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Panda Security receives “21st Century Global Quality Award” 2017

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The International Selection Committee of the Worldwide Marketing Organization (WMKTO) in Mexico has named advanced cybersecurity vendor Panda Security as winner of its prestigious “21st Century Global Quality Award” 2017.

This award is granted annually in recognition of those companies, products or professionals that stand out in the business world for their quality and service. The recipients are selected by an International Selection Committee comprised of prestigious entrepreneurs, diplomats, educational and governmental authorities, marketing and communications specialists, and banking institution directors, with 19 years’ experience in studying global market trends.

This international award was established to recognize and encourage the growth and development of companies and professionals who, despite the difficult global financial and economic conditions, have maintained the highest levels of product quality and professional competence. A recognition of the good work and the implementation of patterns of contextual intelligence on cybersecurity applied to companies in the country.

The award will be presented at the Marquis Reforma Hotel in Mexico City on March 4, 2017. The event will also feature the awarding of three other awards: the “Golden Star for Business Merit”, the “Golden Medal for Quality and Service” and the “Royal Crown to Excellence” to other leading companies in Mexico.

 

 

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A cybersecurity primer

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History teaches us that everything changes, and that’s particularly true when it comes to cybersecurity where a vulnerability, accidental or malicious, can put a business at risk any time, any where. While cybersecurity must address the core functions — Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover — in a holistic manner, what are the processes, practices, hardware and software that when combined and integrated together can provide effective cybersecurity? The following is not a definitive list, but it does cover the basics required to better secure your information assets.

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When cyber-security becomes an affair of state

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The Netherlands, France and Germany will hold presidential elections in the coming months. A series of electoral processes that take place in the wake of the U.S. elections, during which, Russian cyber-attackers leaked thousands of Democratic National Committee emails which some claim may have affected the election result – a possibility ruled out by President Trump despite finally admitting the existence of said attacks.

Dutch authorities will count all

election ballots by hand to stop hackers.

Following the events on the other side of the pond, some European leaders are now worried that Russian cyber-espionage groups may try to influence their elections in order to help far-right candidates. European Security Commissioner Julian King has admitted that cyber-attacks could be used “to manipulate democratic processes.” More specifically, cyber-security experts fear the possibility that phishing attacks may be used to extract confidential information that tarnishes the reputation of certain candidates, as was the case with Hillary Clinton.

Growing cyber-security fears ahead of coming European elections 

The first elections will take place in the Netherlands, where voters will go to the polls on March 15. The Dutch government has resorted to extreme measures to combat cyber-attacks aimed at manipulating the general election. In fact, Dutch authorities have announced that they will count all ballots cast by hand, and will communicate the election results by phone to avoid any risk of hackers messing with the results. This announcement was made after a cyber-security expert stated that the software used at Dutch polling stations is vulnerable to hacking.

The two rounds of France’s 2017 presidential elections will take place on April 23 and May 7, and French authorities are warning political parties about the increased threat of cyber-attacks. French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian recently said that in 2016 about 24,000 external attacks against his ministry were blocked by security, and warned of a real risk of cyber-attacks on French civil infrastructure such as electricity, telecommunications and transport.

Germany will hold its federal election on September 24. According to Stefan Soesanto, cyber-security expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, the German federal system could lead to communication failures among security teams. Just a few months ago, German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her concern that Russia could try to influence Germany’s general elections, and recently indicated that security will be a key issue in the election campaign.

Taking all of this into account, it seems clear that cyber-security will play a key role in order to stop cyber-attacks from having an impact on Europe’s upcoming elections.  However, it is not only political parties that must step up their defenses. The best way for your organization to protect itself against cyber-attaks, including phishing emails, is to have an advanced cyber-security solution in place, such as Panda’s Security Adaptive Defense 360. Prevention, detection, response and remediation becomes an affair of state.

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Netflix target of cybercriminals

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Netflix Accounts Are Being Used In Cyber Scams

Netflix has enjoyed huge success over the last couple of years. As stated in the company’s overview, they have over 93 million members in over 190 countries enjoying more than 125 million hours of TV shows and movies per day.

Not bad for a company that started out during the declining years of physical entertainment, renting out DVD’s by mail.

Unfortunately, success often comes at a cost. Along with the adulation and well wishing, it often garners other types of, unwanted, attention. In the case of Netflix, this attention, as you can imagine, is increasingly coming from malicious cybercriminals.

