In today’s evolving threat landscape, the decision of whether to bring in external talent expertise is no longer optional. During the 2021 Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit, we heard other facts and figures that aligned with the needs of our customers and of the market. At the summit, Gartner analysts noted that organizations must have partnerships with MSS/MDR providers and security consulting firms if security is to enable corporate business objectives.

This is part 2 of Trustwave’s 2022 Cybersecurity Predictions blog series. In 2021, the cybersecurity industry was truly tested. Most notably, we uncovered the deeper fallout from the SolarWinds attacks, combatted the proliferation of advanced ransomware gangs and a surge in vulnerability exploitation, and saw fragile supply chain and critical infrastructure more targeted by attackers than ever.

Kevin Kerr, Lead Security Principal Consultant at Trustwave, participated in a discussion on Zero Trust with Steve Riley, Field CTO at Netskope during SASE Week 2021. The importance of Zero Trust is derived from how it functions. Instead of focusing on protecting a physical network, a Zero Trust network works by focusing on securing the resources that reside on or have access to the network such as data, identities, and services.

'Email is dead. It's a thing of the past.' In the IT industry, this statement, or something like it, is said regularly — usually corresponding with the rise of a new communication or collaboration platform. Each time this happens, it's prudent to remember a general rule around tools: as long as they retain specific advantages for the human beings using them, they generally endure.

The macro-economic consequences of COVID-19 have reached cybersecurity and the talented people who keep us secure. In some sense, invisibility is a hallmark of good cybersecurity, back-end operations running smoothly and keeping the assets, operations and reputation of an organization from harm. But this invisibility is built on proper resourcing, and in the last 18 months, we’ve seen a progressive erosion of the human resources behind successful organizational cybersecurity.

Over the last several years, Managed Security Service Providers (MSSP) have evolved, and some have started offering Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services as part of their overall security solution. However, an MSSP lacking MDR capability simply cannot provide the same level of security, particularly in today’s quickly changing environment that has seen remote and hybrid work become the norm.

In 2021, the cybersecurity industry was truly tested. Most notably, we uncovered the deeper fallout from the SolarWinds attacks, combatted the proliferation of advanced ransomware gangs and a surge in vulnerability exploitation, and saw fragile supply chain and critical infrastructure more targeted by attackers than ever. As global cyber defenders, predicting where the broad industry could be heading is a daunting task.

Iranian government-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) actors are exploiting known Microsoft and Fortinet vulnerabilities to attack targets with ransomware in the transportation, healthcare and public health sectors, according to an alert issued on Nov. 17 by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

In Part 1 of our BlackByte ransomware analysis, we covered the execution flow of the first stage JScript launcher, how we extracted BlackByte binary from the second stage DLL, the inner workings of the ransomware, and our decryptor code. In this blog, we will detail how we analyzed and de-obfuscated the JScript launcher, BlackByte’s code, and strings.

Please click here for Part 2 UPDATE 19.October.2021 - Based on some reactions and responses to our BlackByte analysis, and specifically, the included decryptor, we wanted to provide an update and some clarification. First off, we’ve updated the decryptor on github to include two new files. One is the compiled build of the executable to make the tool more accessible and the second is a sample encrypted file “spider.png.blackbyte” that can be used to test the decryptor.