6/3/22

LP, AP & IT Security's #1 News Source

Organized Retail Crime: CEOs are Taking a Stand

With the recent surge in organized retail crime, it is now getting much-needed attention from the highest levels of the organization. On December 9th, 2021, the CEOs of 20 leading retailers expressed in an open letter to Congressional leadership, their concerns about the impact organized retail crime is having on employees and communities across the U.S. and urged Congress to pass the Integrity, Notification and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces (INFORM) for Consumers Act. As CEOs are leaning on congress to address the ease of resale issue with legislation, they are also looking internally for solutions to keep their employees and shoppers safe while protecting their merchandise.

"Retailers have made significant investments to combat organized retail crime, but as they note in their letter, criminals will continue these brazen acts of theft as long as they are able to anonymously sell their stolen goods using online marketplaces," said Dodge.

What exactly are the CEOs saying?

"ORC is on the rise at Best Buy. The tactic involves an organized "gang" of people who steal entire shelves of high-value products, such as electronics, to resell them for a profit. This is traumatizing for our associates and is unacceptable. We are doing everything we can to try to create a safe as possible environment."
-Corie Barry, CEO Best Buy

"They're criminals, and it is impacting our stores. What they're doing is they're taking our products off the shelf and they're putting them online and we need to go after that." -Karen Lynch, CEO CVS

About 25% of the decline in gross margin came from loss of inventory - what grocery stores and other retailers refer to as shrink. That's heavily driven by organized crime or at least it appears to be."
-Rodney McMullen, CEO The Kroger Co.

The right solution to prevent ORC

Gatekeeper's Purchek® solution is a highly effective cart-based pushout theft prevention system that thwarts ORC and opportunistic shoplifters at the moment a theft occurs. As a thief attempts to leave the store with a cartload of unpaid for merchandise, the pushout prevention system locks the cart in place, thereby keeping the merchandise in the store. When this occurs, most thieves walk away empty handed. As shoplifters experience this type of disruption, they commonly seek easier targets.

Gatekeeper Systems' Purchek® solution may be your key to finding common ground with your CEO on how to retain your merchandise while improving safety. Contact Gatekeeper to learn a little more.

Cybercriminals Targeting Retail
Retailers amongst most targeted by cybercriminals
Retailers are amongst the most targeted organisations for cybercriminals, and it's important to make sure security is strong, particularly ahead of major shopping events, according to security firm Sekuro.

Prashant Haldankar, CISO at Sekuro, says whilst online shopping has opened up a whole new world of convenience, it has meant retailers (and their customers) have increasingly become targets of cyber attackers and scammers.

Sophos found that retail, together with education, was the sector most hit by ransomware in 2020 with 44% of organisations hit (compared to 37% across all industry sectors). Other common attacks against retailers include credential phishing and malware attacks.

"Any of these can lead to disaster for a retailer and their customers - from halting operations over critical shopping periods to stolen customer credit card information being used to make fraudulent purchases, to people's personal information being held for ransom or sold on the dark web," says Haldankar.

"This rise in retail cybersecurity attacks may be due to a combination of factors including; higher yield for a hacker to gain consumers personal information enabling them to use same attack template on similar retail organisations, and social engineering activities to compromise security, often not anticipated by retailers, leaving retail organisations vulnerable to hackers wanting to use their employees and others to gain sensitive information."

Research from Fortinet also shows that as retail businesses expand, so do their attack surfaces. Whether retailers are growing via brick-and-mortar shops or online, each new outlet, store, or website is a potential target for retail cybersecurity threats. securitybrief.com.au

FBI-CISA-Treasury Dept. Issue Ransomware Warning
U.S. cybersecurity officials issue notice on Karakurt extortion group

The suspected Conti ransomware group spinoff employs a variety of attack methods, the notice warns.

A trio of U.S. government agencies on Wednesday issued an advisory with technical details related to the Karakurt data extortion gang, warning that the group has "employed a variety of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), creating significant challenges for defense and mitigation."

Karakurt - also known as the Karakurt Team or Karakurt Lair - doesn't destroy or encrypt victim files. Instead, the group steals data and threatens to publish it, with known ransom demands ranging between $25,000 and $13 million in bitcoin, according to the notice published jointly by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Treasury Department and the Treasury Department-run Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Karakurt is part of the Conti ransomware group, multiple independent cybersecurity researchers reported in April. Wednesday's notice does not reference Conti, but notes that Karakurt has extorted victims previously attacked with other ransomware variants, or at the same time the victims were under attack by other actors.

Conti has made international headlines of late after attacking more than two dozen Costa Rican government agencies beginning April 17. Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves declared a national emergency May 8 as a result of the attacks, and the U.S. State Department announced a $10 million reward for information leading to the identification and/or location of anybody holding a "key leadership position" within Conti.

Conti, among the most prolific and visible ransomware variants dating back to its first detection in December 2019, is in the process of shutting down, according to cybersecurity firm AdvIntel. The group's public support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine made it difficult for the group to collect ransom payments as it had before.

While the group's public data leak site remains operational, it's back-end infrastructure was dismantled as of May 19 and its main operators and affiliates have split into various groups, including Karakurt. cyberscoop.com

Ransomware Groups Dodging Sanctions
Russia-Linked Ransomware Groups Are Changing Tactics to Dodge Crackdowns

Gangs are splitting into smaller cells and using different malware to obscure their identities and evade sanctions, researchers say

Russia-linked ransomware groups are splitting into smaller cells or cycling through different types of malware in attempts to evade a growing array of U.S. sanctions and law-enforcement pressure, cybersecurity experts say.