What exactly are they doing though?

How They Can Get You

Cybercriminals are using several methods to breach vulnerabilities in people’s accounts. People who are probably too busy binge watching shows like Black Mirror to know what’s going on. Oh the irony!

Among the methods these cybercriminals are reportedly using are the theft of user credentials that can be sold on the deep web, the exploiting of vulnerabilities, and most recently, the infecting of systems with Trojans capable of stealing the user’s financial and personal information.

What could a cybercriminal do with stolen user information though?

They could be sold on to other cybercriminals wanting to use the service for free. There’s another layer to the equation. A double-crossing of sorts; the lure of a free account could be used to trick someone into installing malware or ransomware onto their laptop.

Cybercriminals using details in this way can make a profit out of the initial selling of the information as well as by taking hostage of the same persons data. Never trust a criminal.

Trend Labs Security recently came across a ransomware luring Windows users via a pirate login generator. This is a typical way illegal websites share premium and paid for website details for free, as shown below.

Via TrendMicro.com

Clicking the “Generate Login” button in this case leads to another prompt window that purportedly contains the stolen information of a genuine Netflix account. RANSOM_NETIX.A uses these fake windows as a distraction, however, all the while performing its encryption routine on 39 files, unbeknownst to most users.

The ransomware is employed using an AES-256 encryption algorithm and appends the files with the .se extension. As can be seen below, the ransom note demands $100 worth of Bitcoin (0.18 BTC).

Via TrendMicro.com

This is actually relatively little, as ransomware demands go, some iterations demanding $500 dollars within a very short time frame. Others even ask you to infect your friends with ransomware in order to decrypt your information.

How Can You Keep Yourself Safe?

There are, of course, two victims in this ransomware scam; those who are unknowingly having their details used to lure the other type of victim, and the other one who receives the ransomware.

The first type of victim can perform a simple action if they suspect they’re account is being used illegally. Look through the “recently watched” section of your Netflix account to see if any shows are popping up that you haven’t seen. For this reason it’s good practice not to share your account with many people, however tempting it may be to allow friends or family in on the action.

It’s also good practice to stick to your provider’s security recommendations. As always, be wary of unsolicited emails pretending to offer legitimate services. A good antivirus, of course, can also act as a barrier to certain types of malware and cyber attacks.

For the second type of victim, the advice is simple; pay for the service. The ten euros a month in savings really won’t seem so great when the device it’s used on, and everything on it, is at the mercy of cybercriminals.

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A Smartwach Social Coach? New Tech Can Read Your Emotions

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Technology gets a bad reputation at times. It’s supposed to connect us, but really, it drives us apart. It’s making us less in touch with the world around us and less inclined to deal with emotional issues.

That may be a very one-sided view of things, but it’s hard to deny that people don’t hide behind their brightly lit screens on a daily basis.

Introducing MIT’s wearable AI system app, a piece of software designed to make people more in touch with their emotions.

How does it do this? Well, by putting them on a screen right in front of you, that’s how. The concept almost feels tailored to not allowing one to hide from their feelings by acquiring a glazed expression and burying their face into their device.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Institute of Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) have recently come up with the idea for the tech device.

How Will It Work?

The device wasn’t designed specifically to prevent people using their devices to hide from their emotions, but rather to help people who may do so compulsively because of an underlying psychological issue.

The tech is based on the principle that human communication goes far beyond being purely verbal. People are constantly sending out signals through other means, like mannerisms, voice intonation and eye contact. These non-verbal signals can be difficult to read though for people with anxiety or for those who have developmental disorders such as Asperger’s syndrome.

This is what lead researchers at MIT to develop software that could capture audio data of a person speaking and analyze the speaker’s tone, pitch, energy, and vocabulary.

“Imagine if, at the end of a conversation, you could rewind it and see the moments when the people around you felt the most anxious,” says graduate student Tuka Alhanai, who co-authored a paper on the subject with PhD candidate Mohammad Ghassemi. “Our work is a step in this direction, suggesting that we may not be that far away from a world where people can have an AI social coach right in their pocket.”

According to MIT News, the students captured 31 different conversations of several minutes each before training two algorithms on the data. After analyzing the conversations, one algorithm classified them as either happy or sad, while the second labeled five-second blocks of the conversations as either positive, negative or neutral.

