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The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 tries to protect personal data while also pursuing users’ consent in what the draft claims are “precise and plain speech,” depicting the identical kinds of data that will be composed and for what purpose.

Divisions of “significant” dimensions – founded on aspects such as the volume of information they process – should appoint an autonomous data auditor to evaluate compliance with provisions of the law.
Enterprises will be mandated to stop controlling user data if it no longer suits the business objective for which it was amassed. However, users shall have the right to modify and erasure their data.
The administration will have the power to specify the countries where companies can transfer personal data. This will allow businesses to send user data to servers in nations on that list. In addition, the government will establish a “Data Protection Board” to ensure compliance with the proposed law. The board will also hear user complaints.

The Data Protection Board can impose financial fines for non-compliance. The draft proposal said that the collapse of commodities to take reasonable security precautions to prevent data infringements could result in penalties of up to 2.5 billion rupees ($30.6 million).

No company or institution will be entitled to process private data that is “likely to cause harm” to children, and advertising cannot target juveniles. In addition, parental consent will be required before processing any confidential data of a child.
The law will cover unique data collected online and digitized offline data. It will also apply to processing confidential data abroad if such data involves profiling Indian users or selling assistance to them.

5G networks are currently deployed across the globe by telecom operators and private enterprises. The 5G network is more complex than the previous generation of networks. With its Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (uRLLC) and Massive IOT capabilities, 5G supports new use cases such as virtual reality, tele surgery, autonomous transport, industry automation and connecting billions of devices.

5G networks are currently deployed across the globe by telecom operators and private enterprises. The 5G network is more complex than the previous generation of networks. With its Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC), and Massive IoT capabilities, 5G supports new use cases such as virtual reality, telesurgery, autonomous transport, industrial automation, and connecting billions of devices.

5G rollout also comes with numerous security concerns. Virtualization of network functions may lead to vulnerabilities such as denial of service. Software Defined Networks (SDN) are prone to attacks such as control plane threats, forwarding device attacks, API vulnerabilities, fake traffic flows, etc. 5G network attacks may even begin with exploiting the vulnerabilities in previous-generation networks. 5G core uses service-based architecture utilizing microservices deployed in cloud infrastructure. Microservices and the APIs connecting them also can open doors for attacks.

5G security is sufficiently addressed with new security frameworks such as SASE (Secure Access Secure Edge) or Zero Trust Security for the known vulnerabilities. However, with the wide variety of new 5G devices and millions of IoT devices introduced in the market with considerably fewer security features, the attack surface and vulnerabilities are also expanding.

Understanding the business impact of security breaches, simulating security threats, and planning mitigation approaches are vital for successful 5G network operations. The essential first step would be to build a comprehensive threat model to assess the network and applications’ risks and recognize the consequences of not addressing the risks. After formulating a threat model, the next important step in securing a 5G network would be to perform 5G penetration testing. Developing a comprehensive 5G security strategy is integral to the 5G deployment and validation. It must include security analysis and extensive cybersecurity testing across the supply chain, including all layers (i.e., hardware, operating system, applications, APIs, protocols), ensuring baseline security of 5G infrastructure.

Security & Vulnerability Assessment involves scanning 5G network components, devices, and applications.

5G cybersecurity assessment involves

• Assessment of systems for compliance with regulations and standards
• Gap analysis to unveil security holes
• Assessment of insider and external threat
• Assessment of active defenses and systems hardening
• Cybersecurity patching

Information Assurance Testing involves the assessment of an organization’s security policies and procedures for operating the 5G network. It is performed using industry best practices and frameworks.
Penetration Testing is focused on the non-radio parts of the network, such as IP, network, and physical security, and tests the resilience of the 5G network security. It involves hacking, testing, and identifying vulnerabilities in networks and applications to secure them from unauthorized access.

Security Compliance Testing involves security evaluation against relevant security standards such as 3GPP Security Assurance Specifications.

Automated Network Testing involves identifying common security issues such as unpatched software, unencrypted links, poor network addressing, etc. This testing is performed using automated network security tools on the 5G network.

Public Key Security Testing involves validating Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that uses cryptographic public keys linked to a digital certificate to authenticate devices or users. PKI certificates play a vital role in establishing and securing IoT devices, providing a high level of control and enabling large-scale device authentication, integrity, and reliable encryption.

5G security spans applications, network functions, transport layers, and cloud environments. Hence a holistic approach to testing is key to addressing security challenges and requirements. However, many network operators need help to build CI/CD pipelines and automated test suites to conduct comprehensive security testing, requiring 3rd party specialist testing service providers. Tsaro labs is a specialist security testing service provider with domain experts in cybersecurity and telecom network and applications.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or drones industry has become a vast worldwide technological sensation. The extensive use of drones and UAVs has made UAS very popular for the public and the private sector, like the Agricultural industry, Armed Forces, law enforcement, meteorological agencies, medical services, environmental companies, oil refineries, windmill manufacturers, farm owners, and many more. In the next decade, drones may become a norm in day-to-day life, just as cell phones are a norm today, which they were not only a few years ago. Cybercriminals are already aware of this and always searching for new ways to use drone technology to extract sensitive information and create chaos.

