Tag: Country Manager-India

News

72% of COVID-19-related attacks are scamming; reports Barracuda Networks

Dec 19, 2020 by Rekha Nair 0 Comments #Barracuda Networks, #Country Manager-India, #Murali Urs

New Delhi: Barracuda, a trusted partner and leading provider of cloud-enabled security solutions released a new report with key findings about the ways cybercriminals are adapting quickly to current events and new tactics. The latest report, titled Spear Phishing: Top Threats and Trends Vol. 5 – Best practices to defend against evolving attacks, reveals new details about these highly targeted threats, including the latest tactics used by cybercriminals and the steps you can take to defend your business.

The report takes an in-depth look at how attackers are quickly adapting to current events and using new tricks to successfully execute attacks — spear phishing, business email compromise, pandemic-related scams, and other types. It also tackles why organizations need to invest in protection against lateral phishing and other internally-launched attacks from compromised accounts, including solutions that use artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Attack trends and beyond

Barracuda’s research reveals key takeaways about how these targeted attacks are evolving and the approaches cybercriminals are using to maximize their impact.

  • Business email compromise (BEC) makes up 12% of the spear-phishing attacks analyzed, an increase from just 7% in 2019.
  • 72% of COVID-19-related attacks are scamming. In comparison, 36% of overall attacks are scamming. Attackers prefer to use COVID-19 in their less targeted scamming attacks that focus on fake cures and donations.
  • 13% of all spear-phishing attacks come from internally compromised accounts, so organizations need to invest in protecting their internal email traffic as much as they do in protecting from external senders.
  • 71% of spear-phishing attacks include malicious URLs, but only 30% of BEC attacks included a link. Hackers using BEC want to establish trust with their victims and expect a reply to their email, and the lack of a URL makes it harder to detect the attack.

Speaking on the latest report, Murali Urs, Country Manager (India), Barracuda Networks said, “Cybercriminals adapt very quickly when they find a new tactic or current event that they can exploit. Their response to the COVID-19 pandemic proved it too well. As organizations in India, today are facing increasing threats from highly targeted phishing attacks, staying aware of the way spear-phishing tactics are evolving will help them take the proper precautions to protect their business and users. They must invest in technology to block attacks and provide training to help people act as a last line of defense and avoid falling victim to scammers’ latest tricks.”

Technology

Barracuda researchers detected millions of bad bots attacks on eCommerce websites during the holiday shopping season

Dec 3, 2020 by Neel Achary 0 Comments #Barracuda, #Barracuda Networks, #Country Manager-India, #Murali Urs

Come holiday season and online shopping spree begins with full force, making the eCommerce websites an attractive target for cybercriminals to launch attacks. This November, Barracuda Networks, a trusted partner and a leading provider of cloud-enabled security solutions, detected millions of bad bots attacks that were been used by the attackers to run distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, make fraudulent purchases, and scan for vulnerabilities they can exploit.

Barracuda researchers in the middle of the month, ran the Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection in front of a test web application, and detected a staggering number of bad bots in just a few days with millions of attacks coming in from thousands of distinct IP addresses. When viewed by the time of day, the researchers found that the bots don’t just wait until the middle of the night to attack. In fact, the bot activity peaks late morning and goes on until 5 p.m., which indicates that the cybercriminals aka “bot herders” follow a regular working day.

Bad bot personas are bots that have been identified as malicious based on their pattern of behavior. They are grouped by User-Agent, some of which are good. For example, GoogleBot, which crawls sites and adds them to search rankings, is good and should not be blocked. Cybercriminals have been using different ways to spoof good User-Agents to conduct the attacks. The bad bots spoof these known good User-Agents, which would need deeper scrutiny to tell them apart.

To identify a bot as being bad when the User-Agent claims to be a good search engine, Barracuda researchers use different methods; Injecting honeytraps like hidden URLs and JS challenges; Using rDNS (reverse DNS lookup) to verify bots coming from a claimed source; Inspecting whether the client is trying to access URLs used by common app fingerprinting attacks; and analysing further with ML, in case the methods don’t work out. HeadlessChrome, yerbasoftware, and M12bot are some of the bad bot personas that showed an increase in numbers.

Speaking on the threat, Murali Urs, Country Manager-India, Barracuda Networks, commented, “While analysing which Internet System Provider or Autonomous System Number has been the source of this bad bot activity, our researchers identified Indian mobile provider Airtel’s subnet ranges in the mix, as well as some of the big public cloud providers like Google Cloud, Amazon. This shows that even though the source of bots is international, it would depend on the bot and the site it is targeting.”

With the holiday shopping season expected to continue in full swing till the New Year, eCommerce teams should start taking necessary steps to safeguard their applications against bad bots. They must install a well-configured web application firewall as a service solution and make sure that the application security solutions include anti-bot protection to effectively detect advanced automated attacks. eCommerce websites should further turn on credential stuffing protection to prevent account takeover.