Microsoft today released updates to plug security holes in its software, including patches to fix at least 74 weaknesses in various flavors of Windows and programs that run on top of it. The November updates include patches for a zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer that is currently being exploited in the wild, as well as a sneaky bug in certain versions of Office for Mac that bypasses security protections and was detailed publicly prior to today’s patches.

More than a dozen of the flaws tackled in this month’s release are rated “critical,” meaning they involve weaknesses that could be exploited to install malware without any action on the part of the user, except for perhaps browsing to a hacked or malicious Web site or opening a booby-trapped file attachment.

Perhaps the most concerning of those critical holes is a zero-day flaw in Internet Exploder Explorer (CVE-2019-1429) that has already seen active exploitation. Today’s updates also address two other critical vulnerabilities in the same Windows component that handles various scripting languages.

Microsoft also fixed a flaw in Microsoft Office for Mac (CVE-2019-1457) that could allow attackers to bypass security protections in some versions of the program that could let malicious macros through.

Macros are bits of computer code that can be embedded into Office files, and malicious macros are frequently used by malware purveyors to compromise Windows systems. Usually, this takes the form of a prompt urging the user to “enable macros” once they’ve opened a booby-trapped Office document delivered via email. Thus, Office has a feature called “disable all macros without notification.”

But Microsoft says all versions of Office still support an older type of macros that do not respect this setting, and can be used as a vector for pushing malware. Will Dornan of CERT/CC reports that while Office 2016 and 2019 for Mac will still prompt the user before executing these older macro types, Office for Mac 2011 fails to warn users before opening them.

Other Windows applications or components receiving patches for critical flaws today include Microsoft Exchange and Windows Media Player. In addition, Microsoft also patched nine vulnerabilities — five of them critical — in the Windows Hyper-V, an add-on to the Windows Server OS (and Windows 10 Pro) that allows users to create and run virtual machines (other “guest” operating systems) from within Windows.

Although Adobe typically issues patches for its Flash Player browser component on Patch Tuesday, this is the second month in a row that Adobe has not released any security updates for Flash. However, Adobe today did push security fixes for a variety of its creative software suites, including Animate, Illustrator, Media Encoder and Bridge. Also, I neglected to note last month that Adobe released a critical update for Acrobat/Reader that addressed at least 67 bugs, so if you’ve got either of these products installed, please be sure they’re patched and up to date.

Finally, Google recently fixed a zero-day flaw in its Chrome Web browser (CVE-2019-13720). If you use Chrome and see an upward-facing arrow to the right of the address bar, you have an update pending; fully closing and restarting the browser should install any available updates.

Now seems like a good time to remind all you Windows 7 end users that Microsoft will cease shipping security updates after January 2020 (this end-of-life also affects Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2). While businesses and other volume-license purchasers will have the option to pay for further fixes after that point, all other Windows 7 users who want to stick with Windows will need to consider migrating to Windows 10 soon.

Standard heads-up: Windows 10 likes to install patches all in one go and reboot your computer on its own schedule. Microsoft doesn’t make it easy for Windows 10 users to change this setting, but it is possible. For all other Windows OS users, if you’d rather be alerted to new updates when they’re available so you can choose when to install them, there’s a setting for that in Windows Update. To get there, click the Windows key on your keyboard and type “windows update” into the box that pops up.

Keep in mind that while staying up-to-date on Windows patches is a good idea, it’s important to make sure you’re updating only after you’ve backed up your important data and files. A reliable backup means you’re probably not freaking out when the odd buggy patch causes problems booting the system. So do yourself a favor and backup your files before installing any patches.

As ever, if you experience glitches or problems installing any of these patches this month, please feel free to leave a comment about it below; there’s a decent chance other readers have experienced the same and may even chime in here with some helpful tips.

Hospitals that have been hit by a data breach or ransomware attack can expect to see an increase in the death rate among heart patients in the following months or years because of cybersecurity remediation efforts, a new study posits. Health industry experts say the findings should prompt a larger review of how security — or the lack thereof — may be impacting patient outcomes.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University‘s Owen Graduate School of Management took the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) list of healthcare data breaches and used it to drill down on data about patient mortality rates at more than 3,000 Medicare-certified hospitals, about 10 percent of which had experienced a data breach.

