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Group-IB Helps INTERPOL-led Africa Cyber Surge II Operation Leading to Arrests of 14 Suspects

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Group-IB has made a key contribution to the INTERPOL-led Africa Cyber Surge II operation, a major joint initiative between international and national law enforcement agencies and private sector cybersecurity companies to prevent, mitigate, and disrupt threat actors on the African continent. The Africa Cyber Surge II operation, which spanned 25 African countries, resulted in the arrests of 14 suspected cybercriminals and the identification of more than 20,000 suspicious cyber networks linked to financial losses in excess of $40 million.

The Africa Cyber Surge II operation was launched in April 2023 and was carried out with funding by the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, the German Federal Foreign Office and the Council of Europe. This multinational, streamlined crime-fighting initiative brought together INTERPOL, AFRIPOL, Group-IB, and Uppsala Security to provide on-the-ground operational support and share actionable intelligence on cyber extortion, phishing, business email compromise, and online scams.

This intelligence was subsequently shared with national law enforcement agencies on the African continent, leading to the arrest of 14 suspects in countries such as Cameroon, Nigeria, and Mauritius, and the takedown of hundreds of malicious IP addresses and malware hosters. Additionally, the educational track of this operation saw parties share best practices on how to combat the surge in digital insecurity and growing cyber threats in the region.

Group-IB, a long-standing private sector partner of INTERPOL, collected and shared at the request of INTERPOL more than 1,000 indicators drawn from the company’s sector-leading Threat Intelligence related to malicious infrastructure across Africa. The data contained domains, URLs, and server IP addresses used in phishing and malware attacks. INTERPOL member countries in Africa leveraged this information in several takedown operations.

Africa Cyber Surge II also had knowledge sharing at its core. During operational activities held in Tanzania In June, Group-IB’s Deputy Head of APAC High-Tech Crime Investigation Department, Kristina Ivanova, shared expertise on techniques to tackle business email compromise scams, phishing and online fraud, and also contributed to a panel discussion on the importance of public-private sector partnerships in tackling cybercrime. Group-IB experts also assisted national law enforcement agencies on the African continent via a series of practical workshops dedicated to the analysis of real cybercrime cases.

“Group-IB is proud of its contribution to fighting against cybercrime in Africa, and we do this in order to protect organizations and citizens across the whole globe against cybercrime through our intelligence-driven technology and agile expertise,” Dmitry Volkov, CEO at Group-IB, said. “The Africa Cyber Surge II is yet another milestone with regard to cooperation between international law enforcement, national agencies, and private sector cybersecurity companies. Collaboration and intelligence sharing should be at the heart of cybersecurity operations, and Group-IB stands ready to make a further contribution to this end, in line with our core strategic mission of fighting against cybercrime in all its forms.”

“The Africa Cyber Surge II operation has led to the strengthening of cybercrime departments in member countries as well as the solidification of partnerships with crucial stakeholders, such as computer emergency response teams and Internet service providers. This will further contribute to reducing the global impact of cybercrime and protecting communities in the region,” said Jürgen Stock, INTERPOL Secretary General.

“As digital systems, Information Communication Technologies and Artificial Intelligence grow in prominence, it is urgent that public and private actors work hand in hand to prevent these technologies from being exploited by cybercriminals. Coordinated operations such as Cyber Surge are necessary to disrupt criminal networks and build individual, organizational and society-wide levels of protection,” said AFRIPOL’s Acting Executive Director, Ambassador Jalel Chelba.

This most recent initiative follows in the wake of the highly successful Africa Cyber Surge operation, launched in July 2022, which was aimed at identifying cybercriminals and compromised infrastructure in Africa. During this four-month operation, Group-IB provided key cyber threat intelligence that aided cooperation between INTERPOL’s Cybercrime Directorate, ISPA, AFRIPOL, and INTERPOL’s African member states. Some of the operation’s highlights included the arrest of 10 suspects linked to fraud and scams amounting to $800,000 in financial damages and the takedown of more than 200,000 pieces of malicious infrastructure.

Group-IB, which has a zero-tolerance policy to cybercrime, has been an official private sector partner of INTERPOL since 2017, and the company has participated in multiple crime-fighting initiatives on the African continent, including Falcon I and II, Delilah, and Lyrebird. In July 2023, Group-IB played a key role in the INTERPOL-led Operation Nervone, an initiative aimed at disrupting the activities of the notorious cybercriminal group dubbed OPERA1ER by Group-IB (also known as NXSMS, DESKTOP-Group, and Common Raven).

This joint operation was launched under the guises of the African Joint Operation against Cybercrime (AFJOC) and the INTERPOL Support Programme for the African Union (ISPA), in conjunction with AFRIPOL, the Direction de L’information et des Traces Technologiques (DITT), Group-IB and the Orange CERT Coordination Center (Orange-CERT-CC) led to the arrest of a suspected leader of the cybercrime syndicate in Côte d’Ivoire.

