Sharing information key to ward off cyber threats

Sharing information is a key factor in making enterprises, governments and individuals safe against growing cyber threats, a report said on Thursday.The report by global Cloud delivery platform Akamai came at a time when the top 34 global technology and securities firms, led by Microsoft and Facebook, have signed a "Cybersecurity Tech Accord" to defend people from malicious attacks by cybercriminals and nation-states.

The Akamai report analysed data from more than 14 trillion DNS queries collected by Akamai between September 2017 and February 2018 from communications service provider (CSP) networks around the world.

A DNS query is the process of a computer or networking device making an inquiry to get an IP address for a DNS name. For more than 19 years, Nominum, acquired by Akamai in 2017, has leveraged in-depth DNS data to improve overall protection against sophisticated cyber-attacks.
The Akamai's new report builds upon the Nominum expertise and highlights the effectiveness of DNS-based security that is enriched with data coming from other security layers.

Communicating with varying platforms is critical when acquiring knowledge across teams, systems and data sets.

"We believe that the DNS queries that our service provides act as a strategic component to arming security teams with the proper data necessary for that big picture view of the threat landscape," said Yuriy Yuzifovich, Director of Data Science, Threat Intelligence, Akamai.

The exponential rise in public consumption of cryptocurrency adoption has resulted in an increase in crypto-mining malware strains and the number of devices infected with them, the report said.

Akamai observed two distinct business models for large-scale cryptomining. The first model uses infected devices' processing power to mine cryptocurrency tokens. The second model uses code embedded into content sites that make devices that visit the site work for the cryptominer.

Akamai conducted extensive analysis on this second business model, as it poses a new security challenge for users and website owners alike. After analysing the cryptominer domains, Akamai was able to estimate the cost, in terms of both computer power and monetary gains, from this activity.

"An interesting implication of this research shows that cryptomining could become a viable alternative to ad revenue to fund websites," the report added.