As PBS noted in its coverage of the Vanderbilt study, after data breaches as many as 36 additional deaths per 10,000 heart attacks occurred annually at the hundreds of hospitals examined.

The researchers found that for care centers that experienced a breach, it took an additional 2.7 minutes for suspected heart attack patients to receive an electrocardiogram.

“Breach remediation efforts were associated with deterioration in timeliness of care and patient outcomes,” the authors found. “Remediation activity may introduce changes that delay, complicate or disrupt health IT and patient care processes.”

Leo Scanlon, former deputy chief information security officer at the HHS, said the findings in this report practically beg for a similar study to be done in the United Kingdom, whose healthcare system was particularly disrupted by the Wannacry virus, a global contagion in May 2017 that spread through a Microsoft Windows vulnerability prevalent in older healthcare systems.

“The exploitation of cybersecurity vulnerabilities is killing people,” Scanlon told KrebsOnSecurity. “There is a lot of possible research that might be unleashed by this study. I believe that nothing less than a congressional investigation will give the subject the attention it deserves.”

A post-mortem on the impact of WannaCry found the outbreak cost U.K. hospitals almost $100 million pounds and caused significant disruption to patient care, such as the cancellation of some 19,000 appointments — including operations — and the disruption of IT systems for at least a third of all U.K. National Health Service (NHS) hospitals and eight percent of general practitioners. In several cases, hospitals in the U.K. were forced to divert emergency room visitors to other hospitals.

But what isn’t yet known is how Wannacry affected mortality rates among heart attack and stroke patients whose ambulances were diverted to other hospitals because of IT system outages related to the malware. Or how many hospitals and practices experienced delays in getting test results back needed to make critical healthcare decisions.

Scanlon said although he’s asked around quite a bit over the years to see if any researchers have taken up the challenge of finding out, and that so far he hasn’t found anyone doing that analysis.

“A colleague who is familiar with large scale healthcare data sets told me that unless you are associated with a research institution, it would be almost impossible to pry that kind of data out of the institutions that have it,” Scanlon said. “The problem is this data is hard to come by — nobody likes to admit that death can be attributable to a non-natural cause like this — and is otherwise considered sensitive at a very high and proprietary level by the institutions that have the facts.”

A study published in the April 2017 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine would seem to suggest applying the approach used by the Vanderbilt researchers to measuring patient outcomes at U.K. hospitals in the wake of Wannacry might be worth carrying out.

In the NEJM study, morbidity and mortality data was used to show that there is a measurable impact when ambulances and emergency response teams are removed from normal service and redirected to standby during public events like marathons and other potential targets of terrorism.

The study found that “medicare beneficiaries who were admitted to marathon-affected hospitals with acute myocardial infarction or cardiac arrest on marathon dates had longer ambulance transport times before noon (4.4 minutes longer) and higher 30-day mortality than beneficiaries who were hospitalized on nonmarathon dates.”

“Several colleagues and I are convinced that the same can be shown about WannaCry, on the large scale, and also at the small scale when ransomware attacks impact a regional hospital,” Scanlon said.

In November 2018, I was honored to give the keynote at a conference held by the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (H-ISAC), a non-profit that promotes the sharing of cyber threat information and best practices in the healthcare sector.

In the weeks leading up to that speech, I interviewed more than a dozen experts in healthcare security to find out what was top of mind for these folks. Incredibly, one response I heard from multiple healthcare industry experts was that there is currently no data available to support the finding of a negative patient outcome as a result of a cybersecurity vulnerability or attack.

As I kept talking to experts, it occurred to me that if smart people in this industry could say something like that with a straight face, it was probably because not a lot of people were looking too hard for evidence to the contrary.

With this Vanderbilt study, that’s demonstrably no longer true.

A copy of the new study is available here (PDF).

Top domain name registrars NetworkSolutions.com, Register.com and Web.com are asking customers to reset their passwords after discovering an intrusion in August 2019 in which customer account information was accessed.

A notice to customers at notice.web.com.

“On October 16, 2019, Web.com determined that a third-party gained unauthorized access to a limited number of its computer systems in late August 2019, and as a result, account information may have been accessed,” Web.com said in a written statement. “No credit card data was compromised as a result of this incident.”