After the U.S. in 2019 put sanctions on a Russia-based group known as Evil Corp, which Washington accused of stealing over $100 million from more than 300 banks, hackers believed to be affiliated with the gang switched its operating model, according to a report published Thursday by security firm Mandiant Inc. The individuals ditched Evil Corp's bespoke malware and rotated between several related variants, ultimately renting access to ransomware produced by another group.

Hackers' attempts to obscure their identity could make it more difficult for victims to know whether they are complying with rules prohibiting ransom payments to sanctioned entities. These changes in tactics have helped some loosely connected criminal groups extend lucrative hacking sprees that have disrupted energy companies, manufacturers and other firms in recent years, cybersecurity experts say. Fourteen of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors in the U.S. were hit with ransomware last year, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Washington advises companies not to pay ransoms but urges those that do to report them to authorities, including the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees sanctions.

In a speech Wednesday at the Boston Conference on Cyber Security, FBI Director Christopher Wray said U.S. officials are "running at full tilt against Russian cyber threats" by disrupting hacking groups and warning targets of imminent threats. wsj.com

Attacks Hitting Microsoft Office Apps
Microsoft Office apps are vulnerable to IDN homograph attacks

Microsoft Office apps - including Outlook - are vulnerable to homograph attacks based on internationalized domain names (IDNs).

In practice, this means that users hovering above a link in a phishing email or a Word or Excel document they have received can't tell that it will direct them to a spoofed malicious domain that's not what it purports to be.

"Users, who are trained to validate a link in an email client before they click it, will be susceptible to click on it because it has not yet been translated to a real domain name in their browser. The real domain name would only be seen after the page has started to open," Bitdefender researchers warned.

Microsoft has acknowledged the issue when notified of Bitdefender's findings, but has not made it clear if they intend to fix it.

In the meantime, endpoint security solutions and IP and URL reputation services should block most suspicious domains, and user awareness training should teach users to always check the destination URL.

Organizations should also implement multifactor authentication to make homograph and any other kind of phishing less likely to lead to account compromise, and should consider registering all domains that could be associated with their company. helpnetsecurity.com

A closer look at the 2022 Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report

$1.5B in Fraudulent Transactions
Apple App Store stopped nearly $1.5 billion in fraudulent transactions in 2021

Prevented over 1.6 million risky and untrustworthy apps and app updates from defrauding users throughout the year

Apple is dedicated to keeping the App Store a safe and trusted place for people to discover and download apps. A key pillar in that effort is Apple's ongoing work detecting and taking action against bad actors who seek to defraud developers and users.

Bad actors continue to evolve their methods of online fraud, often making their schemes harder to recognize. That is why Apple has continued to refine its processes, create new ones, and engineer solutions to take on these threats.

Last year, Apple released an inaugural fraud prevention analysis, which showed that in 2020 alone, Apple's combination of sophisticated technology and human expertise protected customers from more than $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions, preventing the attempted theft of their money, information, and time - and kept nearly a million problematic new apps out of their hands.

Today, Apple is releasing an annual update to that analysis: In 2021, Apple protected customers from nearly $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions, and stopped over 1.6 million risky and vulnerable apps and app updates from defrauding users.

Apple's efforts to prevent and reduce fraud on the App Store require continuous monitoring and vigilance across multiple teams. From App Review to Discovery Fraud, Apple's ongoing commitment to protect users from fraudulent app activity demonstrates once again why independent, respected security experts have said the App Store is the safest place to find and download apps. marketscreener.com

Amazon Pulling Back on E-Commerce Operations
Amazon Slowdown Sends Shivers Through Red-Hot Warehouse Sector

Retailer's decision to pull back on e-commerce operations clouds growth in industrial-property market

Amazon. com Inc.'s decision to throttle back on its e-commerce operations threatens to slow the growth of the industrial-space sector, one of the hottest areas of commercial property.

For now, demand from other retailers is expected to pick up the slack, supporting warehouse occupancies and rent levels, analysts say.

Rents, occupancy levels and sales volume of industrial real estate were already rising before Covid-19. They have soared even higher during much of the pandemic, as retailers led by Amazon, Walmart Inc. and Target Corp. gobbled up record amounts of space at warehouses and distribution centers.

These growth trends are slowing in some markets, in part because Amazon is now subleasing warehouse space after reporting in April its slowest growth in about two decades. Amazon is one of the largest users of U.S. industrial space, owning or leasing some 374 million square feet at the end of 2021, according to MWPVL International Inc., a Canadian supply-chain consultant that tracks Amazon demand.

The company went on an expansion tear during the pandemic to make sure it could keep up with the sharp rise in demand from homebound consumers. Its slowdown is likely to disappoint some developers who had been hoping to lease projects under way to Amazon.

Property owners in some markets might also face new competition from Amazon's plan to sublease at least 10 million square feet of warehouse space, and possibly as much as triple that amount over time, as well as a flood of new supply from developers responding to the strong industrial market. Before the Amazon news, real-estate-analytics firm Green Street had been projecting about 400 million square feet of new industrial development in 2022. wsj.com
 
Walmart using its stores to battle Amazon for e-commerce market share

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