New Cyber Attacks

A new and sig­nif­i­cant world­wide attack cam­paign was recently uncov­ered tar­get­ing Office 365

accounts known as ‘Knock­Knock’. In this attack, attack­ers attempt to knock on back­door system

accounts to infil­trate entire Office 365 envi­ron­ments. The main dis­tinc­tion of the KnockKnock

attack is tar­get­ing sys­tem accounts that are not assigned to any indi­vid­ual user.

Cyber Secu­rity Statistics

An inter­na­tional cyber secu­rity com­pany announced that KSA is get­ting the high­est amount of

cyber-attacks in the Mid­dle East. The King­dom was ranked in the third posi­tion glob­ally in

cyber-attacks against gov­ern­men­tal and pri­vate orga­ni­za­tions from out­side. Accord­ing to the

announce­ment, KSA was the high­est tar­geted coun­try with aver­age of 54,000 attacks annually,

which means %50 of the attacks in the third quar­ter of 2016, and the third in the first quar­ter in

2017.

New Cyber Threats

Accord­ing to a new research, 4G and 5G wire­less net­works’ Evolved Packet Core (EPC) architecture

can be exploited to inter­cept and col­lect mobile data as well as launch denial-of-service (DoS)

attacks. The attack sce­nar­ios largely fall into three categories:

1. Inter­cep­tion of data, such as text mes­sages and unen­crypted email messages;

2. Col­lec­tion of data, such as the loca­tion of the device;

3. Dis­rup­tion of ser­vices like DoS attacks.

Mobile users are highly rec­om­mended to use apps that trans­mit data securely using secure

trans­port chan­nels and pro­to­cols, rather than rely­ing on SMS/MMS for com­mu­ni­cat­ing sensitive

infor­ma­tion.

Cyber Secu­rity Tip

Make sure to always lock your sys­tem when­ever you are not around your device, because

unin­tended data leak­age is a cyber-crime.