Author: Brett Walkenhorst

Wireless Threat Intelligence: Enhancing Modern Corporate Security — Bastille

The Critical Role of Wireless Threat Intelligence in Modern Corporate Security

In today’s interconnected world, wireless technology is an integral part of corporate infrastructure. As businesses continue to rely on wireless networks for daily operations, the importance of securing these networks has never been more critical.

Employees and visitors bring wireless devices into corporate facilities. Visiting wireless devices may be unwittingly compromised or used by bad actors to compromise corporate assets and networks, exfiltrating voice and data or introducing threats and vulnerabilities to corporate systems.

This is where Wireless Threat Intelligence (WTI) comes into play. WTI provides organizations with the tools and insights needed to detect, analyze, and mitigate threats to their wireless environments. In this article, we will explore the significance of Wireless Threat Intelligence and its impact on modern corporate security.

Understanding Wireless Threat Intelligence

Wireless Threat Intelligence refers to the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information regarding threats to wireless networks. This encompasses a range of activities, including the identification of unauthorized access points, detection of anomalous network behavior, rogue wireless devices and networks, and analysis of wireless vulnerabilities. By leveraging WTI, organizations gain a comprehensive understanding of the threats facing their wireless environments and take proactive measures to safeguard their networks.

The Evolution of Wireless Threats

Wireless threats have evolved significantly. Initially, the primary concern was securing Wi-Fi networks from unauthorized access. However, with the advent of advanced technologies and sophisticated attack techniques, the threat landscape has become increasingly complex. Today, organizations must contend with a wide array of wireless threats, using Wi-Fi, cellular and IoT protocols including:

  • Rogue Access Points: Unauthorized devices that mimic legitimate access points to intercept sensitive information.

  • Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) Attacks: Intercepting and altering communication between two parties without their knowledge.

  • Wireless Eavesdropping: Unauthorized listening to private communications over wireless networks.

  • Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks: Disrupting wireless services by overwhelming the network with traffic.

  • Bluetooth Exploits: Attacks that target Bluetooth connections to gain unauthorized access or spread malware.

These evolving threats underscore the need for Wireless Threat Intelligence to detect and mitigate potential risks effectively.

The Importance of Wireless Threat Intelligence in Corporate Security

Wireless Threat Intelligence is crucial for several reasons:

Proactive Threat Detection

One of the primary benefits of WTI is its ability to detect threats proactively. Traditional security measures often rely on reactive approaches, addressing threats only after they are identified. In contrast, WTI enables organizations to identify potential threats before they cause significant damage. By continuously monitoring wireless networks and the airwaves for suspicious activity, WTI will alert security teams to potential risks in real-time, allowing for swift and effective response.

Enhanced Visibility and Control

Wireless Threat Intelligence provides organizations with enhanced visibility into their wireless environments. This includes identifying all devices connected to the network, monitoring their behavior, and detecting any anomalies that may indicate a security breach. With this level of visibility, organizations maintain greater control over their wireless networks, ensuring that only authorized devices have access and that any suspicious activity is promptly addressed. In addition, WTI finds wireless devices that are in the facility but are not connected to the network, including cellular devices and those that use IoT protocols.

Improved Incident Response

In the event of a security breach, WTI plays a critical role in incident response. By providing detailed information about the nature of the threat and the affected systems, WTI enables security teams to respond quickly and effectively. This includes isolating compromised devices, mitigating the impact of the attack, and preventing future incidents. With Wireless Threat Intelligence, organizations minimize the damage caused by security breaches and ensure a swift recovery.

Compliance and Regulatory Requirements

Many industries are subject to strict regulatory requirements regarding the security of their wireless networks. Compliance with these regulations often necessitates the implementation of advanced security measures, including Wireless Threat Intelligence. By leveraging WTI, organizations ensure that they meet regulatory requirements and avoid potential penalties. This is particularly important in industries such as healthcare, finance, and government, where the security of sensitive information is paramount.

