Breaking news: New protections added to Kinetics KARE Foundation

by | Dec 20, 2023 | News, Security

We have big news for Kinetics customers on our “KARE Foundation” cyber plan.

We’ve added new Browser Cyber-Protection 

We’ve found an amazing new security tool called ‘Conceal’ that provides even more added protection. Cyber-security is all about layers and this one has got us excited. After two solid months of testing, we’re ready to add it to all our “Foundation” customers over the next few weeks.

You will soon see a new icon to your EDGE browser.

This new tool scans websites as you visit them and tests the ones it identifies as risky in a virtual and secure cloud-based browser. While no tool is perfect, this one has performed extremely well in our testing.

How does it help protect your web browsing?

Let’s take the example of Christmas gift card fraud.

Recently Microsoft issued a series of warnings on “X’ (Twitter!) about an uptick in attacks carried out by Storm-0539 actors against retail organizations for gift card fraud and theft via email and SMS phishing.  The hack starts as gift card fraud but is then leveraged to become a serious attack with the hackers registering their devices to receive YOUR MFA prompts.

Conceal should help with these “man-in-the-middle” login pages by identifying them as fake and warning you. It will also look for malware in the pages and protect you.

Wait – tell me more about the gift card hacks

Victims are redirected to highly realistic but fake log-in pages that are designed to harvest credentials and session tokens.

Microsoft say that the hackers then use this information to register their own devices for MFA on the victim’s accounts, enabling the hacker to bypass MFA protections.

From here the hackers can escalate their privileges, access cloud resources, and use internal resources to identify gift card-related services that can be used for gift-card fraud.

Even worse, Microsoft says the hackers also collect additional information including emails, contact lists, and network configurations for future attacks. With the holidays approaching, these opportunistic attacks are likely to increase due to key IT personnel taking leave.

We understand that investing in a security tool may not be on the top of everyone’s priority list. But the cost of a data breach can be much higher than what you think. The damage to your reputation and finances can be significant. Thus, it’s essential to have multiple layers of security in place to protect yourself. By using KARE foundation as a minimum standard. You can be confident you have taken reasonable steps to protect your business and we’re keeping a close eye on your system.