New HIPAA fines will be based on an organization’s “level of culpability”

Following a record year for HIPAA settlements that saw the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) collect $28.7 million in HIPAA fines, HHS has reduced the maximum annual HIPAA fine in three out of the four penalty tiers. However, HHS’ move doesn’t mean that healthcare organizations are now free to take a laissez-faire approach to compliance or cybersecurity.

More culpability = higher HIPAA fines

For years, healthcare organizations have been complaining about eye-popping HIPAA fines in the wake of breaches that were not their fault. The adjusted fines address this issue by making willfully negligent organizations pay more than those who exercise due diligence. The new HIPAA penalty tiers are effective now and are as follows:

• Tier 1 (no knowledge of violation): $100 to $50,000 per violation; capped at $25,000 per year
• Tier 2 (reasonable cause): $1,000 to $50,000 per violation; capped at $100,000 per year
• Tier 3 (willful neglect, corrected): $10,000 to $50,000 per violation: capped at $250,000 per year
• Tier 4 (willful neglect, not corrected): $50,000 per violation; capped at $1.5 million per year

While the maximum HIPAA fines have gone down significantly, these are still hefty chunks of change, especially for small and medium-sized organizations with tight budgets. It’s also important to note that the annual cap is per year for every year the violation persists.

There’s more at stake than just HIPAA penalties

HIPAA compliance does not automatically equate to cybersecurity, and healthcare organizations have a lot more to worry about than just being slapped with HIPAA penalties, which are assessed only in a minority of cases, anyway. Even if a healthcare organization faces no HIPAA fine or only a small one, it is still subject to:

• Other compliance mandates, such as PCI DSS.
• The theft of confidential business information or employee data.
• State data privacy laws, such as the law Washington State just enacted, halving the time organizations have to notify victims of a breach from HIPAA requirements and broadening the definition of what would be considered breached information.
• Civil lawsuits filed by angry patients, including class action suits.
• Bad PR and brand damage that could lead to lost business and difficulty recruiting talent.
• Difficulties with current or future M&A transactions; no organization wants to inherit another’s cybersecurity or compliance problems.
• Incident response and mitigation costs, including system restoration, replacement of hardware, and the price of identity theft solutions for breach victims.

Healthcare organizations can also be victimized by cyber attacks that do not involve data breaches or HIPAA penalties but are quite costly and destructive, such as ransomware and cryptojacking malware. Ransomware, which has plagued the healthcare industry for several years, can be used to disable medical IoT devices or lock providers out of electronic health records and other critical systems, putting patients’ health and lives at risk.

The cybersecurity landscape is dynamic, and new threats are emerging literally daily. HIPAA is important, but it should not be healthcare organizations’ only compliance or cybersecurity concern, and fines should not be the only motivating factor to defend against cyber abuse.

The cybersecurity experts at Lazarus Alliance have deep knowledge of the cybersecurity field, are continually monitoring the latest information security threats, and are committed to protecting organizations of all sizes from security breaches. Our full-service risk assessment services and Continuum GRC RegTech software will help protect your organization from data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cyber threats.

Lazarus Alliance is proactive cybersecurity®. Call 1-888-896-7580 to discuss your organization’s cybersecurity needs and find out how we can help your organization adhere to cybersecurity regulations, maintain compliance, and secure your systems.

Formjacking allows hackers to steal payment card data and other information submitted through online forms

As individuals become more savvy about avoiding phishing emails, and enterprises get better at filtering them out before they ever reach employees’ inboxes, it’s become more difficult for hackers to infect enterprise systems with ransomware and cryptojacking malware. Companies are also becoming more diligent about backing up their systems, and cryptocurrency prices have fallen, meaning that the potential profits from ransomware and cryptominers have likewise diminished.

So what’s a hacker to do if they want to make a fast, illicit buck? The answer is formjacking, a cyber attack that dramatically increased in popularity in 2018 and is now hitting an estimated 4,800 websites a month.

What is formjacking?

Formjacking is sometimes described as the online version of ATM card skimming – another hacking method that is becoming less fruitful as more brick-and-mortar retailers implement EMV chip technology. In a typical formjacking scheme, hackers breach an ecommerce site and insert malicious JavaScript code into the form where shoppers enter their payment information. When the customer hits “submit,” the information is transmitted to the hackers, who can then sell the credit card data or use it themselves.

Formjacking is very difficult to detect because it’s invisible to both the customer and the retailer. The customer sees the transaction being processed normally, and the retailer still receives the order information and payment. The malicious code tends to be very short, and hackers disguise it to appear innocuous or routine. There is no indication that anything unusual has happened until days, weeks, sometimes even months later, when the retailer discovers the code or customers see unusual charges appearing on their credit card statements.

Most formjacking malware is developed by Magecart, the name given to a hacking ring composed of loosely affiliated groups that specialize in stealing credit card data. In addition to orchestrating their own attacks, Magecart groups also offer formjacking malware-as-a-service to other cybercriminals.

Small- and medium-sized retailers are the most frequent victims of formjacking, likely because their cyber defenses tend to be less robust than large ecommerce sites. However, because formjacking malware often gets onto sites by compromising third-party services, such as payment processing and chatbot applications, very large companies are not immune. British Airways and Ticketmaster number among the high-profile victims of Magecart formjacking attacks.

