Insights

Critical Path Security researcher Patrick Kelley told BleepingComputer that he was able to quickly find the credentials bad actors would need to infiltrate both the City of Griffin and P.F. Moon's systems with the help of several OSINT tools and techniques such as Shodan, RiskIQ's PassiveTotal, data dumps, and pastes. "I work heavily with small governments. Very similar issues across all municipalities. Small budgets. High expectations. I was VERY happy that the City of Griffin was doing Security Awareness Training. It's quite rare," added Kelley. "The biggest thing we've been pushing that works are phone, text, some sort of additional factor to authorize a payment change." Read more

"We can patch operating systems all day long, but it's a lot harder to patch the human in us," cybersecurity expert Patrick Kelley said. Kelley isn't surprised the city of Griffin got scammed. "It happens every week," he said. What is uncommon is how much money the crooks got. The scheme went through the city's water department. An email came through that looked legitimate from their vendor - P F Moon & Co. The email said they needed to change the banking information for the account, so the city employee sent it over. "We get that these changes need to take place, but an email just isn't good enough," Kelley said. Read More

The Atlanta City digital systems were hijacked by a ransomware attack in 2018. Officials said this attack is much less serious than the one that affected the city. However, Cyber Security Expert Patrick Kelley said it is still a big deal. "To me there's a dramatic impact to this,"Kelley said. Kelley is talking to some of the judges impacted by the hack, and they told him they can't access any of their information. He also believes the judicial council likely doesn't know the full scope of the attack. Read more

Critical Path Security has spent quite a deal of time using Raspberry Pi devices for adversarially-based physical penetration tests, with the hope of compromising the client business network. It is one of the most successful tactics that are employed, as the devices are quite small and versatile. Using a battery pack and a small WiFi antenna, Critical Path Security has proven hundreds of vulnerabilities in some of the most well-defended networks in the world. This has led to increasing the security posture of our customers. When we read the most recent breach report, there was little surprise to find that NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was unable adhere to the NIST standards, including the 1st requirement which is "Inventory and Control of Hardware Assets". It is a vast, interconnected network of 26,174 computer systems with 3,511 being servers. With the extensive distribution of legacy systems, the ability to breach a…