If your wealth management firm suffers a ransomware attack, should the firm pay the ransom or not? This seems like a straight-forward question, but in reality, is anything but. A number of factors have to be taken into account, including what kind of ransomware attack you have suffered, the possible financial costs associated with the attack and the attack aftermath, the possible reputational damage and attendant loss of clients, and also legal and regulatory consequences that may arise from the attack.

Let’s start by looking at the two main types of ransomware attacks your firm might encounter. In the “traditional” ransomware attack, cyber-criminals break into your network and encrypt your important data so that you cannot access it without the key they used. They then demand a ransom payment for this key. This is an attack on only one of the three pillars of information security: availability. If your firm doesn’t have safely stored backups, you must pay or suffer likely permanent loss of your data. If your firm has safely stored backups, all you have to do is restore your system from these backups. The decision to pay or not in this case seems simple for a wealth management firms: if you pay you get your data back quickly. If you don’t pay, you still get your data back, but not so quickly. It may take days to go through the restoration process. If you think your clients will stand for this downtime, you don’t pay. If you don’t think the business interruption will be tolerated, then maybe it is better to pay and take the financial loss.

The other type of ransomware attacks we’re seeing today are not so simple. If your important data is not properly encrypted, the attackers may not only re-encrypt your data, they may also copy it and threaten to release it publicly if they are not paid. This is a much thornier problem because it also affects another pillar of information security: confidentiality. Financial institutions are heavily regulated and are required to adequately protect the confidentiality of their client’s financial and personal private information. If the firm pays the ransom, they may get the key to unencrypt their data and a promise not to post this data publicly. But what level of trust can you put in the word of criminals?! What is to prevent them from publicly releasing the data anyway, or keeping the data and demanding further payments in the future? This complicates the decision to pay or not considerably. If the firm doesn’t pay the ransom, they are in for public scandal that might cause present clients to go elsewhere and prospective clients to choose a different firm. They may also be subject to regulatory sanction if their information security program is judged to be inadequate. In addition, the firm may be sued by affected clients which can lead to even more scandal and reputational loss.

But wait, there is more! Paying the ransomware is actually illegal is some instances. Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act or the Trading with the Enemy Act, U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with individuals or entities that are on OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List or with persons from embargoed regions and countries (see the Advisory on Potential Sanctions Risks for Facilitating Ransomware Payments at https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/126/ofac_ransomware_advisory_10012020_1.pdf for more information). And how is the firm to know if the blackmailers they are dealing with are among those on the proscribed list? I would hate to have to be the one to make the decision to pay ransomware or not in these cases. To quote an old cliché, these decision makers are caught between a rock and hard place!

There is no simple, easy or right decision to make if your firm is caught up in this second type of ransomware attack. The real answer is to not be in such a position in the first place. Financial firms should ensure that their information security program is compliant with regulatory and best practices standards at all times. You should ensure that your data is properly encrypted and backed up, patch and update your systems religiously, test and monitor your systems and ensure that your partners and services providers are doing the same. To quote another old cliché: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

Credential stuffing is a truly thorny security problem that exploits weaknesses in both human nature and Internet access controls. A credential stuffing attack is using user name/password combinations stolen from one website to try to gain access to other websites. It exploits the tendency of all of us to use the same passwords for multiple websites. Although this is a human weakness, it is also perfectly understandable; it is tedious and difficult to remember many complex passwords. It is also difficult to reliably protect password lists that are in any way accessible over the Internet. I see many articles about password management tools or cryptographic techniques that have been compromised while preparing the MSI Infosec Précis. Even MFA is not invulnerable. Attackers have come up with a number of different MFA bypass attacks lately, and more are certain to follow. Couple all this with the fact that there already are literally billions of user name/password pairs available for sale out there that have already been compromised, and you can see why credential stuffing is such a danger to the security of our private information. It is used constantly by attackers to gain the network foothold they need to launch further attacks such as Ransomware.

How are you supposed to protect yourself and your business from password stuffing attacks? The best solution is for everyone to use strong, unique passwords for each different online account they have. Good luck with that! Even the best of us get lazy or stupid once in a while. Or you can (and probably should) employ strong password managers and MFA. These are good techniques that are largely successful. But as I stated above, even these techniques are not sacrosanct. So, if you can’t stop credential stuffing attacks, you had better be able to detect them quickly and react appropriately.

One way to detect these attacks is through monitoring and analysis. As Scott Matteson, the man who coined the term “credential stuffing,” recommended in a 2019 interview: “Monitor your business metrics for signs that you may already be experiencing credential stuffing or other automation attacks, including poor or declining login success rates, high password reset rates, or low traffic-to-success conversion rates.” Plus: “Analyze the hourly pattern of traffic to your login and other attackable URLs for traffic spikes or volume outside of normal human operating hours for your markets: Real users sleep, automated attacks do not.”

In addition, there are tools and services available that can help you detect password stuffing attacks. As the MSI CEO, Brent Huston, discussed in his blog posted on November 11, MicroSolved’s data leakage detection engine ClawBack™ is one such tool that is useful in detecting stolen credentials that show up on pastebin sites or that have been leaked inadvertently through a variety of ways.

However, detection is not enough. You also need to be able to react quickly and surely when a leak has been detected. This means incorporating credential stuffing into your incident response (IR) plan. The incident response team as a whole should discuss response methods, incorporate them in the written IR plan and include them in their periodic IR training sessions. The combination of awareness of the credential stuffing problem, implementation of rational protection and detection mechanisms and documented response measures are a combination that can help your organization protect itself to best effect.

