Hidden threats lurking in social media; facts to acknowledge.

Millennial Mobile Workforce and Data loss revealed that 82% of Indian employees use Facebook, 62% blogs, 45% micro blogs, 69% Google talks and 61% of Yahoo messenger. The convergence of employees personal and professional lives on social media platforms and the high degree of trust in these environments is also becoming a major concern for enterprises.

Social media offers an easy and authentic way to communicate with almost anyone around the world. But social media also act as a perfect platform to perform malicious activities. As per the recent survey, cases of cyber-attacks and threats are increasing at a significant rate.

One of the main reason to this is that people have updated almost everything in their social media profile. Personal and sensitive information are being shared which can cause a higher depth of damage in the long run.

Social hackers increasingly use social media to attack brands, VIP’s and customers. The types of threats in these platforms are diverse and every platform has a different tactic to respond against cyber-attacks. As a result mitigation threats on social media can be frustrating and time consuming process for security teams.

Here we will look into various social threats and possible ways to mitigate them.

Threat types

  • Impersonation; pretending to be someone else.

Impersonation is one the major and upcoming trend that hackers use nowadays. They rely heavily on this because it adds credibility to the scam and also increases the effectiveness.

Mitigation criteria:

  1. Proof that the profile is not a parody account
  2. Proof that the name and photo of the person impersonated is present on the post.
  3. Legitimate profile of the victim is optimal.
  • Financial scams

Financial scams are commonly found in established social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Types of financial scams include deposit frauds, money flipping, card cracking, tech support and fake employment opportunities.

Mitigation criteria:

  1. Direct mentions of client in question with intent to commit financial fraud.
  2. Posted login details.
  3. Break in terms of service.
  • Cyber threats

Cyber threats on social media includes phishing related links or pages, as well as malware. These types of threats are found in all social medias including YouTube.

Mitigation criteria:

  1. Active links to malicious content that is abusive in nature.
  2. Proof of past posted malicious content.

Social media stands as a free way to communicate with customers, prospects and partners that many brands used as an advantage. But on the other hand it is yet another potential threat to an organization’s reputation and infrastructures.

What if social media threats aren’t so predictable?

Many organizations are still unaware that apart from the benefits social media act as a breeding ground for highly targeted and co-ordinated malicious activities.

Hidden threats can cause substantial damage to your organization infrastructure and personal reputation.

Hidden threats

  •  Threat 1: Reputation damage

For an upcoming brand reputation play a key role in its development. Without the trust of the customers or prospects maintaining or growing your business will be an arduous task. Threats can come in the form of a disgruntled former employee, unhappy vendor or someone with a baleful intent to whittle away your brand’s reputation.

Eg. In Tesla, a former employee apparently stole several gigabytes of confidential data and leaked the details of the company’s production line to the media.

  • Threat 2: Planned, focussed attack

Social media provides an ideal platform for cyber criminals to attack organization and their employees. The common tactics include:

  • Harvesting information about individual employees to fuel sophisticated social engineering campaigns.
    • Compromising employees social media accounts for the purpose of launching further attacks and password reuse.
    • Planning destructive activities such as boycotts and protests.
  • Threat 3: Physical threats

Sadly, not all digital threats stay entirely in the digital world. Social media platform make it easy for individuals to threaten organizations or employees and there is no way of knowing whether the threat is legitimate or not.

How to prevent hidden threats

  • Be aware of what’s public
  • Check your private settings
  • Don’t accept friend request from strangers
  • Be careful when you check in or share location
  • Review you tags
  • Don’t share personal information online
  • Be aware of phishing scams
  • Always keep your passwords safe
  • Check community guidelines

Keywords: Social media, hidden threats, privacy

Zero-day exploit; advanced version of cyber-attack!

Zero-day exploit is a cyber-attack that occurs on the same day a weakness is discovered in software. At this point, it’s exploited before a fix becomes available from its creator.

Usually when a user discovers a security risk in a program, he consults the concerned software company to develop a security patch against the flaw. Developing a solution requires time. So there are chances where a hacker comes to know about this issue and uses this opportunity to exploit them. When this happens there is a little protection against an attack because the software flaw is so new.

Organizations that face such issues can employ different detection software’s like Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) to protect transmitted data.

In fact zero day exploit is very hard to detect.

The attack is carried out once the software/hardware is under vulnerability and attackers releases the malware before the developers fixes the bug/patch.

How it works

  • Developer of a particular company creates software that somehow contains vulnerability.
  • The hacker spots the vulnerability either before the developer does or before he acts on it to fix them
  • The attacker sends/injects malware into the software/system when the vulnerability is still open.
  • After the exploit is released, either the public recognises it in the form of identity or information threat or the developer analyses the malware and develops a patch.

Vectors used

Hackers use different attacking vectors to carry out zero-day attack. In some cases, the website is infected, in the target is likely to visit. Once the target enters the website, the hacker successfully hacks the system.

