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What Is A SIM Swap Scam And How Would You Protect Yourself?

The SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) is a tiny integrated circuit card that goes into your phone. It contains multiple identifying numbers and keys that the phone uses to communicate with the mobile phone network. Some mobile handsets have an eSIM, which is a built-in SIM card.

How does an attacker swap the SIM cards?

Many businesses have used 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) to improve the security while allowing system access. The use of an SMS as the second component is by far the most prevalent. After giving their login and password, the user will be required to input an OTP provided through SMS. The SMS code is the second element. In a SIM-swap attack, the threat actor’s goal is to get possession of a SIM to receive the SMS codes delivered to the victim. This is done with an aim to be successful in bypassing the 2FA system’s protection.

Swapping any Subscriber Identity Module card is a legitimate customer service operation. Hackers take malicious advantage of this. Threat actors using social engineering techniques impersonate the victim to the mobile phone company’s customer service staff. A SIM-swap attack begins with victim research and phishing attempts to obtain the personal information that may be used to effectively impersonate the victim. Hackers often impersonate genuine customers and supply the necessary information by self-help applications or portals to request the SIM swap.

What all can an attacker do after swapping the SIM cards?

Threat actors may be able to acquire access to the targeted users’ email, bank accounts, and social media accounts. This allows them to commit additional fraud as well. Taking control of the SIM may also make it easier to change passwords. They could possibly use the ‘Forgot Password’ function of online accounts that rely exclusively on the supply of a 2FA code through SMS.

How would you ascertain whether a SIM-swap attack is happening with you?

Keep an eye out for the following signs that you are being personally targeted for a SIM-swap attack:

  • Prior to the SIM-swap attack – The threat actor must mimic you, so they may contact you and ask you to exchange codes or SMS messages from your cell phone carrier. They will relay these codes to your telecom service provider to impersonate you to their customer support representatives.
  • During the attack is occurring – Your mobile phone’s network data connection is lost, and you neither receive any phone calls nor any messages via SMS. This is because your mobile phone number has now been transferred to the attacker’s swapped SIM card.
  • After the attacker successfully swapped the SIM(s) – If the attacker modifies sensitive credentials, you lose the account access of your email, bank, and social media accounts. As the thieves continue to mimic you, you notice unexpected transactions on your bank records or unusual behavior on social media.

If you see any of these signs, call your mobile phone provider right away to see if a SIM swap has occurred and to get it reversed. Also, contact your bank to have your online account password changed.

How to prevent SIM-swap attacks from happening?

When selecting a 2FA solution to protect their businesses, Security Managers may avoid SMS-based solutions and instead use a smartphone app. Google or Microsoft Authenticator generates OTP codes on the smartphone and is thus not vulnerable to SMS redirection.

Individuals may defend themselves from SIM-swap attacks by declining to provide any PII data to anyone who calls you claiming to belong to a mobile phone operator. If in doubt, hang up the phone first. Search out your mobile phone company’s contact information, then call back to ask them to confirm why they were calling. Never give out one-time passwords over the phone; they are meant to be typed into web pages or applications. It is advisable to choose an app-based authenticator rather than SMS. Also do not click on links received in SMS messages since it is easy to impersonate the sender of an SMS.

Centex Technologies provide complete IT infrastructure and Cybersecurity solutions for businesses. For more information on how you can protect your systems, contact Centex Technologies at Killeen (254) 213-4740, Dallas (972) 375-9654, Atlanta (404) 994-5074, and Austin (512) 956-5454

Tokenization and Encryption

PDF Version: Tokenization and Encryption

Ways To Keep Your Business & Home Networks Secure

The ongoing digital revolution across multiple sectors has been a lucrative target for hackers for the past few decades. Follow these simple yet profound tips to keep your work and home networks secure.