While formjacking is usually deployed to steal payment card data from ecommerce sites, it can be used to compromise any type of online form. This means that formjacking could also be used to steal other sensitive data, including login credentials, Social Security Numbers, or even confidential business information, such as contact information for sales prospects who have signed up for a company’s mailing list.

Protecting your website against formjacking

Implement Subresource Integrity (SRI) tags. SRI tags use cryptographic hashes to ensure that the files that web applications and web documents fetch do not contain unexpected content that could indicate they’ve been manipulated by a malicious third party, such as additional code.

Monitor your site’s outbound traffic. If you see form data being transmitted to an unusual or unknown resource, your site could be under attack from formjacking or other malware.

Secure your supply chain. Hackers frequently insert formjacking malware onto sites by compromising third-party application developers, especially payment processors but also chatbots, quizzes, and other common web applications. Talk with a cybersecurity expert, such as Lazarus Alliance, about solutions to test software updates and scan your website for unexpected code changes.

The cybersecurity experts at Lazarus Alliance have deep knowledge of the cybersecurity field, are continually monitoring the latest information security threats, and are committed to protecting organizations of all sizes from security breaches. Our full-service risk assessment services and Continuum GRC RegTech software will help protect your organization from data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cyber threats.

Lazarus Alliance is proactive cybersecurity®. Call 1-888-896-7580 to discuss your organization’s cybersecurity needs and find out how we can help your organization adhere to cybersecurity regulations, maintain compliance, and secure your systems.

Last year, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced the launch of the WPA3 WiFi security standard, which was developed to eliminate a number of security problems with WPA2. One of the major defense measures in WPA3 is the Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) handshake, which replaced the Pre-Shared Key (PSK) used in WPA2. Also known as “Dragonfly,” SAE was touted as a way to prevent brute-force offline dictionary attacks and protect past sessions against future password breaches.

However, a new research paper, Dragonblood: A Security Analysis of WPA3’s SAE Handshake by Mathy Vanhoef (who discovered the infamous KRACK vulnerability in WPA2) and Eyal Ronen, reveals that SAE is not as secure as originally thought. The paper outlines a series of vulnerabilities in WPA3 that leave it open to many of the same types of cyberattacks that plagued WPA2. Additionally, the authors take umbrage with what they allege was a lack of transparency on the part of the Wi-Fi Alliance during the development of WPA3.

The Dragonblood vulnerabilities

Dragonblood isn’t one vulnerability but five design flaws that fall into two categories: downgrade attacks against WPA3-capable devices and weaknesses in the WPA SAE/Dragonfly handshake.

• A downgrade and dictionary flaw that exploits the backwards compatibility of WPA3. Attackers can create rogue networks, force WPA3 clients to connect via WPA2, then launch a brute-force or dictionary attack against the partial WPA2 handshake.
• A security group downgrade flaw in the Dragonfly handshake, where clients can be forced to choose a weak security group.
• Another flaw in the Dragonfly handshake allows hackers to forge commit frames and launch DDoS attacks.
• A timing-based side channel flaw that allows dictionary attacks on access points that support optional multiplicative security groups modulo a prime (MODP groups).
• A cache-based side channel attack can be launched if a hacker has control of any application on a user’s device, and “may even be possible when the adversary controls JavaScript code in the victim’s browser.” In this attack, hackers can recover password information by observing memory access patterns.

Dragonblood attacks are cheap to deploy; Vanhoef and Ronen point out that a hacker needs less than $125 worth of Amazon EC2 instances to get started.

Dragonblood also affects EAP-pwd

On their website, Vanhoef and Ronen note that the Dragonfly/SAE handshake is also used in the EAP-pwd (Extensible Authentication Protocol), which is supported in the WPA and WPA2 standards. The researchers discovered that the Dragonblood attacks also work against EAP-pwd and found what they called “serious bugs in most products that implement EAP-pwd. These allow an adversary to impersonate any user, and thereby access the Wi-Fi network, without knowing the user’s password.”

The Wi-Fi Alliance is downplaying the research, stating in a press release that the Dragonblood vulnerability exists “in a limited number of early implementations of WPA3™-Personal” and that “the small number of device manufacturers that are affected have already started deploying patches to resolve the issues.”

However, Vanhoef and Ronen expressed concerns over what they alleged was a lack of transparency in the WPA3 development process; the new features of the protocol were not put up for public review before they were released. Additionally, the researchers note, while the Dragonfly handshake “was designed in an open manner, its security guarantees are unclear. On one hand, there is a security proof of a close variant of WPA3’s handshake, but on the other hand, another close variant of the handshake received significant criticism during its standardization. These issues raise the question whether WPA3 is secure in practice.”

The cybersecurity experts at Lazarus Alliance have deep knowledge of the cybersecurity field, are continually monitoring the latest information security threats, and are committed to protecting organizations of all sizes from security breaches. Our full-service risk assessment services and Continuum GRC RegTech software will help protect your organization from data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cyber threats.

Lazarus Alliance is proactive cybersecurity®. Call 1-888-896-7580 to discuss your organization’s cybersecurity needs and find out how we can help your organization adhere to cybersecurity regulations, maintain compliance, and secure your systems.