skygofree that provides attackers with remote control of infected Android devices. Network worm OlympicDestroyer attacked on the Olympic infrastructure just before the opening of the games in February.

In late April 2018, a new zero-day vulnerability for Internet Explorer (IE) was found using our sandbox; more than two years since the last in the wild example (CVE-2016-0189). This particular vulnerability and subsequent exploit are interesting for many reasons.

In Q1 2018, we observed a significant increase in both the total number and duration of DDoS attacks against Q4 2017. The new Linux-based botnets Darkai (a Mirai clone) and AESDDoS are largely responsible for this hike.

In the second quarter of 2017, Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) began publishing summaries of the quarter’s private threat intelligence reports in an effort to make the public aware of the research we have been conducting. This report serves as the next installment, focusing on the relevant activities that we observed during Q1 2018.

Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT publishes the findings of its research on the threat landscape for industrial automation systems conducted during the second half of 2017. The main objective of these publications is to provide information support to incident response teams, enterprise information security staff and researchers in the area of industrial facility security.

At last year’s Security Analyst Summit 2017 we predicted that medical networks would be a titbit for cybercriminals. Unfortunately, we were right. The numbers of medical data breaches and leaks are increasing. According to public data, this year is no exception.

The researchers at Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT decided to check the popular smart camera to see how well protected it is against cyber abuses. This model has a rich feature list, compares favorably to regular webcams and can be used as a baby monitor, a component in a home security system or as part of a monitoring system.

This time, we’ve chosen a smart hub designed to control sensors and devices installed at home. It can be used for different purposes, such as energy and water management, monitoring and even security systems.