Page 43 - Cyber Defense eMagazine April 2023

In addition, Cyble’s researchers also encountered several posts on cybercrime forums advertising
Extended Validation Code Signing certificates. These services enable criminals to digitally sign malicious
code/binaries with digital certificates stolen from legitimate publishers to deceive the operating system
and the anti-virus software into “trusting” these malicious binaries and allowing them to execute on the
target’s computer system. Thereby, they allow cybercriminals to install malware by bypassing the
software security and anti-virus security mechanism on the victim’s operating system.

By successfully attacking and bypassing “trusted” technologies and exploiting the trust relationship
between organizations and their third-party service providers, TAs have now spawned a new trend that
is expected to continue well into 2023 and beyond.

Our industry should brace for more such attacks in the future that target the trusted supply chain.

Social media has emerged as the next frontier for information warfare, with miscommunication and
disinformation campaigns being routinely designed and launched to proliferate biased, false, or
misleading information in masse to sway public opinion and cause financial, economic, or reputational
damage to institutions and individuals. Coupled with the popularity of deep fake AI audio and video
phenomenon, social media can amplify harmful content that could potentially have far-reaching
ramifications for political regimes, the market performance of corporates, and personal reputations of
people holding important positions in the public and/or private enterprise.

2022 saw glimpses of these risks materializing and causing widespread panic and confusion. A fake
tweet from a Twitter account bearing the name and logo of Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company,
announced that it was “making insulin free”. This sparked widespread panic that led to the stock price
falling by 4.37%. The Twitter account carried a blue tick mark signifying the account’s authenticity, which
further aggravated the confusion.

During the early days of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, a video portraying the President of Ukraine exhorting
his people to lay down arms and surrender also emerged on social media and received much media
attention. While the seemingly real looking video was quickly dismissed to be a creation of AI technology,
it did trigger serious conversation and debate around the risks of misuse of deep fakes for sowing the
seeds of distrust and suspicion and their potential for business and reputational damage to large
corporations and enterprises.

Several organizations reportedly fell prey to smishing or vishing scams that involved a scamster creating
a fake social media account or a chat messenger profile carrying an image of a senior executive or the
CEO and coercing gullible employees into effecting a fraudulent wire transfer or a gift card transaction
on their behalf.

Cybercriminals are increasingly adopting novel techniques that synthesize social media, artificial
intelligence, and personal communication technology to target their victims via a highly personalized
attack that aims to exploit the implicit trust relationship between brands, personalities, and individuals.

Several organizations have jumped on the proverbial digital transformation bandwagon exhorting their IT
and software development departments to “move fast and break things”. Open-source software
underpins most such digital initiatives. With active communities of open-source software developers that
freely share code and packages via public code repositories and also offer altruistic technical support,

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