The model is 7.5 per cent more accurate than other existing approaches, however, it is not yet reliable enough to be used as part of a handheld social coaching device. According to Alhanai, this is very much the goal. To make this possible though, they will have to collect data on a much larger scale.

The model is 7.5 per cent more accurate than other existing approaches, however, it is not yet reliable enough to be used as part of a handheld social coaching device. According to Alhanai, this is very much the goal. To make this possible though, they will have to collect data on a much larger scale.

Cybersecurity Implications?

There is a slightly eerie implication to having our emotions read by an artificial intelligence. It might evoke images of HAL going haywire after lip-reading the protagonist’s plans to shut him down in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

While the tech obviously isn’t on the verge of allowing an AI to hatch a murderous plan, the team have urged caution in the way the system is used in the future.

The algorithm is run locally on the user’s device in order to protect personal information. Alhanai also emphasizes that a consumer version would have to set out clear protocols for getting consent from people involved in the conversations.

The thought of this type of technology being used for third-party data gathering and targeted ads is an uncomfortable one. Despite this, we can see the tech forming an important part in the future of wearables and AI. A huge technological step in a similar direction could also see lie detection playing a role in data security, something that could even be integrated into the security of a futuristic smart home.

MIT’s wearable emotion-reading technology is an interesting step towards integrating technology into the outside world. Augmented Reality companies like Magic Leap are promising a future of enhanced reality, projecting images seamlessly over the real world instead of cutting it out with virtual images. MIT’s new tech can, in one particular respect, be seen very much in the same vein.

Our tech will arguably be enhancing our emotional lives rather than dulling them.

Björn Schuller, professor and chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems at the University of Passau in Germany, seems to share this sentiment. Though he wasn’t involved in the project, he is fascinated about where this step could lead us:

“Technology could soon feel much more emotionally intelligent, or even ‘emotional’ itself.”

We’ll be keeping our eye on this new tech; a tantalizing step towards making technology form a seamless part of our lives instead of distracting us from things that are important in life.

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Detection: What you don’t know will hurt you

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One of the realities of today’s cybersecurity threatscape is not if you will be breached, but when, and how often. As good as cybersecurity is becoming – i.e. prevention solutions provide a 99.9 percent or higher detection rate for common malware – effective cybersecurity depends upon three pillars –  prevention, detection and resolution – with the latter two required to address those situations where prevention isn’t enough.

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IoT weaknesses put webcams at risk for attack [infographic]

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Out of all the cybercrimes from malware to social engineering, the creepiest has to be a stranger watching your child through a webcam or baby monitor in their room. As this year’s Mobile World Congress starts in Barcelona, Avast researchers reveal that half a million smart devices in the city, including webcams and baby monitors, are currently vulnerable to cyber attack.

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Security tips to avoid becoming a victim of revenge porn

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Relationship break-ups have always been difficult, sometimes even acrimonious. Unfortunately a distressing new trend has emerged that can make the process even more hurtful.

Revenge porn – the process of sharing intimate, naked photos of an ex-lover online without permission – is being used by some jilted partners. By sharing these pictures on social media and other public websites, the person hopes to hurt and humiliate their victim, who they often blame for the collapse of the relationship.

Obviously revenge porn is illegal – but once those photos are ‘in the wild’, there is almost nothing the victim can do to prevent their spread. The only way to stop yourself from becoming a victim is to put protections in place in advance.

Here are 4 ways to help yourself:

1. Don’t take naked photos

By far the safest way to prevent intimate photos from being leaked online is not to take them in the first place. As soon as those images exist, even if you don’t share them, they are at risk of loss, theft or leakage.

The minute you take a photo on your phone, it is copied to the Cloud for instance – so now you need to protect two copies. And if you sync your phone with your computer, that then creates a third; three copies that provide points of vulnerability.

2. Don’t share naked photos

The second rule of protecting yourself against revenge porn is to ensure you never send naked pictures to anyone. No matter how much you love and trust your partner, you give up all control over that image the minute you pass it on.

Should your relationship hit the rocks, you will find it even harder to regain any control over those pictures.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask someone to delete pictures

If you go ahead and send an intimate picture to someone, you should always be ready to ask them to delete it – for any reason at all. You should also watch as the image is deleted to make sure it really is gone.