The Jacksonville, Fla.-based Web.com said the information exposed includes “contact details such as name, address, phone numbers, email address and information about the services that we offer to a given account holder.”

The “such as” wording made me ask whether the company has any reason to believe passwords — scrambled or otherwise — were accessed.

A spokesperson for Web.com later clarified that the company does not believe customer passwords were accessed.

“We encrypt account passwords and do not believe this information is vulnerable as a specific result of this incident. As an added precautionary measure, customers will be required to reset passwords the next time they log in to their accounts. As with any online service or platform, it is also good security practice to change passwords often and use a unique password for each service.”

Both Network Solutions and Register.com are owned by Web.com. Network Solutions is now the world’s fifth-largest domain name registrar, with almost seven million domains in its stable, according to domainstate.com; Register.com listed at #17 with 1.7 million domains.

Web.com’s homepage currently makes no mention of the breach notification.

NetworkSolutions.com does not appear to currently link to any information about the incident on its homepage, nor does Web.com. To get to the advisory, one needs to visit notice.web.com.

Web.com said it has reported the incident to law enforcement and hired an outside security firm to investigate further, and is in the process of notifying affected customers through email and via its website.

The company says it plans to circle back with customers when it learns the results of its investigation, but I wonder whether we’ll ever hear more about this breach.

Web.com wasn’t clear how long the intrusion lasted, but if the breach wasn’t detected until mid-October that means the intruders potentially had about six weeks inside unnoticed. That’s a long time for an adversary to wander about one’s network, and plenty of time to steal a great deal more information than just names, addresses and phone numbers.

H/T to domaininvesting.com‘s Elliot Silver for the heads up on this notification.

When New York-based cloud payroll provider MyPayrollHR unexpectedly shuttered its doors last month and disappeared with $26 million worth of customer payroll deposits, its payment processor Cachet Financial Services ended up funding the bank accounts of MyPayrollHR client company employees anyway, graciously eating a $26 million loss which it is now suing to recover.

But on Oct. 23 — less than 24 hours before another weekly payroll rush — Pasadena, Calif.-based Cachet threw much of its customer base into disarray when it said its bank was no longer willing to risk another MyPayrollHR debacle, and that customers would need to wire payroll deposits instead of relying on the usual method of automated clearinghouse (ACH) payments (essentially bank-to-bank checks).

Cachet processes some $150 billion in payroll payments annually for more than 110,000 employers. But payroll experts say this week’s actions by Cachet’s bank may well soon put the 22-year-old company out of business.

“We apologize for the inconvenience of this message,” reads the communication from Cachet that went out to customers just after 6:30 PM ET on Oct. 23. It continued:

“Due to ongoing fraud protocol with our bank, they are requiring pre-funding via Direct Wire for all batches that were uploaded this week, unless employees were already paid or tax payments were already transmitted. This includes all batch files moving forward.”

All files that were uploaded today for collection and disbursement will not be processed. In order to process disbursement, we will need to receive a wire first thing tomorrow in order to release the disbursements.

All collections that were processed prior to today will be reviewed by the bank and disbursements will be released once the funds are cleared. Credit trans

Deadline for wires is 1 P.M. PST.

This will be the process until further notice. If you need a backup processor, please contact us.

If you require wire instructions, please respond to this email and they will be sent to you.

We welcome and anticipate your phone calls and inquiries. We remain committed to our clients and are determined to see this through. We appreciate and thank you for your patience and understanding.”

In a follow-up communication sent Thursday evening, Cachet said all debit transactions with a settlement date of Oct. 23 had been processed, but that any transactions uploaded after Oct. 23 were not being processed at all, and that wires are no longer being accepted.

“If they aren’t taking money, they’re out of business,” Friedl said of Cachet.

Cachet’s financial institution, Wilmington, Del. based The Bancorp Bank (NASDAQ: TBBK), did not respond to requests for comment.

Cachet also did not respond to requests for comment. But in an email Thursday evening, the company sought to offer customers a range of alternatives — including other providers — to help process payrolls this week.