Implementing Wireless Threat Intelligence

Implementing Wireless Threat Intelligence requires a multi-faceted approach that encompasses several key components:

Wireless Intrusion Detection Systems (WIDS)

Wireless Intrusion Detection Systems (WIDS) are a critical component of WTI. These systems monitor wireless networks and wireless devices for suspicious activity, then alert security teams to potential threats. WIDS detects a wide range of threats, including rogue access points, unauthorized devices, and anomalous network behavior. By integrating WIDS into their security infrastructure, organizations enhance their ability to detect and respond to wireless threats.

Machine Learning and AI

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) play an increasingly important role in Wireless Threat Intelligence. These technologies enable organizations to analyze vast amounts of data and identify patterns that may indicate a security threat. By leveraging machine learning and AI, organizations enhance their ability to detect and respond to wireless threats in real-time.

Employee Training and Awareness

Employee training and awareness are critical components of an effective WTI strategy. Organizations must ensure that their employees are aware of the risks associated with wireless networks and are trained to recognize potential threats. This includes educating employees about safe wireless practices, such as avoiding public Wi-Fi networks and recognizing phishing attempts. By fostering a culture of security awareness, organizations reduce the risk of wireless threats.

Continuous Monitoring and Updates

Wireless Threat Intelligence is not a one-time effort but an ongoing process. Continuous monitoring and regular updates are essential to keep up with the evolving threat landscape. Organizations must invest in technologies and practices that allow for constant vigilance and adaptation to new threats. This includes updating threat intelligence databases, refining detection algorithms, and ensuring that security policies remain current and effective.

The Future of Wireless Threat Intelligence

As wireless technology continues to evolve, so too will the threats facing corporate networks. Emerging technologies such as 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) present new opportunities and challenges for Wireless Threat Intelligence. To stay ahead of these evolving threats, organizations must continue to invest in advanced WTI solutions and stay informed about the latest developments in wireless security.

The Impact of 5G on Wireless Threat Intelligence

The rollout of 5G technology promises faster speeds and more reliable connections. However, it also introduces new security challenges. The increased bandwidth and connectivity offered by 5G can be exploited by cybercriminals. Organizations must adapt their Wireless Threat Intelligence strategies to address the unique risks associated with 5G networks.

Securing the Internet of Things (IoT)

The proliferation of IoT devices adds another layer of complexity to wireless security. Each connected device represents a potential entry point for cyber threats. Effective Wireless Threat Intelligence must include strategies for securing IoT devices, such as implementing authentication mechanisms, ensuring firmware updates, and monitoring for anomalous behavior.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Wireless Threat Intelligence is a critical component of modern corporate security. By providing organizations with the tools and insights needed to detect, analyze, and mitigate wireless threats, WTI enables businesses to protect their networks and ensure the security of their sensitive information. As the threat landscape continues to evolve, the importance of Wireless Threat Intelligence will only continue to grow. Organizations that invest in advanced WTI solutions and adopt a proactive approach to wireless security will be better equipped to navigate the challenges of the digital age and safeguard their operations against emerging threats.

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Enhancing Security in Critical Environments Series: The Pager — Bastille

Pagers – History, Uses Today and How to Detect 

In a world of ever-faster mobile communications devices and cellular networks, it is easy to forget the role still played by much older wireless communication devices: pagers.

While smartphones dominate modern communication, pagers—once ubiquitous for short messages and alerts—are still widely used in critical environments. Detecting and monitoring pagers is vital to ensuring operational security. Bastille Networks provides a comprehensive solution for detecting wireless devices across the RF spectrum, including pagers.

Understanding the history and current usage of pagers is key to recognizing their significance and the potential security risks they pose.

A Brief History of Pagers

Pagers, or beepers, first emerged in the early 20th century as basic communication tools, eventually evolving into more advanced devices. The first iterations of what became known as a pager were first implemented by the Detroit Police Department in the 1920s. Their popularity peaked in the 1990s, with millions of users worldwide relying on them for critical communication. Despite being overshadowed by mobile phones, pagers continue to serve vital roles in certain sectors today, including health care and public safety.

Key Milestones in Pager Technology History:

  • 1920s-1950s: The development of early pagers for hospitals and medical staff.

  • 1959: The first commercial pager, introduced by Motorola, revolutionized emergency communications by offering one-way communication to doctors and hospital staff. This is when the term pager came into usage.

