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SonicWall Staff

Cybersecurity News & Trends – 10-15-21

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SonicWall’s push for the cloud generated quite a bit of attention. The company’s growing virtual, cloud, and hybrid offerings leverage the best of SonicWall’s Boundless Cybersecurity approach and return choice to the customer. In industry news, the unfortunate rise of “killware,” the world is talking about Russian hackers without Russia, Verizon’s Visible problem, Quest fertility clinic has a breach, and a Pentagon cyber official quits.

SonicWall in the News

SonicWall Returning Choice to Customers by Securing Any Mix of Cloud, Hybrid and Traditional Networks

ITNews: SonicWall, a global leader in physical, virtual and cloud-focused cybersecurity solutions, emphasizes the return of customer choice for securing and scaling a mix of cloud, hybrid and traditional environments.

SonicWall Returning Choice to Customers by Securing Any Mix of Cloud, Hybrid and Traditional Networks

BusinessInsider: SonicWall’s growing virtual, cloud and hybrid offerings leverage the best of the company’s Boundless Cybersecurity approach returning deployment choices to the customer.

SonicWall Secures Mix of Cloud, Hybrid and Traditional Networks

TheHackPosts: SonicWall’s cloud innovation and collaboration with organizations worldwide to build some of the safest and strongest hybrid networks.

SonicWall Gives Organizations Freedom of Choice In All Types Of Security Architectures 

Byte (Spain): With its virtual, cloud and hybrid offerings, SonicWall takes full advantage of the enterprise’s unlimited cybersecurity approach to return deployment choice options to the customer.

A Brief Insight into The Complex Topic Of IoT Security

Industry of Things (Germany): This article deals with attacks on IoT devices and the complex issue of defending networks. It cites the SonicWall mid-year update on the 2021 Cyber Threat Report to raise the urgency.

SonicWall Is a Company Highly Valued by The Channel

Newsbook (Spain): SonicWall’s Sergio Martinez was interviewed about the company’s great first fiscal semester in Spain.

Industry News

The Next Big Cyberthreat Isn’t Ransomware. It’s Killware.

USA Today: The headline is just as bad as it sounds. As most Americans are still learning about ransomware, USA Today says our top security experts are worried about an even more dire development: killware, cyberattacks that can literally end lives. While the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in April triggered a region-wide shortage of gasoline, another earlier attack tried to distribute contaminated water to residents. According to this news outlet and others, the Oldsmar Water Treatment facility’s attempted hack in Florida came “very close” to achieving its goal. The fact that the attack was not for financial gain but instead purely to harm, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas remarked that the incident “should have gripped our entire country.” Mayorkas and cybersecurity experts said the Oldsmar intrusion indicates that hackers are targeting critical parts of the nation’s infrastructure – everything from hospitals and water supplies to banks, police departments and transportation – in ways that could injure or even kill people.

U.S. talks global cybersecurity without a key player: Russia

A.P. News: The U.S. got into a week-long huddle with 30 other countries to discuss a unified cybersecurity strategy. Obviously absent: Russia. Russia is one country that, unwittingly or not, hosts many of the criminal syndicates behind the recent rise of ransomware attacks. The fact that none of the other participants invited Russia to the two-day meeting marks a big move to publicize the growing disapproval of Russia’s inability (or unwillingness) to reel in cybercrime gangs. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan likened gathering “like-minded” governments as an urgent attempt to protect citizens and businesses. The virtual discussions will focus in part on efforts to disrupt and prosecute ransomware networks like the one that attacked a major U.S. pipeline company in May.

High-Profile Breaches Are Shifting Enterprise Security Strategy

DarkReading: The attacks against Microsoft Exchange and SolarWinds highlighted enterprise concerns over supply chain vulnerabilities and attack visibility. Dark Reading’s 2021 Strategic Security Survey shows that high-profile incidents drove changes in enterprise security strategies over the past year. In the survey, 54% of respondents describe top executives as paying more attention and prioritizing cybersecurity because of the increased media attention around incidents.

Verizon-owned Visible network suffers suspected data breach.

XDA: Visible, a Verizon-owned company, says that it is aware of an issue where some member accounts were accessed and charged without authorization. It’s not clear if Visible itself suffered a data breach or if the attackers used usernames and passwords obtained from other data breaches to log in — a tactic known as credential stuffing. Some Visible subscribers claim that they have randomly generated passwords for their accounts and that they are not used elsewhere, which would indicate Visible itself had a security breach.

Quest-owned fertility clinic announces data breach after August ransomware attack.

ZDNet: Quest Diagnostics informed the SEC about a ransomware attack in August that hit ReproSource, a fertility clinic owned by the company. The attack led to a data breach that exposed a significant amount of health and financial information for about 350,000 ReproSource patients. Quest released a statement to ZDNet, saying that ReproSource notified patients that it experienced a data security incident and that an unauthorized party may have accessed or acquired some patients’ protected health information and personally identifiable information.

Israel on heightened alert after hospital hit with a ransomware attack

Times of Israel: After a ransomware cyberattack targeted the Hillel Yaffe Medical Center in Hadera Wednesday, Israel’s National Cyber Directorate said there were heightened fears of other hospitals being targeted. The directorate also issued a general warning to Israeli businesses to be aware of potential cyberattacks as the country faces an uptick in hacking attempts. Separately, in a letter to hospitals around the country, the Health Ministry urged them to print out patients’ medical files amid the fear of more cyberattacks.

A Pentagon official said he resigned because U.S. cybersecurity is no match for China.

BusinessInsider: “We have no competing fighting chance against China in fifteen to twenty years,” said Nicolas Chaillan, formerly a high-ranking member of the software and security teams for the U.S. Pentagon and the U.S. Air Force. He quit in September and told the Financial Times last week that the U.S. was far behind China on A.I. security development, commenting that the U.S. capabilities and cyber defenses of some government departments were at “kindergarten level.”

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SonicWall Staff