HID Global®, a worldwide leader in trusted identity solutions, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of the international identity solutions business of De La Rue (LSE:DLAR), the world’s largest commercial issuer of banknotes and passports. The De La Rue business will be merged with HID’s citizen identity solutions portfolio, broadening HID Global’s leadership position, extending its capabilities to scale and assemble government-issued citizen IDs, and expanding the value delivered to customers. 

“HID Global and the De La Rue international identity solutions business share the common goal of helping governments fulfill their e-government initiatives today and in the future by converging physical and digital identities to increase efficiency, security and flexibility,” said Stefan Widing, President and CEO, HID Global. “The acquisition sets the stage for HID to leverage the decades-long relationships De La Rue has had as a prime citizen ID supplier providing HID’s innovative solutions to governments seeking to modernize. From making it possible for citizens to use mobile IDs with their smartphones in everyday life to providing travelers with a more secure and convenient passport for border crossing, HID is transforming the citizen experience.” 

Today, HID Global’s citizen identification solutions can be found in sixty percent of all government-issued electronic identity projects around the world.  HID delivers complete, end-to-end system solutions that meet governmental requirements for national IDs, passports, foreign resident IDs, driver licenses, vehicle registration and other programs.

De La Rue’s direct relationships with ministries of the interior, immigration departments, police departments, and numerous other government entities/agencies will enhance HID’s ability to provide customers with a broader suite of offerings that include mobile IDs, automated verification capabilities, and e-passports with advanced physical and electronic security features.

The addition of the De La Rue citizen ID business also extends HID’s capabilities to assemble secure ID documents from end to end in world-class facilities.  It will create new opportunities to apply its design excellence, data analysis services/consultancy, and proven software and systems–including civil registry and vital statistics (CRVS)–to HID’s citizen ID portfolio. 

Fortinet Threat Landscape Report Highlights Cybercriminals Bypassing Popular Phishing Tactics to Inject or Execute Code Onto a Range of Publicly Facing Services

“Cybercriminals continue to attempt to be a step ahead of cybersecurity professionals. While they develop new malware and zero-day attacks, they also redeploy previously successful tactics to maximize opportunity across the entire attack surface,”said Derek Manky, Chief, Security Insights & Global Threat Alliances, Fortinet. “In addition to essential strategies like patching, segmenting, and training, organizations also need to embrace automation and AI to enhance their ability to correlate threat intelligence and respond to threats in real time. This approach will only be successful, however, when organizations integrate all of their security resources into a security fabric that can see across, and adapt to their rapidly expanding network.”

Highlights of the report follow.

Shifting Tactics to Catch Organizations By Surprise: The majority of malware is delivered via email, therefore many organizations have been aggressively addressing phishing attacks with end user training and advanced email security tools. As a result, cybercriminals are expanding their ability to deliver malicious malware through other means. These include targeting publicly facing edge services such as web infrastructure, network communications protocols, as well as bypassing ad blocker tools to open attack vectors that don’t rely on traditional phishing tactics. For example, this quarter FortiGuard Labs saw attacks against vulnerabilities that would allow the execution of code remotely targeting edge services, at the top in terms of prevalence amongst all regions. Although this tactic is not new, changing tactics where defenders may not be as closely watching can be a successful way to catch organizations off guard and increase chances for success. This can be especially problematic ahead of a busy online shopping season when online services will experience increased activity.

Maximizing Earning Potential: Following in the footsteps of the lucrative GandCrab ransomware, which was made available on the dark web as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) solution, cybercriminal organizations are launching new services to expand their earning potential. By establishing a network of affiliate partners, criminals are able to spread their ransomware widely and scale earnings dramatically in the process. FortiGuard Labs observed at least two significant ransomware families—Sodinokibi and Nemty—being deployed as RaaS solutions. These are potentially just the beginning of what could be a flood of similar services in the future.