  • 1970s-1980s: Pagers gained widespread use in industries like law enforcement, corporate management, and emergency services due to their reliability.

  • 1990s: Pagers reached their peak with around 61 million users globally, but began to decline with the rise of mobile phones and cellular networks.

  • 2000s-present: While the global use of pagers has significantly decreased, they are still common in sectors requiring robust and reliable communication..

How Many Pagers Are in Use Today?

While the overall use of pagers has dramatically declined, approximately two million pagers are still in active use globally. . A few regions and industries, including government,healthcare and emergency services, continue to rely on pagers due to their unique benefits, including reliability in areas with poor cellular coverage and the ability to communicate during network outages.

Pagers in Use by Country:

  • United States: The US healthcare industry remains the largest consumer of pagers, with an estimated 85% of hospitals still using them. Doctors, nurses, and emergency responders often rely on pagers to receive urgent communications, especially when  cellular signals are unreliable or in situations requiring fast, secure alerts.

  • Japan: Pagers remained popular in Japan for longer than in most other countries. Tokyo Telemessage, the last paging company in Japan, discontinued services in 2019, but before then, pagers were still used by businesses and young people for secure, quick communications.

  • United Kingdom: Pagers are still used in healthcare and emergency services in the UK. The National Health Service (NHS) is one of the largest users of pagers. Despite efforts to phase out pagers, and transition to more modern communication tools many hospitals still depend on them.

  • Germany and France: Both countries have reduced pager usage but continue to employ them in healthcare settings and other industries that require secure, encrypted messaging systems.

  • Canada: In Canada, pagers are still in use within the healthcare system and by certain government agencies, although the numbers are significantly lower compared to the peak usage era.

Why Are Pagers Still in Use?

Despite the rise of smartphones, pagers offer several distinct advantages:

  1. Reliable Communication: Pagers are more reliable in environments with poor or no cellular reception, such as large buildings, hospitals, or rural areas.

  2. Network Independence: Pagers operate independently of congested cellular networks, making them a reliable tool in emergencies when cellular systems may be overloaded.

  3. Battery Life: Pagers can last several weeks on a single battery, making them ideal for long-term use in emergencies or power outages.

  4. Cost-Effective: Pagers are often more affordable than modern smartphones or communication systems, making them an economical option for many organizations.

  5. Security: Some pagers are equipped with encryption, making them secure for transmitting sensitive information, especially in healthcare or government sectors.

  6. Employees without cell phone coverage: One-way pagers allow professionals to receive messages while working in no to low cell phone coverage locations, such as rural areas.

Cellular Networks and Pager Technology

Pagers operate on dedicated paging networks, separate from mobile cellular networks like GSM or CDMA. These networks typically broadcast messages over VHF (Very High Frequency) or UHF (Ultra High Frequency) radio bands, allowing for long-range communication.

Types of Paging Networks:

  1. One-Way Paging: The most common type, where users receive messages but cannot respond. These systems use specific frequencies, such as 138–174 MHz (VHF) or 929–932 MHz (UHF).

  2. Two-Way Paging: In two-way systems, users can send responses, often using a combination of paging and cellular networks. These systems may use more advanced cellular technologies like GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) to send replies.

Bastille Networks: Detecting Pagers Across the RF Spectrum

Given the critical role pagers play in industries like healthcare, Bastille Networks provides advanced tools to monitor and detect pager signals.

How Bastille Detects and Locates Pager Signals:

  1. RF Spectrum Monitoring: Bastille’s technology scans frequencies from 100 MHz to 7.125 GHz.. This ensures comprehensive monitoring of pager transmissions, as well as other wireless devices.

  2. Localization: Bastille provides the location of radio-emitting devices such as pagers, allowing security teams to quickly respond to potential threats from unauthorized or suspicious devices.

  3. Real-Time Alerts: Bastille provides real-time notifications when devices are detected. This enables immediate action, such as investigating unauthorized devices or addressing security vulnerabilities.

Use Cases for Pager Detection

  • Government & Defense: High-security environments use pagers for secure communications. Bastille detects unauthorized pager signals to prevent potential espionage or breaches.

