Insights

1,000 of 1,400 employees were sent home and all manufacturing halted as Belgian company ASCO Industries, a key leader in manufacturing components for both civilian and military planes, fell victim to a ransomware attack on June 7. One week later, ASCO describes the incident as a "large-scale ransomware attack". It's important to note that the attack came two months after the European Commission approved the acquisition of the company by US-based Spirit Aerosystems. As ASCO Industries manufactures airplane parts for Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier Aerospace, Lockheed Martin and the new F-35 fighter plane, the impact has been felt around the world. The company has plants in Belgium, Germany, Canada and the US, as well as office representation in Brazil and France. A week later, the plants are still closed and an investigation by external experts seeks to determine the actual damage caused. The infection occurred at the production plant in Belgium,…

Researchers have discovered one million internet connected devices that are vulnerable to a Microsoft flaw, which could open the door to a cyberattack. The flaw (CVE-2019-0708) was fixed during Microsoft’s May Patch Tuesday Security Bulletin earlier this month. System administrators were urged to immediately deploy fixes as the flaw could pave the way for a similar attack on the scale of WannaCry. Making matters worse, a spike in scans for vulnerable systems was spotted over the weekend – potentially indicating that bad actors are looking to sniff out the activity. The critical remote code-execution flaw exists in Remote Desktop Services and impacts older version of Windows, including Windows 7, Windows XP, Server 2003 and Server 2008 (Microsoft deployed patches to Windows XP and Windows 2003 for the bug during Patch Tuesday, neither of which is still supported via monthly Patch Tuesday updates). While Microsoft urged administrators to update impacted Windows…

Google announced today that they have accidentally stored user passwords unprotected in plaintext. Google says that the bug affected "a small percentage of G Suite users," meaning it does not impact individual consumer accounts, but does affect some business and corporate accounts, which have their own risks and sensitivities. The company typically stores passwords in a cryptographic hash. However, a bug in G Suite's password recovery feature for administrators caused unprotected passwords to be stored in the infrastructure of the admin console. Google has disabled the features that contained the bug. Google is in the process of notifying G Suite administrators, and says that it will also automatically reset any impacted passwords that haven't already been changed. The company discovered the bug in April. Since all impacted passwords that haven't already been changed will be auto-reset by Google, you should focus on adding two-factor authentication to your G Suite account…

In the last 24 hours, Critical Path Security has seen a couple of critical vulnerabilities that could affect your IT infrastructure and employee communication streams. Here is what you need to know: Microsoft Remote Desktop Services Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Remote code execution vulnerabilities are considered to be the most effective means of breaching networks and spreading malware. It allows an adversary to compromise systems with relative ease. In most cases, this can result in circumvention of perimeter security technologies protecting internal corporate networks from attackers on the public Internet. Microsoft has released a patch which fixes a serious remote desktop services remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-0708). This vulnerability affects Windows XP, Vista, 7, Server 2003 and Server 2008. The patch has been made available to currently supported operating systems, which are Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. In a rare move, Microsoft is also releasing update for Windows XP…