As the complexity of a computer system increases so does the difficulty of securing it against cyber-attack. In fact, difficulty of protection rises at a more than one-to-one ratio with complexity. This is one of the reasons we at MSI so highly tout extensively segmenting complex networks into “enclaves” with individual firewalls and access controls, as well as strict trust rules on how each enclave can communicate with each other and the outside world. Although this process is complex to develop and implement, once in place it greatly simplifies the protection of critical assets such as industrial controls systems and administration networks.

One reason why it behooves utilities to consider cyber-protections at this level is the exponential rise in the availability and use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It seems like every kind of device there is now has a computer in it and can be accessed and administered over a network of some kind. And usually this network is the Internet or is routable to the Internet.

Systems at threat include industrial control systems and the enterprise networks that administer them; they employ more remote access devices every day. IoT devices that are connected to enterprise networks can be just about anything. Smart light bulbs, cameras, heat sensors, voice controllers, televisions, robots… the list is daunting and grows constantly.

Exacerbating this problem for most of the last year has been the pandemic emergency. The need for social distancing and remote working has exploded because of it. And as we all know, in an emergency functionality trumps security every time. Concerns have set up remote conferencing and remote administration systems at a record pace. And even if they have performed some form of risk analysis before, during or after implementation, chances are that they may not have been holistic in their threat and risk analysis.

This brings me back to the enclave computing scheme I mentioned above. To set up proper network segmentation, the first things you need to know are what data/devices are on the network, how data flows between these entities and what trust relationships are implemented in their setup. Until you have a grasp on all of these factors, there is no way you can gauge the full range of negative security effects hooking IoT devices to your enterprise network can have.

So, my advice to Utilities and other users of industrial controls systems is this: do a thorough business impact analysis (BIA) of your enterprise network and all of its connections. The BIA will reveal the factors I mentioned above. It reveals what devices and data are there and their relative criticality. It shows you how data moves and what trusts what. This information is the necessary precursor to accurate risk and threat assessment, and can be the beginning of a new level of information security at your enterprise.

Data breaches are happening every day, and presently, they are often accompanied by ransom demands. It used to be that most ransomware simply encrypted a firm’s data and wanted to get paid for the key to decrypt it again. The answer to this kind of attack is pretty simple: make and securely store backups of your data so that you can reload your systems without paying ransom. This works, but some concerns still pay the ransom to avoid downtime while backups are accessed and systems restored. Unfortunately, the bad guys have a worse trick up their sleeves: threatening to publish your data on the Internet if you don’t pay the ransom.

This is a very thorny problem. If you don’t pay, you are going to have private personal and financial data of your clients exposed, which is going to lead to regulatory scrutiny and loss of business. If you do pay, you are out the expense and you have no guarantee that the cybercriminals won’t publish your data anyway.

Besides ensuring that your data doesn’t get compromised in the first place, the only thing that wealth management firms can do to thwart this problem is ensure that their incident response plan is complete and ready to invoke at a moments notice. This takes good communications, especially internally. This is the responsibility of the CISO in most firms.

The first thing the CISO should do once the incident is validated is to notify the incident response team and get them working on containing the incident and researching how it was perpetrated. From there, the CISO should handle communications. All incident-related communications should go through the CISO. The team should communicate their findings with the CISO, and the CISO in turn should communicate pertinent information with the Board of Directors. They are primarily responsible for the information security program at the firm, and decisions on further communications with regulators, law enforcement and clients should come from them. It is also their responsibility to decide how ransomware demands are to be addressed.

To perform all these functions quickly and efficiently, communications methods and responses to incidents should all be pre-planned and included in the incident response plan. It is also important to practice responses to various likely incident scenarios (table-top exercises are generally used for this). These practice sessions help to speed up actual incident responses and expose holes in the plan that could cripple the response if not corrected.

As I’m sure most of you know, October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. The point of this yearly event is to stimulate awareness of the importance of cybersecurity in the workplace and at home. Every year, it seems, cybersecurity becomes more important in the lives of all of us. Identity theft, ransomware, denial of service attacks and a plethora of other cyber-dangers are running rampant and becoming more sophisticated every day. Awareness of these problems and following a few simple security rules can go a surprisingly long way in keeping your networks safe. So why not take advantage of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month to bring awareness to your own personnel and families?

The number one tip I wish to emphasize is this: be wary, think and make sure before you click on a link or answer questions posed by unknown telephone callers. We are all human which means we get in a hurry, we get bored, we lose focus, we get preoccupied and a dozen other frailties. Cybercriminals rely on these human weaknesses to make their cash, and very successful they are at it. As an addendum to this advice, I want to emphasize caution when clicking on links or accessing websites having to do with the Covid-19 emergency or the impending national election. These two subjects are the subjects of more than half of all current phishing attacks.

Next tip: ensure that all of your devices, software applications, operating systems and firmware applications are included in your security maintenance program. Relying solely on WSUS and patching Windows vulnerabilities just doesn’t do the job. All your non-Windows network entities should be updated and patched as well. Also, updating and patching should be applied as soon as possible. You can bet that cybercriminals will not be slow in attacking vulnerable systems.

Tip number three: be very wary of social media use. The amount of private information that we blithely upload to social media sites is astounding! Having been in the intelligence field myself, I know how much information analysts can glean and infer from seemingly harmless business or family facts. You should remember that the information you provide your friends or colleagues on social media is only as private as their own security settings and habits. A good rule of thumb is to not post anything you wouldn’t want a stranger to see. Once again, think before you post!

The last tip I’ll provide here is to use very strong access controls and encrypt every connection and bit of private information you can. With so many of us working from home now, web conferencing is at an all time high. Make sure you use a service that will allow you to encrypt communications. If at all possible, employ multi-factor authentication for web conferences and other sensitive communications as well. If MFA is impossible, use a nice long passphrase instead of some weird nonsensical eight-digit password you can’t remember anyway. Entropy is where it’s at!