Apply now for jobs that are hiring near you. Top Locations For Sophos Jobs Sophos Jobs Near You New York,NY Forest Park,IL St. Louis,MO Thornton,CO Westborough,MA. Suite 1100, Chicago, IL 60601. International Jobs Career Advice Salary Search. Sophos Support Plans Our support plans range from basic technical support to options including direct access to senior support engineers and customized delivery. Receive Training As a Sophos Customer, you can attend our courses and webinars to stay up to date. Making the Move to SD-WAN with Sophos: Six Use Cases Distributed organizations must link together sites spread over large geographical distances to exchange information and deliver applications. The traditional solution, multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), is no longer the best solution.
Google just used the offical blog of the Android team to announce a new Android component called Nearby.
About Sophos Accountants Michael Leontios is the principal of Sophos Accountants and has over 15 years experience providing taxation advice to individuals and business clients. Business advise. Tell us what you think. Feedback © 1997 - Sophos Ltd. All rights reserved. Legal Privacy Cookie Information Privacy Cookie Information.
Technically, it’s not part of Android itself, because it’s intimately connected to Google Play, which is proprietary to Google.
So we don’t think you’ll see the source code for Nearby in the Android Open Source Project any time soon.
Not that we think Nearby would be hugely popular in alternative builds of Android, because it’s all about pop-up ads.
Simply put, companies that want to advertise their apps or websites using Nearby deploy a tiny Bluetooth-based hardware device known as an Eddystone beacon.
Eddystone is a protocol devised by Google to allow advertisers to find and communicate with your mobile phone as you walk by.
If your phone can receive and process the “here I am” broadcast from one of these beacons, it can use the identifier that is broadcast by the beacon to fetch and display adverts.
The theory is that beacon-triggered ads of this sort will not only be relevant to your interests, but also pertinent in time and space.
The low power and range of Bluetooth transmissions means you’re guaranteed to be nearby (geddit?) to the beacon, and thus in range of the ad, both figuratively and literally.
One of Google’s examples of what it calls “a thing that can be helpful near you” is receiving popup ads for a well-known drugstore chain’s Play Store app…
…just in case you want to print out any of the photos on your phone at that very moment.
But every photo-printing outfit I’ve seen in the last decade or so already lets me print photos from my phone quickly and easily, without installing a special app.
What I stand to gain from installing yet another app in a case like this isn’t clear.
Similarly, Google suggests that:
The right app at the right moment lets you get more done. For example, at a store, you may want a barcode scanner to check prices and reviews for an item.
I don’t know about you, but if I want to get objective price comparisons before I buy an item, and to put myself in an informed position for bargaining, I do my price comparisons before I walk into the first shop.
If I suddenly realised that a price-check app is what I needed, then I wouldn’t install an app promoted by a popup ad paid for by the shop I was in at that moment!
What to do?
According to Google:
To use Nearby, just turn on Bluetooth and Location, and we’ll show you a notification if a nearby app or website is available. Once you’ve opted-in, tapping on a notification takes you straight into the intended experience.
In other words, it sounds as though simply having Bluetooth and Location enabled effectively means you’ve opted in to Nearby.
If so, turning off either or both sounds like your only easy way of preventing the popups.
It also seems that if you have Android 4.4 (KitKat) or later, you’ll automatically get the Nearby component sometime soon, when the next update to Google Play Service happens.
If there is a way of exercising finer-grained control over Nearby, we’ll let you know.
Have your say
An an interesing aside, the Eddystone beacon protocol is named after the Eddystone Light, a famous ship-saving lighthouse off the Southern coast of England.
Ironically, perhaps, the Eddystone Light’s beacon was designed to alert ships so they could stay away from the dangerous rocks on which it was built, not to draw them closer in.
But, then again, the first Eddystone Light was washed away in a storm, while the second burned down.
Sophos Near Me Free
What do you think?
Is Nearby a bug or a feature?
Organizations using Microsoft Exchange now have a new security headache: never-before-seen ransomware that’s being installed on servers that were already infected by state-sponsored hackers in China.
Microsoft reported the new family of ransomware deployment late Thursday, saying that it was being deployed after the initial compromise of servers. Microsoft’s name for the new family is Ransom:Win32/DoejoCrypt.A. The more common name is DearCry.