4. Protect your devices

Sometimes technology lets us down, and sensitive data is stolen or leaked directly from our computers and phones. Modern malware and computer viruses are exceptionally good at stealing our information.

This is just one of many reasons why you must install security software on your phone and PC to protect against hackers. Using an application like Panda Security prevents cybercriminals from accessing your pictures, protecting you against revenge porn leaks or blackmail attempts.

Use your head

Like most cybersecurity problems, applying your common sense could save you a great deal of embarrassment later. There is nothing “prudish” about refusing to take or share naked photos – in fact, protecting yourself in this way is extremely mature. So you should never feel pressured into sharing something you don’t want to.

And if you so choose to share an intimate image, make sure that your phone and PC are secured to minimise the risk of your selfie being leaked. You can download a free trial of Panda Security to get started.

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Online dating scams

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Does swiping right cost more than $200 million to the USA?

Protection when using dating apps no longer means you have to pop by the pharmacy before you go out on an internet date. UK’s National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) recently reported online dating fraud in the UK cost victims a heart-breaking £27 million ($34 million) last year. NFIB states the numbers are not entirely correct as they believe many people are not reporting online dating crimes out of embarrassment. Quartz most likely takes this argument into account as it mentions the losses in 2016 from online dating in the UK estimates at very close to $50 million. Anyway, we will rely on NIB’s data. The UK has a population of 65 million people, and according to the UK’s office for national statistics, about 45 million of them have access to or use the internet.

How is this relevant to us here in the USA?

Having in the scams are happening in a well-developed country such as the United Kingdom we find the results of NFIB’s research utterly shocking. We decided to see how these numbers would compare to cases in the US. According to PerREsearch, today roughly 280 million Americans use the internet or have access to a connected smartphone or a PC.

If we maintain the same ratio, we can quickly conclude that online dating fraud is mostly costing the US population more than $200 million. This is a lot of money, just to put things into perspective $200 million would be the cost of constructing a desalination plant able to provide clean water for the whole county of Ventura. People need to be protected while enjoying the perks that come with online dating. I guess we just solved the drought problem for one of California’s drought-stricken counties.

Is it $200 million dollars?

It most likely is more than that. It’s no secret USA tops the list of the countries most engaged in online dating. We, the Americans might be smarter and not fall for the tricks of hackers, but according to eHarmony, 40% of Americans use online dating sites when compared to just 25% in the UK, who admitted to having at least one dating app installed on their phone or tablet.

Even if we are not as easy to trick as the Brits, online dating scams are most likely affecting us more than our British friends across the pond. We won’t go into further details but the time and money Americans lose on dating sites are serious. Thus, we wouldn’t be surprised if numbers in the US are even higher.

Who are the victims?

Seniors are more prone to fall victim to one of these scams. About 62% of those who fell for the scams were over 40, and a quarter were aged 50-59. So be extra vigilant if you are in this age group. And even if you are not, if it seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t. And unless you are into giving away your personal belongings, money and personal information to complete strangers in exchange for a possibility of a hookup, we advise you to keep yourself protected with antivirus software that may prevent you from getting scammed. We understand that chatting with exotic lads and ladies might be bringing emotions you enjoy, but please remember to remain protected. Don’t be a contributor to the $200 million pot the US is most likely giving away.

How to determine if you are being scammed and what actions you must take?

Yes, you can be a good citizen and help the police catch the lovebird trying to take your vacation money away from you. The number one rule is always to record the incoming phone number should you start receiving calls. This should not be hard as you can find it in your ‘recents’ section on your cell phone. Secondly, try to remember as much as possible about the way your lover-to-be is talking, i.e. accent, or type of words he/she is using. If it doesn’t feel right, hang up and report the user to the fraud department of the dating platform you are using.

Being a good citizen will help dating sites keep their listings as accurate as possible. Never allow access to your personal information, if you have doubts about the person you are meeting or chatting.

Bear in mind those three rules:

  • Do not give your account number to anyone over the phone or the Internet unless you are the caller or if you are 100% sure who they are.
  • Keep in mind that fraudulent activities are often made by non-native people.
  • Using common sense is the best way to avoid a scam.

Panda Security is here to the rescue; we offer the best antivirus protection for all your devices. Next time you swipe right, stop by at www.panda.com and get yourself protected. Then go to the pharmacy and get the additional things you may need to enjoy a safe and happy relationship.

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