Refining Malware for Success: Expanding on these approaches, cybercriminals are also refining malware to evade detection and deliver increasingly sophisticated and malicious attacks, such as the evolution of the Emotet malware. This is a troubling development for organizations as cybercriminals increasingly use malware to drop other payloads on infected systems to maximize their opportunities for financial gain. Recently, attackers have begun using Emotet as a payload delivery mechanism for ransomware, information stealers, and banking trojans including TrickBot, IcedID, and Zeus Panda. In addition, by hijacking email threads from trusted sources and inserting malicious malware into those email threads, attackers are significantly increasing the likelihood that those malicious attachments will be opened.

Maximizing Opportunity with Older Vulnerabilities and Botnets: Targeting older, vulnerable systems that have not been properly secured is still an effective attack strategy. FortiGuard Labs discovered that cybercriminals target vulnerabilities twelve or more years old more often than they target new attacks. And in fact, they target vulnerabilities from every subsequent year since then at the same rate as they do current vulnerabilities.

Similarly, this trend of maximizing existing opportunity also extends to botnets. More so than any other type of threat, the top botnets also tend to carry over from quarter to quarter and region to region globally with little change. This suggests the control infrastructure is more permanent than particular tools or capabilities, and that cybercriminals not only follow new opportunities, but like legitimate businesses, also leverage existing infrastructure whenever possible to increase efficiency and reduce overhead.

Protecting for the Unexpected: Broad, Integrated, and Automated Security

The expanding attack surface and shifting attack strategies of cybercriminals means organizations cannot afford to over-focus on a narrow set of threat trends. It is essential that organizations adopt a holistic approach to securing their distributed and networked environments. This requires the deployment of a security fabric that is broad, integrated, and automated. This approach will enable organizations to reduce and manage the expanding attack surface through broad visibility across integrated devices, stop advanced threats through AI-driven breach prevention, and reduce complexity through automated operations and orchestration. In addition, threat intelligence that is dynamic, proactive, and available in real-time plays a crucial role in identifying trends by following the evolution of attack methods targeting the digital attack surface and then pinpointing cyber hygiene priorities.

Report and Index Overview
The latest Fortinet Threat Landscape Report is a quarterly view that represents the collective intelligence of FortiGuard Labs, drawn from Fortinet’s vast array of global sensors during Q3 of 2019. Research covers global and regional perspectives. Also included in the report is the Fortinet Threat Landscape Index (TLI), comprised of individual indices for three central and complementary aspects of that landscape, which are exploits, malware, and botnets, broken down by prevalence and volume in a given quarter.

Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced today that it will host its annual .NEXT on Tour with the theme ‘Invisible Clouds, Visible IT’ at the Fairmont Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on November 18, 2019. The conference will focus on helping enterprises in the Kingdom free themselves from the complexity and cost of legacy IT and embrace the power of cloud. 

 

Executives from Nutanix will deliver a number of informative sessions including latest insights into data center modernization, multi-cloud and automation and application workloads. The event will feature keynotes and talks, hands-on learning with experts, and a first-hand look at the latest Nutanix products. The solutions-oriented event will educate attendees on how they can build virtual apps and desktops on Nutanix. Topics include:

 

The illustrious speaker lineup includes Dheeraj Pandey Co-Founder & CEO Nutanix, who has been identified as being one of the top 30 most influential IT leaders in the world and Stephen Hadley, principal of RiceHadleyGates LLC, an international strategic consulting firm founded with Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, and Anja Manuel. AvinashShetty, Sr. Director, Strategy at Nutanix will conduct technical sessions, giving deeper insights into specific product features, workloads and latest technology announcements. One of the attractions at the event will be the presence of Sophia the robot, the world’s first robot citizen who is a Saudi national.

 

Mohammad Abulhouf, Country Manager – Saudi & Bahrain at Nutanix says, “.NEXT on has become a premier event for the latest in cloud technologies. With our company’s well-earned reputation as a global leader in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), we aim to help regional organizations embrace the power of hybrid clouds by eliminating pain points, and enabling them to manage, govern and optimize applications across public and private cloud architectures. I’m confident that this event in Riyadh will give attendees a clear roadmap so that they can help drive digital transformation initiatives within their organizations.”