Steve Friedl, an IT consultant in the payroll service bureau industry, said the Cachet announcement has sent payroll providers scrambling to cut and mail or courier paper checks to client employees.  But he said many payroll providers also use Cachet to process tax withholdings for client employees, and that this, too, could be disrupted by the funding changes.

“There’s a lot of same day stuff that goes on in the payroll industry that depends on people being honest and having money available at certain times,” Friedl said. “When that’s not possible because a bank in that process says it doesn’t want to be stuck in the middle that can create problems for a lot of people who are then stuck in the middle.”

Another payroll expert at a company that uses Cachet but who asked not to be named said, “everyone I know at payroll providers is scrambling to get it done another way this week” as a result of the decision by Cachet’s bank.

“Those bureaus will do whatever they can to keep their clients happy because something like this can quickly put them out of business,” the source said. “Unlike what happened with MyPayrollHR — which harmed consumers directly — the payment service bureaus are the ones potentially getting hurt here.”

Most corporate payroll is handled through ACH transactions, a system that allows financial institutions to push and pull funds to and from checking accounts between banks. ACH is essentially the same thing as writing a check for a good or service, and it typically involves an element of trust because there is a time delay (24-48h) between which the promised funds are released to the receiving bank and the funds are made available to the recipient.

In contrast, a wire transfer takes minutes and the funds are made available to the recipient almost immediately. Wires are also far more expensive for customers, and they earn banks hugely profitable processing fees, whereas ACH transaction fees are minuscule by comparison.

Ultimately, banks may decide that for certain clients they no longer wish to assume the risk of fraudsters exploiting the float period for ACH transactions to steal tens of millions of dollars, as was the case in the MyPayrollHR fiasco.

It’s worth noting that the MyPayrollHR fraud wasn’t the first time Cachet has been tripped up by the demise of a payroll company: In 2016, the collapse of Monterey, Calif. based payroll processor Pinnacle Workforce Solutions left Cachet holding the bag for more than $1 million. Cachet sued to recover the money stuck in Pinnacle’s frozen accounts. From The Monetery County Weekly:

“Cachet’s lawyers also outline possible nefarious action by Pinnacle. ACH companies act as middlemen for processing payroll and other large transactions. Every pay period, Pinnacle would send Cachet a coded file to tell the ACH how to distribute funds. But, on Sept. 21 [2016] Pinnacle had manipulated the code sent to Cachet so the money collected from its clients went directly to Pinnacle instead of being held in the ACH account before being distributed to its clients’ employees, the suit alleges.”

It will be interesting to see how long the fallout from the MyPayrollHR episode will last and how many other firms may get wiped because of it. Shortly after MyPayrollHR closed its doors last month and disappeared with $35 million in payroll and tax payments, the company’s 49-year-old CEO Michael Mann was arrested and charged with bank fraud.

The government alleges Mann was kiting millions of dollars in checks between his accounts at Bank of American and Pioneer from Aug. 1, 2019 to Aug. 30, 2019. The Times Union reports that Mann and his company are now being sued by Pioneer Bank and a large insurance company over a $42 million loan it gave to Mann and his companies just a month before his payroll business closed up shop.

Antivirus and security giant Avast and virtual private networking (VPN) software provider NordVPN each today disclosed months-long network intrusions that — while otherwise unrelated — shared a common cause: Forgotten or unknown user accounts that granted remote access to internal systems with little more than a password.

Based in the Czech Republic, Avast bills itself as the most popular antivirus vendor on the market, with over 435 million users. In a blog post today, Avast said it detected and addressed a breach lasting between May and October 2019 that appeared to target users of its CCleaner application, a popular Microsoft Windows cleanup and repair utility.

Avast said it took CCleaner downloads offline in September to check the integrity of the code and ensure it hadn’t been injected with malware. The company also said it invalidated the certificates used to sign previous versions of the software and pushed out a re-signed clean update of the product via automatic update on October 15. It then disabled and reset all internal user credentials.

“Having taken all these precautions, we are confident to say that our CCleaner users are protected and unaffected,” Avast’s Jaya Baloo wrote.

This is not the first so-called “supply chain” attack on Avast: In September 2018, researchers at Cisco Talos and Morphisec disclosed that hackers had compromised the computer cleanup tool for more than a month, leading to some 2.27 million downloads of the corrupt CCleaner version.

