January 2018

The security industry was taken aback by the emergence of the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities early in January 2018, which could lead to unauthorised data leakage. Intel customers were cautioned to continuously monitor vendor bulletins for the latest mitigation and patches.

Adobe confirmed that a vulnerability in its Flash Player was being actively exploited in the wild. Calls have been made for a number of years to end of life the vulnerability prone Flash Player and all progressive content providers should have a migration strategy in place.

February 2018

A number of Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerability patches were released, however several of these were shown to introduce further issues and customers are to continuously monitor vendor bulletins for the latest mitigation and patch updates.

March 2018

In March 2018 the City of Atlanta, USA, suffered a massive ransomware attack that resulted in widespread system outages for nearly a week, forcing the organisation to revert to manual processes in the absence of functioning computer systems.

Cisco-based network infrastructure is increasingly coming under attack from nation-state attackers looking to infiltrate critical infrastructure within government and industry. [Comment: Will this tie up with unsupported claims against Chinese government interfered with Huawei core network infrastructure.?]

April 2018

Reports regularly surface of compromised social media accounts. The effects being exposed personal data, malicious, fake comments, identity theft and more. The impact ranges from tarnished reputations to large scale monetary losses. Users need to make sure their personal devices have suitable passwords or PIN’s and switch on lock-screens, use unique passwords for each social media platform, employ two-factor authentication where possible, disallow third-party applications from connecting to accounts and limit the amount of personal data shared on in such media. It goes without saying that one should also regularly review profiles and passwords.

May 2018

VPNFilter is a new piece of malware targeting routers and NAS devices to spy on traffic through the device or even render them unusable on command. Infected devices will need to be reset to factory default settings.

Finally reports have begun to surface of more Spectre related CPU flaws on the horizon as researchers dig deeper into the vulnerabilities that were inadvertently created by performance enhancement intentions.

June 2018

In June 2018, in South Africa, the Liberty hackers successfully breached internal servers earlier this month. Though details were never fully disclosed, this may be a ground breaking test for the Information Regulator on the provisions of the South African Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act.

A new scam, in the form of an extortion email, which threatens recipients with a WannaCry infection if they don’t pay, is in fact a phishing mail set to scare victims into paying ransoms for non-existent threats.

July 2018

The preinstalled Windows PowerShell has become one of the most popular tools for the cybercriminal, employing “living off the land” tactics to perform file-less attacks.

August 2018

The preinstalled Windows PowerShell has become one of the most popular tools for the cybercriminal, employing “living off the land” tactics to perform file-less attacks.

September 2018

An extortion email that threatens recipients with a ransomware infection if they don’t pay is a phishing mail set to scare victims into paying ransoms for non-existent threats. This threat has appeared in many inboxes and user awareness is required.

Globally, cyber criminals have increased their efforts in Formjacking, where malicious script is injected into web pages to capture form data, including payment card details as well as in Cryptojacking, where coinminers are run on victims’ devices.

October 2018

In October 2018 two separate large scale cyber-attacks saw the personal information of 9.4 million Cathay Pacific passengers and hundreds of thousands of HSBC Bank customers being compromised.

November 2018

So called “Tech Support” scams are seemingly increasing in complexity so as to threaten unsuspecting victims into paying “administrative penalties” to clear recurring pop-up windows or avoid embarrassment through various extortion messages.

Formjacking, the use of malicious JavaScript to steal credit card details and other information from payment forms on e-commerce sites, has again made headlines recently. In most cases the victim is unaware that they’ve been redirected to a legitimate, but compromised site, however robust endpoint protection does provide a degree of protection from this threat.