  1. Maintain a CMDB of your entire IT Infrastructure – Businesses are advised to create and maintain a list of their IT assets, hardware, and software in a CMDB (Configuration Management Database). Configuration Management Database helps IT teams to quickly manage and configure the hardware and software assets the business requires. Security frameworks such as ISO, NIST, and even CIS benchmarks are driven by IT Asset CMDBs. An automated system for scanning and finding IT assets, as well as in-depth information on those assets, is your best choice for ensuring your IT asset inventory is up-to-date, accurate, and thorough.
  2. Continuous surveillance and monitoring – IT department must keep track of all the assets as soon as they connect with the enterprise network, as vulnerabilities in them can allow a cyberattack to take place. Asset discovery solutions provide device detection features; allow IT teams to detect and identify rogue and unknown assets across the IT infrastructure. Hence, it also eliminates blind spots. This is especially essential as people connect work laptops to home networks, where a range of unprotected personal and IoT gadgets can act as entry points for malware and fraud.
  3. Update, upgrade and upscale your IT infrastructure – Security disclosures, vulnerability bulletins, and other technology vendor upgrades must all be kept up to date. Unpatched appliances are a typical attack vector for cybercriminals. Organizations have been frequently breached months or years after a patch is released because updates were not implemented as part of a managed program. Keep your software up to date and, if feasible, keep up with all the newest software patches.
  4. Implement access control and IAM (Identity Access Management) – IT Teams can reduce the risk potential as they adopt the principle of least privilege. Here, users are only assigned the permissions they need to do their work tasks. This should also apply to removing access to facilities such as Local Administrator access. Review and restrict the use of highly privileged accounts such as Domain Administrator and Global Administrator.
  5. Securing data from malicious entities as well as disasters – A security compromise can result in data loss and damage; thus regular backups are essential. Backups provide infinite scalability and remove additional infrastructure expenditures. Cloud is an excellent choice for data backup. Predictable storage costs and negligible downtime allow data to be accessed and restored immediately, ensuring business continuity.
  6. Educate and train the people – Let it be your family members at home or your employees, colleagues in the business; educate them all about end-user security awareness. However, the majority of people are unaware of how to see a threat and fail to notice a fraud attempt when they encounter one. You can limit risk and reduce occurrences by educating people about the hazards of cyber-attacks, what to look for, and how to report a probable attack.
  7. Strengthen your Incident response strategies – The best strategy to ensure timely corrective action after facing a cybersecurity incident is to have an IR (Incident Response) plan. Following a breach, a good IR identifies the procedures and actions that the staff should take. The Incident responder also assists in the coordination of resources to quickly restore operations. The incident response plan should specify responsibilities and provide step-by-step technical instructions for repairing the vulnerability. It must also include assessing the damage, recovering any lost or damaged data, and documenting the occurrence. The impact of an event will be minimized and the business will be protected from unnecessary harm and costs if everyone is on the same page with a plan of action and access to a central data repository.

Seek a consult with Centex Technologies for complete IT security audit of your business. Contact at (254) 213 – 4740.

How Do You Protect And Secure Your Telemedicine Business From Hacker Onslaught?

Telemedicine is the way of the future in medicine. Before the current epidemic, telehealth had already absorbed a significant share of the medical industry’s growth potential. Telehealth utilization surged from 11 percent to 46 percent after COVID, according to McKinsey forecasts, with providers seeing up to 175 times as many patients as before. With 76 percent of consumers expressing interest in telehealth, the future seems bright. Overall, McKinsey estimates that the telemedicine business has a $250-billion-dollar development potential. However, all of this expansion comes with significant hazards.

Telehealth and telemedicine businesses are the waves of the future in the healthcare industry. They are, nevertheless, in the vanguard of our COVID-accelerated future. Cybercrime targeting telemedicine has increased dramatically. Medical data breaches are increasing.

Why hackers are attracted to hack into telemedicine systems?

Telehealth and telemedicine are some of the world’s most profitable industries because of their magnitude. However, because of the large number of stakeholders, including clients and employees, it is a prime target. This industry also holds one of the most prized loot for cybercriminals: PHI of patients.

The following are a few examples of PHI (Personal Health Information): –

  1. PII (Personally Identifiable Information) about the demographics of patients
  2. Patients’ medical histories, as well as the results of their various medical tests
  3. Information about a patient’s medical and life insurance
  4. Financial details of patients and their mode of payment used to pay the hospital bills

Techniques implemented by hackers to obtain PHI

In addition to the PHI-based dangers inherent to the medical industry, telehealth operators face the same basic vulnerabilities as all businesses. While not all telemedicine cybersecurity vulnerabilities are related to PHI, they are by far the most serious threats. To steal PHI from telehealth providers, cybercriminals use a number of vulnerabilities and employ a complicated set of strategies.

Most of the hospitals have not strengthened the security of their cyberinfrastructure. Loopholes in any company’s cyberdefense create opportunities for hackers to take control of assets and cause havoc.

Inadequate firewalls cannot block incoming viruses and malware. Hence, hackers utilize insecure networks to gain access to various corporate systems and devices. Hackers can get around password protection thanks to flaws in authentication mechanisms. Once they infiltrate, the unencrypted data stored in servers are easier to steal and mobilize.

Medical professionals often lack end-user security awareness essential to defend against malicious social engineering tactics adopted by cybercriminals. Even the most well-protected cyberdefense system must accommodate for human mistakes across several employees and clientele accounts. Users who haven’t been properly instructed may configure passwords and settings that are not secure. Users may also be duped into compromising their own accounts through social engineering. Hackers may get access to physical areas and take advantage of unsupervised endpoints.