We have detected and are now blocking a new family of ransomware being used after an initial compromise of unpatched on-premises Exchange Servers. Microsoft protects against this threat known as Ransom:Win32/DoejoCrypt.A, and also as DearCry.
— Microsoft Security Intelligence (@MsftSecIntel) March 12, 2021Piggybacking off Hafnium
• Sophos
Security firm Kryptos Logic said Friday afternoon that it has detected Hafnium-compromised Exchange servers that were later infected with ransomware. Kryptos Logic security researcher Marcus Hutchins told Ars that the ransomware is DearCry.
“We’ve just discovered 6970 exposed webshells which are publicly exposed and were placed by actors exploiting the Exchange vulnerability,” Kryptos Logic said. “These shells are being used to deploy ransomware.” Webshells are backdoors that allow attackers to use a browser-based interface to run commands and execute malicious code on infected servers.
We've just discovered 6970 exposed webshells which are publicly exposed and were placed by actors exploiting the Exchange vulnerability. These shells are being used to deploy ransomware. If you're signed up to Telltale (https://t.co/caXU7rqHaI) you can check you're not affected pic.twitter.com/DjeM59oIm2
— Kryptos Logic (@kryptoslogic) March 12, 2021
Anyone who knows the URL to one of these public webshells can gain complete control over the compromised server. The DearCry hackers are using these shells to deploy their ransomware. The webshells were initially installed by Hafnium, the name Microsoft has given to a state-sponsored threat actor operating out of China.
Hutchins said that the attacks are “human operated,” meaning a hacker manually installs ransomware on one Exchange server at a time. Not all of the nearly 7,000 servers have been hit by DearCry.
“Basically, we’re starting to see criminal actors using shells left behind by Hafnium to get a foothold into networks,” Hutchins explained.
AdvertisementThe deployment of ransomware, which security experts have said was inevitable, underscores a key aspect about the ongoing response to secure servers exploited by ProxyLogon. It’s not enough to simply install the patches. Without removing the webshells left behind, servers remain open to intrusion, either by the hackers who originally installed the backdoors or by other fellow hackers who figure out how to gain access to them.
Sophos Near Me Store
Little is known about DearCry. Security firm Sophos said that it’s based on a public-key cryptosystem, with the public key embedded in the file that installs the ransomware. That allows files to be encrypted without the need to first connect to a command-and-control server. To decrypt the data, victims’ must obtain the private key that’s known only to the attackers.
Sophos Near Me Store
What you need to know about #DearCry by Mark Loman (@markloman) Director, engineering technology office, Sophos (a thread):
From an encryption-behavior view, DearCry is what Sophos ransomware experts call a ‘Copy’ ransomware.
1/9
Among the first to discover DearCry was Mark Gillespie, a security expert who runs a service that helps researchers identify malware strains. On Thursday, he reported that, beginning on Tuesday, he started receiving queries from Exchange servers in the US, Canada, and Australia for malware that had the string “DEARCRY.”
🚨 #Exchange Servers Possibly Hit With #Ransomware 🚨
ID Ransomware is getting sudden swarm of submissions with '.CRYPT' and filemarker 'DEARCRY!' coming from IPs of Exchange servers from US, CA, AU on quick look. pic.twitter.com/wPCu2v6kVl
He later found someone posting to a user forum on Bleeping Computer saying the ransomware was being installed on servers that had first been exploited by Hafnium. Bleeping Computer soon confirmed the hunch.
John Hultquist, a vice president at security firm Mandiant, said piggybacking on the hackers who installed the webshells can be a faster and more efficient means to deploy malware on unpatched servers than exploiting the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities. And as already mentioned, even if servers are patched, ransomware operators can still compromise the machines when webshells haven’t been removed.
“We are anticipating more exploitation of the exchange vulnerabilities by ransomware actors in the near term,” Hultquist wrote in an email. “Though many of the still unpatched organizations may have been exploited by cyber espionage actors, criminal ransomware operations may pose a greater risk as they disrupt organizations and even extort victims by releasing stolen emails.”
Update 7:40 pm EST: This post was updated to remove “7,000” from the headline and to make clear not all of them have been infected with ransomware.