CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF HACKING

What do Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have in common? 

The answer: All three technology giants, considered the gold standard among cloud computing providers, have suffered the ignominy of being breached by hackers.

Apple’s “celebgate” incident exposed personal photos of its celebrity iCloud users and made unwelcome news headlines last year. 

UK technology provider Code Spaces was forced out of business last year after hackers tried to blackmail it and subsequently deleted crucial data from its Amazon Web Services-hosted cloud storage. 

In 2013, an expired SSL certificate in Microsoft’s Azure cloud service gave hackers the chance to bring down the Xbox Live and a raft of other cloud-hosted services.

Cloud security risks are rising, with attacks growing at 45% year-on-year globally, according to cloud security firm Alert Logic. In the next five years, $2 billion will be spent by enterprises to shore up their cloud defenses, according to Forrester Research. 

First time cloud users can be most at risk, simply because of unfamiliarity with the new environment and the added burden of having to grapple with a new way of managing users, data and security.

Credit:Rajesh Maurya, Fortinet / Financial Express

YOUR PAYPAL ACCOUNT IS WORTH $6.43

Online criminals are more interested in getting their hands on stolen Uber, PayPal and even Facebook accounts, than credit card numbers and other personally identifiable information.

 The price of these stolen identifiers on the underground marketplace, or “the Dark Web,” shows the value of credit cards has declined in the last year, according to security firm Trend Micro.

Last week, stolen Uber account information could be found on underground marketplaces for an average of $3.78 per account, while personally identifiable information, such as Social Security Numbers or dates of birth, ranged from $1 to $3.30 on average – down from $4 per record in 2014, reported CNBC.

Furthermore, PayPal accounts – with a guaranteed balance of $500 –were found to have an average selling price of $6.43. Facebook logins sold for an average of $3.02, while Netflix credentials sold for about 76 cents.

By contrast, U.S.-issued credit card information, which is sold in bundles, was listed for no more than 22 cents each,

“It’s an incredible underground ecosystem. There is a high level of competition for these criminal buyers and there are a lot of different types of forums. It’s incredibly diverse, but incredibly mature,”Said Ed Carbera, Trend Micro’s vice president of cyber security strategy.

Cyber criminals will often use stolen Uber credentials to book “ghost rides,” in which they create a fake driver account and charge nonexistent rides to stolen accounts, experts say.
Another way fraudsters leverage this information is to simply build a fuller picture of a victim for identify theft.

“They are doing their own market research or where they can find the data that’s most valuable in the criminal underground and they develop their attacks accordingly,” said Cabrera.

Meanwhile, Forrester research analyst Andras Cser adds these incidents highlight the need of these service providers to be more cognizant of sudden changes in user’s account behavior.

“If a user suddenly takes a cross country ride versus following their usual movements, that should spark an alert,” notes Cser

To address the issue of fraudulent transactions, Uber is reportedly testing its version of two-step authentication, which would require users to enter additional credentials when logging in from an unknown device.

The time has come to move away from passwords.

“Firms should be looking at behavioral biometrics solutions to authenticate users — how the user actually behaves, how they hold a phone, how big their fingers are and how hard they press the touch screen."