Another method is using spam emails via SMTP. Some exploit databases like US-CERT. Criminals can engineer malware to take advantage of their file type exploits to compromise attached systems or steal confidential data.

Detection strategy

While zero day attacks are difficult to detect, several strategies have emerged.

  • Statistics based detection: This type of detection set-up software to collect data from the previous detected exploits and creates a baseline for a safe system. While this method has limited successful rate, it can work well in hybrid solutions.
  • Signature based detection: This uses existing databases of malwares and their behaviour as reference while scanning threats. Signatures can be used to detect previously unknown vulnerabilities.
  • Behaviour based detection: This detects the virus based on its behaviour with the target system. Rather than looking at the incoming files code, the solution analyses the interaction with existing software to predict the results of the attack.
  • Hybrid detection: This combines the above three techniques to take advantage of their strengths while mitigating their weakness.

Protection against zero day exploit

  1. Content threat Removal (CTR): CTR is a defence technology that analyses the data on its way to the destination. It scans every data and prevents its direct delivery. Rebuilding data into this new form helps to ensure its safety and it discards dangerous elements of the original data.
  2. Disaster Removal Strategy: When a zero day attack takes place you need a disaster recover strategy to mitigate the damage. This includes cloud-based storage for data backup.
  3. Access removal: One of the effective ways to recover the data is to remove all access from anyone who would have the ability to exploit it.

Examples of zero day attack

Multiple zero day attacks commonly occur each year. In 2016, for example there was a zero day attack that exploited an undiscovered flaw in Adobe Flash player.

Also in 2016, more than 100 organizations were in the trap of a zero day bug that was exploited for an elevation of privilege attack targeting Microsoft Windows.

In 2017, a zero day vulnerability was discovered in which a Microsoft office document in text format was shown to be able to trigger the execution of a visual basic script containing powershell commands upon being opened.

Cyber hack prevention; Know your malware.

How many of you are aware of what actually a malware is?

Let’s look into it.

Malware is a collective term used to describe a number of malicious software variants including viruses, ransomware and spyware.

Malware is cut short term for “Malicious software”.

Malwares are nothing but codes developed by cyber hackers to damage the data or system and gain unauthorized access to a network.

Malware is typically delivered in the form of a link or file, through email or text messages. The system gets infected only when this is opened by the target user.

History of malware began 1970’s when the first malware, Creeper virus appeared. From then, the world witnessed different variants of viruses that cause immense damage to the data and the personal files.

What can a malware possibly do?

Malware can cause destruction to an extreme level. From stealing others personal information to threating for ransome, the growth of malware became a question of security.

Malware can extract sensitive information, delete files permanently and spy on your activities.

Variants of malware

Different types of malware include:

  • Virus

Virus is considered as the most common malware. Virus inserts malicious codes into a clean code and waits for the user to operate them. Once executed, they spread like a biological virus, making the core function and the data’s of the system at stake. They are usually contained with an executable file.

  • Worms

They got their name in a way they infect a system. Like a worm, they build a thread from one network to another, corrupting other systems gradually. This type of malware can infect entire network of devices very quickly.

  • Spyware

As the name suggest, it acts as a spy to retrieve others personal data without the knowledge of the user. This malware hides behind the background of the system, leaking credentials like credit card details, passwords and other sensitive information.

  • Trojans

This malware confuse the user by disguising themselves as reliable software. Acting discretely, it will breach security by creating backdoors that gives the malware variant easy access.

  • Ransomware

The behaviour of ransomware can be compared to that of a thief. It steals information and demands ransom to return them. It can be called as the worst malware ever. Ransomware comes with a heavy price. It can lockdown networks and logout users until the required amount is paid. This malware has targeted some of the biggest organizations in the world.

How can this spread? What are the medium?

 Each malware tend to spread in a unique way. Most of them rely on user action of some kind. Email and spam messages are major mediums used for transmission. Others are delivered via instant messaging and social media.

How to prevent malware?

  • As phishing emails and spams are the root cause of their outspread, make sure the email systems are locked down tight.
  • Keep all the systems patched and updated. Keeping an inventory of hardware, so you know what you need to protect and perform continuous vulnerability assessment on the infrastructures.
  • Create backup of the files so that in case of a ransomware attack you will never have to pay ransome
  • Establish end point security offering that provides defence depth against malware
  • Never trust strangers online. As per the social engineering technique strange mails, abrupt alert and fake profiles tend to spread the malware. Be attentive and don’t believe any stranger blindfolded.
  • Double check your downloads. Download data from trustworthy sites and even after download check the genuinity of the data.
  • Get an ad blocker. Malwares are lurking everywhere. Some in the kind of contagious ads. It’s quite safe that you install an ad blocker software.

Detection technique

Certain strains of malware are easy to detect.

