Increasing Use Of Encryption For Malicious Purposes
Cyber criminals are focusing on by-passing strong encryption and it is very important for organisation and governments to focus on updated, resilient Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), configurations.
Now, F5 Labs have uncovered the extent of Internet encryption and the potential abuse of web encryption for malicious purposes.
According to F5 Labs' 2021 report Transport Layer Security (TLS) Telemetry Report, the issue is not so much the lack of adopting new ciphers and security features but the rate at which old and vulnerable protocols are removed. "Attackers know there is a correlation between poor HTTPS configurations and a vulnerable web server. Websites that routinely fail to follow TLS best practices are also found to be running old (and likely vulnerable) web servers,’says the Report.
TLS is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securing HTTPS remains the most publicly visible.
Based on the screening of the top million websites in the world, F5 Labs found that more than 50% of the web servers still allow unsecured RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) Exchange. The RSA initials comes from the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who described the algorithm in 1977, which is a form of public-key cryptography, which is used to secure communication between multiple parties.
The exchange uses public keys to encrypt data as it travels electronically. RSA is what's known as asymmetric cryptography, which uses a combination of public and private keys for security.
The research also found out that attackers have learned how to exploit TLS for their phishing campaigns. At the same time, new fingerprint techniques raise questions regarding the prevalence of malware servers hidden in the top million websites. Also, F5 Labs has found that the negation of authorisation is a persistent problem, due to the prevalence of legacy servers which and rarely updated.
F5 Labs has discovered that the TLS 1.3 protocol, the more secure and rapid one, has been the chosen encryption protocol for the majority of web servers among the Tranco top million list. Almost 63% of the servers contain TLS 1.3, similarly to more than 95% of all the browsers in use. However, in some countries, such as the United States and Canada, as many as 80% of web servers choose it, while in others, such as China and Israel, only 15% of servers support it.
Security risks continue to grow. According to the report, the proportion of phishing sites using HTTPS and valid certificates has risen from 70% in 2019 to 83% in 2021, with roughly 80% of malicious sites coming from just 3.8% of the hosting providers.
Facebook and Microsoft Outlook/Office 365 were the most common counterfeit brands in phishing attacks. F5 Labs also found that webmail platforms accounted for 10.4% of impersonating Internet functions, a rate almost as high as Facebook.
This means that phishing attacks against webmail are as common as attacks against a Facebook account.
‘The desire to intercept, weaken, and circumvent encryption has never been greater. Nation-states and cybercriminals alike are attempting to work around the problems caused by strong encryption... ‘While this rarely results in direct attacks against cryptographic algorithms or protocols, it often leads attackers to instead think of creative ways to intercept or capture information before or after it has been encrypted.
"It has never been more important to focus on strong and up-to-date HTTPS configurations, particularly when digital certificates are shared across different services,’ says the F5 Labs Report.
F5 Labs: I-HLS: University of Brstol:
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