Targeting the mission-critical hospital network infrastructure with DoS and DDoS attacks is again a very common and brutal technique. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks usually target servers, ultrasound machines, ventilators, and pacemakers. Cybercriminals bombard a continuous stream of access requests to the hospital network. This overwhelms the server systems and disrupts the usual network operations. The daily mission-critical operations are slowed or perhaps stopped as a result of this hyper network traffic. Hackers also take advantage of newly discovered flaws, often dubbed as Zero-Day vulnerabilities. Alternatively, hackers may demand a ransom before restoring normal service. Combinations of attacks, using numerous vulnerabilities at once, are being used by the most dedicated and notorious hackers.

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)

The HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) of 1996 was created to ensure that PHI and the medical and health-related profession as a whole had uniform security requirements. It is administered and monitored by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The hazards created by cybercrime cannot be totally eliminated by adhering to the specific regulations and measures that each rule requires. However, compliance is a set of procedures that minimizes vulnerabilities and mitigates hazards in the telemedicine and healthcare industries. It’s not easy to comply with HIPAA. It is advised to hire professional services. The professional cybersecurity company will aid the business to evaluate their information security posture. They also help in deploying the precautions as well as handling the patchwork to ensure that all loopholes are closed or at least monitored. This is one of the best approaches to ensure the safety and security of your telemedicine systems and data.

Centex Technologies provide complete IT infrastructure and Cybersecurity solutions for businesses including medical establishments. For more information on how you can protect your systems, contact Centex Technologies at Killeen (254) 213-4740, Dallas (972) 375-9654, Atlanta (404) 994-5074, and Austin (512) 956-5454

How Would You Protect Your Remote Workforce From Emerging Cyber-attacks?

The pandemic has facilitated, rather than forced, many office workers to work remotely for their individual firms. Professionals working remotely encounter a number of challenges particularly in the arena of cyber security. The onslaught of pandemic has led cyber threat actors to exploit the situation and target those working remotely.

It is advised that businesses and employee undertake the below measures to ensure that their remote working experience is safe and secure:

Security-first environment – When working remotely, it’s critical to choose a physically secure location. The employer or employee has to avoid disclosing any PII (Personal Identifiable Information) when connected online. Remote workers delivering online video conferences and presentations must try to mask their personal surroundings. Malicious actors are continuously on the lookout for PII that is revealed during such video calls. It is also important that other persons in the house do not have access to your laptop and desktop system. Do not use public networks for personal or business purposes.

Securing your Wi-Fi network – Make sure your WiFi Security is set to WPA2 on your Broadband Router. The default credentials across your routers, modems, and cellular WiFi hotspots must be changed. As you are working remotely, it’s a good idea to set up specific Wi-Fi networks. A Host network must be reserved for employees-employers and the Guest network available to the rest of the family. This will allow you to isolate data transmission between WiFi networks and avoid bottlenecks and network clogs.

Remote working communication and collaboration platforms – Employers need to invest in video conferencing apps, cloud-based office suites, and other technologies to be able to operate remotely. As managers and leaders, it is your responsibility to ensure that these tools are safe to use by your employees. You may assess the safety and security of any apps you want your employees to use by working with your IT and Security staff. It’s also crucial to remind your remote workers to update their software applications on a frequent basis to ensure that they have the most up-to-date security updates.

Do not use office equipment for personal use – Employees who have been given work equipment should avoid using it to log into personal social media accounts. Remote workers should not engage in any personal activities of interest on company-issued devices and appliances.

Avoid any suspicious content, emails and chat messages on social media – The pandemic has prompted criminal actors to take advantage of the situation and send phishing emails around the world. They replicate emails from local government officials and containing forms to be filled out with personal information or work-related information. Rather than believing in any random unconfirmed message on social media being propagated by bad actors, pay attention to your local and regional government news broadcasts and laws.

Strengthen the cyber security posture of your organization – Antivirus software alone is no longer sufficient to keep hackers and cyber criminals at bay. You should invest in a complete cybersecurity system that can protect you from all types of malware, frauds, and zero-day assaults.

VPNs must be provided to ensure encrypted and secure transmission of work data – Enable the different security features offered by vendors and OEMs in your devices and use them to protect yourself and your data while working remotely. It is advised to use VPN connections to connect to official applications.

These are just a few of the security options remotely working employers and employees must adopt. While the employees might not be physically protected from the office, employers must ensure to provide them adequate digital security while working remotely.

Centex Technologies provide complete cybersecurity solutions to businesses. For more information, call at (254) 213-4740

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