Cyber Security

Databases Are the Black Boxes for Most Organisations

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Nik Koutsoukos, the Vice President of SolarWinds, says databases represent the most difficult ecosystems to observe, tune, manage, and scale

Tell us about the SolarWinds database observability platform.
Nearly everything a modern business does from a digital perspective requires data. Thus, databases are among the enterprise’s most valuable IT assets. This makes it critical for organisations to ensure their databases are optimised for performance and cost.

That said, databases represent the most difficult ecosystems to observe, tune, manage, and scale. Not only are there different types of databases that serve different purposes, but they are also populated by different types of data, adding to their complexity. The implications of not having visibility into your databases can be anywhere from a costly annoyance to a significant issue that causes business service disruption. For example, most application performance issues, between 70% and 88%, are rooted in the database.

For this reason, databases have largely been seen as a black box for most organisations. You know what goes into it. And you know what comes out and how long that took. However, the complexities that occur within the black box of the database are harder to discern.

This is where the SolarWinds Database Observability comes in. This offering is built for the needs of the modern enterprise environment and helps ensure optimal performance by providing full, unified visibility and query-level workload monitoring across centralised, distributed, cloud-based, and on-premises databases. Organisations armed with SolarWinds Database Observability enhance their ability to understand database implications as new code is deployed, utilise real-time troubleshooting of database performance issues, and isolate unusual behaviour and potential issues within the database.

How does database observability help IT teams track and manage infrastructure, applications, and possible threats?
Database observability collects data about the performance, stability, and overall health of an organisation’s monitored databases to address and prevent issues, and provides deep database performance monitoring to drive speed, efficiency, and savings. With SolarWinds Observability — which supports MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server database instances — database performance, responsiveness, and error rate are conveniently displayed in dashboards.

Moreover, alerts can be configured to notify admins by email or other methods when user-defined thresholds are crossed. This allows them to identify and remedy issues before they can develop. By gaining insight into the activities taking place inside their database instances, teams can understand user experience as well as ensure systems can scale to meet demand.

What sort of enhancements has your observability platform received recently?
Just this November, we announced major enhancements in the Database Observability capability within our cloud-based SolarWinds Observability platform. SolarWinds Database Observability provides full visibility into open-source, cloud-enabled, and NoSQL databases to identify and address costly and critical threats to their systems and business. It is now possible to navigate across all of the samples collected globally, giving IT teams an empirical distribution of random samples, which resembles the main workload.

What factors according to you will drive the adoption of observability tools in the MEA region?
The Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa (META) are riding a wave of rampant digital transformation as organisations seek to remain competitive. According to IDC, digital transformation spending in the Middle East will accelerate at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16% over the five-year period, topping US$74 billion in 2026 and accounting for 43.2% of all ICT investments made that year. As organisations continue to shift workloads to multi- and hybrid-cloud environments, the complexity of their IT environments still continues to increase. This raises the potential for visibility and monitoring gaps which ultimately translate to underwhelming or outright frustrating experiences for end users.

Tell us about the top three trends you foresee for 2024.
There are clear signs of the continued adoption of cloud technologies to allow enterprises to become more agile, giving engineering teams the ability to focus on their core competencies and expand and contract on demand.

The adoption of Kubernetes is also increasing as the refocusing introduced by the cloud enables the move to microservices-based architectures which require sophisticated orchestration management.

Finally, we are starting to see an uptick in Vector databases, as applications demand better handling of relationships between data points.

What is going to be your top priority in terms of strategies for 2024?
We will continue to deliver on our vision of making observability easy. OpenTelemetry is driving observability, but data collection is nothing if it can’t provide insights. So, we aim to ensure the data is both collected and curated such that users find it easy to consume and extract valuable insight.

Regionally, through 2024, we will continue to focus on our key markets of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the ongoing enhancement of our product portfolio, and the strengthening of our channel ecosystem to create more markets for our business and for our partners.

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Cyber Security

ManageEngine Intros Enhanced SIEM with Dual-Layered System for Better Precision in Threat Detection

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ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation, today unveiled the industry’s first dual-layered threat detection system in its security information and event management (SIEM) solution, Log360. The new feature, available in Log360’s threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) component, Vigil IQ, empowers security operations centre (SOC) teams in organizations with improved accuracy and enhanced precision in threat detection.

A quality SOC ensures people, processes, and cutting-edge technology function well. However, enterprise security is made difficult by staffing shortages and solution orchestration complexities. Following recent upgrades to the security analytics module of Log360 designed to facilitate SOC optimization through key performance metric monitoring, the company has focused on addressing pressing challenges in security operations.