Ransomware and adware makes their presence visible by encrypting the files and sending streaming endless ads to you.

Spyware and Trojan hides behind the system as long as possible.

Viruses and worms show their infection by freezing, deleting or replicating files, sudden shutdown or in the form of hyperactive processor.

Only way to prevent these malicious malware is to use an effective anti-malware.

Examples of malware attacks

  1. ILOVEYOU: a worm that spread like wildfire in 2000 caused a damage of nearly 15 billion dollars.
  2. SQL Slammer: The ground internet traffic came to halt within minutes of the spread of this malware in 2003.
  3. Conficker: This worm found a patch in the new update of the Windows and injected malicious code to phishing mails leading to the hijack of windows devices into botnet.
  4. Zeus: A keylogger malware that targeted banking information.

Facebook hacking techniques; all under one roof!

What comes into your mind while thinking about Facebook hacking?

Tough right?

What if I say it’s easier than you think? You don’t need to be a graduate in software engineering or a fabulous hacker to hack Facebook. Let’s us introduce you to the simplest Facebook hacking techniques. This isn’t a hacking class, rather an awareness to people and make them understand that their account can also be hacked and to prevent them.

Exclaimer: Don’t try this unless you have a good excuse to break into someone’s social media account without permission.

Hack Facebook account now

Different techniques of Facebook Hacking

Using a monitoring app: If you are looking forward to hack someone’s account in a simple way, mspy could work. Mspy is a brand of mobile and computer parental control monitoring software for iOS, android, windows and macOS.

Facebook hacking
  • Sign up: Visit the Facebook website and create an account. Follow the sign up procedures and give correct information to complete the registration process.
  • Log in to your account: After the registration process sign in to your account and fill in the details of the user/account to be hacked.
  • Install the application: After you have successfully updated the data of the user/device to be hacked, install the mspy (or similar app) application on the targets device.
  • Start monitoring: After installation click “start monitoring” option to spy on all the activities the target does on their Facebook account.

Advantage of this method

  • The process does not require any technical skills. Anyone could do this.
  • Fast way to hack Facebook.
  • Operates only on stealth mode.

Disadvantage of this method

  • Physical access of the target required.
  • If the user loses his phone, you will have to reinstall the application.
  • Apps are expensive.

The Manual method of Facebook Hacking

This is one of the legitimate and legal methods to hack Facebook account. This requires no application and is a perfect solution for those who try to hack other people clean handed.

  • Try to get the email account of the target that he/she uses to login into Facebook. This is no big deal when you are hacking people who are close to you. You can take the situation for granted when the email address of some people are displayed on their account
  • Open the targets login page and then click on to ‘forgot password’ option.
  • Facebook will now ask you for the recovery maid address to recover your account. Since you might not have the access to the email address, just click on to the link that says “No longer have access to these?”
  • Next the browser will ask you to provide a new email ID. You need to give an email address that isn’t tied to the Facebook account that you want to monitor.
  • Now you will have to answer a set of questions Facebook provides to prove that you are the owner of the account that the password is tied to. If you know the target very well, this would be a cakewalk for you. Once all the questions are answered, you can easily change the password with the owner detecting it.
  • If you fail in the previous step, you can use your friends help to reset your password. In this case, you will select three friends and create fake Facebook accounts in their names. With these accounts, it will be easy to evade the previous block because Facebook will contact those “friends” for confirmation.

Pros of manual method

  • Doesn’t require skill
  • free of cost
  • Safe to use

Cons of manual method

  • Requires access to the targets email address.
  • Requires Facebook ID of a person

IP can be tracked unless a public computer is used

 Using a key logging software

Facebook Hacking

Key loggers is another method through which you can hack Facebook.

Try Hacking Facebook
  • Sign up for an account: Select the key logger software to use and sign up an account with the developer.
  • Install the program: Now install the app that you want to monitor using this software. Make sure you have activated the app before accessing the key logging services.

Crack the password: After installing the application and verifying them, sign in to your software’s control panel and view the app harvested passwords. A quality application will capture all the passwords that a person uses in their device

 Matching a password

This method is purely based on luck because it depends on the negligence of Facebook users who use weak and predictable passwords. People often set passwords like dates and names of their higher importance. So if we know well about the person, cracking would be easier. This includes things like:

  • Year of birth
  • Important dates
  • Important names
  • Mobile numbers

Facebook hacking by Cracking user’s history

This last method is a straight forward method and a reliable one.

  • Open the target’s Facebook profile
  • Right click on the poke menu and then choose the copy link location/address from the options. This way you will save their link identity on the clipboard.
  • Go to your browser’s address bar and type in a simple code without any quote with the ABC being the ID which you copied in the previous step.
  • Press the “enter” key and look at the history of your target user’s activities on display including messenger.

        Hacking is illegal. Don’t do that. Respect others privacy!