Since drones are remotely controlled, their chances of being hijacked by bad actors are considerable. Major cyber domain threats caused by drone activity are Downlink intercept, GPS spoofing, data exploitation, and many more. Therefore, organizations must also be conscious of the risks and take necessary measures to secure this valuable technology.

How can we mitigate the prevailing threats?

1. Understand The Security Risks To Your Business With A Managed Vulnerability Assessment every six months.

Organizations must identify, quantify and address the security vulnerabilities within their company’s infrastructure, including on-premise and cloud networks.

Securing your platform as you would do with any network device. Some valuable tips are-

• Update the drone’s firmware and apply a manufacturer’s ppatch.
• Use strong passwords for the base station application.
• Use updated anti-virus software for your drone controller device.
• Subscribe to a VPN service to encrypt your connection.
• Limit the number of devices that can connect to the base station.
• Use the “Return to Home” (RTH) mode to ensure drone recovery from a hijack situation.

Counter Drones
Countermeasures should focus primarily on space protection. It is important to be able to detect drones efficiently. Thermal cameras, RF scanners, high-frequency radars, acoustic sensors, and sophisticated machine learning and AI algorithms are used for this purpose. However, drones’ small size and low speed make their detection difficult within a highly cluttered environment.
Other techniques involve geofencing software, which creates a virtual border around an area, prohibiting unauthorized drone flight.

Workforce Training
Workforce training on cyber security is essential to help you better understand, detect, respond and monitor security risks across your business.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software
Integrating ERP solutions to provide enhanced visibility, integration, agility, and response. It also includes technology that helps maintain and sustain UAVs and other defense assets.

Clearly, this is what happens even if bug bounty platforms cannot prevent attacks by not paying ample amount of $$ to personal (TA) for their work!

As its, developing information, found out that the person behind this attack is of 18 years old (remember there is no age limit for threat actors/hackers) & ultimately, he doesn’t even know what exactly to do with the data that he had accessed to. Still, he found a way in, that is why it makes us feel vulnerable.

According to The New York Times, the threat actor responsible for the Uber hack claims to have gained access simply by sending a text to an Uber employee pretending to be from the company’s corporate IT team and compromised the employee’s account he used the employee’s existing VPN access to pivot to the intranet network and talking about internal network infrastructure they are often less configured and less protected and less audited compared to external infrastructure, that leaves many doors open.

TA appears to have made themselves known to Uber’s employees by posting a message on the company’s internal Slack system. “I announce I am a hacker and Uber has suffered a data breach,” screenshots of the message circulating on Twitter read. The claimed hacker then listed confidential company information they said they’d accessed and posted a hashtag saying that Uber underpays its drivers. Once the attacker compromised an employee, they appear to have used that victim’s existing VPN access to pivot to the internal network. the attacker appears to have found an internal network share that contained scripts with privileged credentials, giving them the keys to the kingdom. They claim to have compromised Uber’s Duo, OneLogin, AWS, and GSuite environments.

The threat actor also breached the Uber Slack server, which he used to post messages to employees stating that the company was hacked. However, screenshots from Uber’s slack indicate that these announcements were first met with memes and jokes as employees had not realized an actual cyberattack was taking place.

The attacker shared several screenshots of Uber’s internal environment, including their GDrive, VCenter, sales metrics, Slack, and even their EDR portal.

Uber’s AWS environment appears to be compromised as well. This screenshot of their IAM portal appears to show that the attacker has administrative access. If true, cloud access could not only include Uber’s websites, but other critical internal services as well.

The fact that the attackers appear to have compromised an IR team member’s account is worrisome. EDRs can bake in “backdoors” for IR, such as allowing IR teams to “shell into” employee machines (if enabled), potentially widening the attacker’s access.

Previous incidents:

1. Uber hacked by teenager demanding higher pay for drivers.
2. Lapsus$ Cyberattacks Traced to Teenager in England.
3. Teen who hacked Bill Gates Twitter account sentenced.
4. Teenage hackers breached T-Mobile, grabbed 30k repos.
5. Scots ‘hacker’ could be extradited to America after manhunt.

Lessons Learnt:

• Organizations should start using Phishing resistant MFA.
• Awareness, and regular phishing tests of employees.
• Centralizing authentication like SSOs can be a single point of entry for any attackers.

So, how do you prevent social engineering ?

You don’t. Stop trying. This is the basic principle of security… it’s a every day process.

You assume it will happen and put in technical safeguards to prevent or minimize impact, here is how:

• Using phishing resistant MFA (FIDO, passkeys, etc.)
• Do not save your credentials as plain text.
• Investing in automation.
• Ensuring least privilege.
• Designing with an assumption of breach: How do we detect, contain, …? (Threat model).
• Education is a key to minimizing possible attack surface’s against Social Engineering.
• MFA providers should by default automatically lock accounts out temporarily when too many prompts are sent in a short period of time.

List of social engineering types of attacks

• Phishing
• Smishing
• Vishing
• Spam
• Spam over instant messaging (SPIM)
• Spear phishing
• Dumpster diving
• Shoulder surfing
• Pharming
• Tailgating
• Eliciting information
• Whaling