“In a recent ManageEngine study, a majority of respondents revealed that their SOCs are understaffed. These resource-constrained SOCs grapple with significant obstacles, such as process silos and manual investigation of alerts, which are often non-threats, low-priority issues or false positives. These lead to extended detection and response times for actual threats. To overcome these challenges, we recognize the imperative adoption of AI & ML for contextual event enrichment and rewiring threat detection logic,” said Manikandan Thangaraj, vice president at ManageEngine.

“We pioneered a dual-layered, ML approach to heighten the precision and consistency of threat detection. First, Vigil IQ ensures genuine threats are discerned from false positives. Second, the system facilitates targeted threat identification and response. This advanced system significantly improves the accuracy of identifying threats, streamlining the detection process and allowing SOC analysts to focus their valuable time on investigating real threats.”

Key Features of the Dual-Layered Threat Detection System of Vigil IQ in Log360:
Smart Alerts: Vigil IQ, the TDIR module of Log360, now combines the power of both accuracy and precision in threat detection. With its dynamic learning capability, Vigil IQ adapts to the changing nature of network behaviour to cover more threat instances accurately. It will spot threats that get overlooked due to manual threshold settings, thereby improving the detection system’s reliability.

Proactive Predictive Analytics: Leveraging predictive analytics based on historical data patterns, Vigil IQ predicts potential security threats, facilitating the implementation of proactive measures before incidents occur. This predictive intelligence drastically reduces the mean time to detect (MTTD) threats.

Contextual Intelligence: Vigil IQ enriches alerts with deep contextual information, providing security analysts with comprehensive threat insights. This enrichment of alerts with non-event context accelerates the mean time to respond (MTTR) by delivering pertinent, precise information.

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Cyber Security

Cybersecurity on a Budget: Affordable Cybersecurity Strategies for Small Businesses

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According to a survey by Statista, typically, global enterprises dedicate a minimum of 12% of their IT expenditure to information security measures. While larger companies can afford to spend a lot on building a robust cybersecurity strategy, smaller businesses cannot. So, let’s explore some affordable cybersecurity strategies for small businesses that may cost less but have a greater impact.

Train your employees
An article from Forbes found that, annually, 34% of businesses worldwide encounter incidents involving insider attacks. Whether intentional or unintentional, employees tend to be the reason for most data breaches. Per the same article, phishing emails account for 67% of accidental insider attacks.

Phishing attacks mostly instil a sense of urgency in the victim, making it harder for them to think clearly before making a decision. For example, employees may click an email announcement about a bonus that actually came from a malicious outsider impersonating your company’s CEO.

To avoid such mistakes, it’s imperative to train employees on the types of phishing attacks and the ways to identify them. Even going as far as sending a mock phishing email occasionally to test their instincts and educate them can go a long way.

Assess your vulnerabilities
One of the most important cybersecurity strategies is to assess all your risk points by periodically reviewing all your business processes. Pay more attention to teams that deal with a lot of customer data. For instance, sales and marketing teams may handle customer data on a day-to-day basis, so they are at high risk of leaking or mishandling data. Assess their daily activities, create a record of all the risk points, and find ways to mitigate them.

Encrypt your data
Encrypting your data can be an effective method to protect it in case of data leaks. Let’s say a hacker gets hold of your company’s data, but it’s encrypted. Unless the hacker gets the encryption key from you, they cannot access your company’s data. This adds another layer of protection in addition to the everyday cybersecurity best practices that you should be following in your company. So make it a point to encrypt all your data, especially sensitive and critical data.

Limit access to critical data
Not everyone requires access to all data. Try to limit access to critical and sensitive data to fewer employees by basing access on work duties or requiring approval for access, making it a multi-step process to access it. Additionally, periodically review who has access to what data to ensure there aren’t any misallocations of access.

Secure your Wi-Fi
A secure network will reduce the chances of a hack or unauthorized access to your sensitive data. So switch your Wi-Fi to WPA2 or later, as it offers more security. Your business might already be using it, but it’s best to be sure. Additionally, change the name of your SSID and have a strong pre-shared key to keep your Wi-Fi safe from hackers.

Prevent physical theft
Through April 2023, there were 3,785 robberies in London, and 1,765 were of mobile phones. This highlights how important it is to secure your physical assets, as they might contain critical and sensitive information about your organization.

Here are some ways to protect your physical assets, such as PCs, laptops, scanners, and printers:

  1. Restrict unauthorized access to assets.
  2. Install a physical tracker on all devices to track down lost items.
  3. Enable remote wiping of data to erase information if a device is lost.

Cybersecurity strategies are seldom drafted with affordability in mind. However, it is crucial to consider them from a financial perspective, as small businesses are also increasingly susceptible to cyberattacks. These tips can help you take the first step toward creating a secure IT environment. Learn more about cybersecurity solutions for your business.

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