Avast said the intrusion began when attackers used stolen credentials for a VPN service that was configured to connect to its internal network, and that the attackers were not challenged with any sort of multi-factor authentication — such as a one-time code generated by a mobile app.

“We found that the internal network was successfully accessed with compromised credentials through a temporary VPN profile that had erroneously been kept enabled and did not require 2FA,” Baloo wrote.

THE NORDVPN BREACH

Separately, NordVPN, a virtual private networking services that promises to “protect your privacy online,” confirmed reports that it had been hacked. Today’s acknowledgment and blog post mortem from Nord comes just hours after it emerged that NordVPN had an expired internal private key exposed, potentially allowing anyone to spin out their own servers imitating NordVPN,” writes Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch.

VPN software creates an encrypted tunnel between your computer and the VPN provider, effectively blocking your ISP or anyone else on the network (aside from you and the VPN provider) from being able to tell which sites you are visiting or viewing the contents of your communications. This can offer a measure of anonymity, but the user also is placing a great deal of trust in that VPN service not to get hacked and expose this sensitive browsing data.

NordVPN’s account seems to downplay the intrusion, saying while the attackers could have used the private keys to intercept and view traffic for some of its customers’ traffic, the attackers would have been limited to eavesdropping on communications routing through just one of the company’s more than 3,000 servers.

“The server itself did not contain any user activity logs; none of our applications send user-created credentials for authentication, so usernames and passwords couldn’t have been intercepted either,” reads the NordVPN blog post. “On the same note, the only possible way to abuse the website traffic was by performing a personalized and complicated man-in-the-middle attack to intercept a single connection that tried to access NordVPN.”

NordVPN said the intrusion happened in March 2018 at one of its datacenters in Finland, noting that “the attacker gained access to the server by exploiting an insecure remote management system left by the datacenter provider while we were unaware that such a system existed.” NordVPN declined to name the datacenter provider, but said the provider removed the remote management account without notifying them on March 20, 2018.

“When we learned about the vulnerability the datacenter had a few months back, we immediately terminated the contract with the server provider and shredded all the servers we had been renting from them,” the company said. “We did not disclose the exploit immediately because we had to make sure that none of our infrastructure could be prone to similar issues. This couldn’t be done quickly due to the huge amount of servers and the complexity of our infrastructure.”

This page might need to be updated.

TechCrunch took NordVPN to task on the somewhat dismissive tone of its breach disclosure, noting that the company suffered a significant breach that went undetected for more than a year.

Kenneth White, director of the Open Crypto Audit Project, said on Twitter that based on the dumped Pastebin logs detailing the extent of the intrusion, “the attacker had full remote admin on their Finland node containers.”

“That’s God Mode folks,” White wrote. “And they didn’t log and didn’t detect it. I’d treat all their claims with great skepticism.”

ANALYSIS

Many readers are curious about whether they should enshroud all of their online communications by using a VPN. However, it’s important to understand the limitations of this technology, and to take the time to research providers before entrusting them with virtually all your browsing data — and possibly even compounding your privacy woes in the process. For a breakdown on what you should keep in mind when considering a VPN service, see this post.

Forgotten user accounts that provide remote access to internal systems — such as VPN and Remote Desktop services (RDP) — have been a persistent source of data breaches for years. Thousands of small to mid-sized brick-and-mortar businesses have been relieved of millions of customer payment card records over the years when their hacked IT contractors used the same remote access credentials at each client location.

Almost all of these breaches could have been stopped by requiring a second form of authentication in addition to a password, which can easily be stolen or phished.

The persistent supply chain attack against Avast brings to mind something I was considering the other day about the wisdom of allowing certain software to auto-update itself whenever it pleases. I’d heard from a reader who was lamenting the demise of programs like Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector and FileHippo, which allowed users to automatically download and install available updates for a broad range of third-party Windows programs.

These days, I find myself seeking out and turning off any auto-update functions in software that I install. I’d rather be alerted to new updates when I launch the program and have the ability to review what’s changing and whether anyone has experienced issues with the new version. I guess you could say years of dealing with unexpected surprises on Microsoft Patch Tuesdays has cured me of any sort of affinity I may have once had for auto-update features.