  • Industrial Control Systems: Pagers play a key role in industrial control environments. Bastille’s system ensures that only authorized pagers are operating, protecting operational integrity.

  • Healthcare: Some hospitals still rely on pagers to send urgent communications to doctors, nurses, and emergency personnel. Emergency or hospital teams may have to enter buildings housing sensitive information without time for security checks. In this case, Bastille helps monitor pagers, providing information on where they are going inside the building.

Why Choose Bastille for Pager Detection?

  1. Comprehensive RF Coverage: Bastille monitors frequencies from 100 MHz to 7.125 GHz, providing full visibility into pager transmissions across all major bands.

  2. Real-Time Detection: Bastille’s system detects radio frequency activity in real time, including the RF frequencies used by pagers, allowing security teams to respond to potential threats as they arise.

  3. Localization: Bastille’s capabilities allow for localization of pager signals, aiding in swift security intervention.

  4. Industry Expertise: Bastille’s products are designed for critical environments, offering specialized solutions for enterprise, government, and industrial sectors.

Conclusion

While pagers may seem like relics of the past, they remain essential in industries like healthcare, government, and emergency services. With an estimated two million pagers still in use worldwide, detecting and locating these devices is still important.

Bastille Networks offers a comprehensive solution to monitor pager activity, covering a broad spectrum of RF frequencies from 100 MHz to 7.125 GHz, and providing real-time alerts, signal characterization, and device localization.

Bastille’s pager detection capabilities mitigate the risks posed by unauthorized and often insecure wireless devices such as pagers. Whether in healthcare, government, or industrial sectors, Bastille’s solutions ensure that even legacy devices like pagers do not become a weak link in an organization’s security posture.

Further reading

https://www.spok.com/blog/throwback-thursday-history-pagers

Sources:

History of Pagers:

  • The History of Pagers: This site provides a detailed overview of the development and milestones of pagers from their invention to present day.

  • ThoughtCo. Article “History of Pagers and Beepers” (2021) on the rise and decline of pager technology. Discusses the global peak of pager usage in the 1990s, when around 61 million pagers were in use

Current Use of Pagers:

  • BBC Article: ,”NHS told to ditch ‘outdated’ pagers” (2019) estimates that the NHS still has around 130,000 pagers, which is about 10% of the total left in use globally.

  • UK Govt Website (2019): NHS’s plan to phase them out, with many hospitals still using pagers for urgent communications.

Pagers in Specific Countries:

  • BBC Article “Japan’s last pagers beep for the final time” (2019) : Discusses the end of pager services in Japan after the closure of Tokyo Telemessage in 2019, marking the end of an era for pagers in the country.

  • HealthTech Article “Why the Hospital Pager Withstood the Test of Time” (2019)Highlights the continued use of pagers in hospitals , where pagers are still seen as a reliable tool for communication.

RF Spectrum and Pager Frequencies:

Paging | Federal Communications Commission (fcc.gov) provides details about pager frequencies and licensing

How to Detect and Locate Unauthorized Cell phones — Bastille

Detect and Locate Unauthorized Cell phones

Bastille is the first and only product to detect and locate cellular phones within a building based on their cellular signal. Real-time detection with alerts plus DVR-like playback for forensics.

Cellular phones are a great business productivity tool, but they are also the most ubiquitous security and compliance threat faced by financial services organizations. Cell phones have cameras, recording devices, the ability to become out-of-network hotspots and to tether to laptops and computers in the building for data-exfiltration. Financial services firms want to track both the authorized and unauthorized phones that enter and move around their environments to alert on potential security threats and compliance issues in real time.

Cell phone tracking has been impossibly difficult to date, because a cell phone detection and location product must detect a cell phone even when the Wi-Fi and BlueTooth are turned off. After 4 years of intense R&D and more than a dozen patents, Bastille has created the solution.

DETECTION VIA CELLULAR SIGNAL

Bastille is the first and only solution to detect and locate the presence of cell phones even if the only available signal they are producing is the cellular signal.

DON’T BE FOOLED BY OTHER SOLUTIONS’ CLAIMS

Other solutions claim to observe phones but actually rely on detection of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth which can easily be turned off by bad actors. some competitors even claim to detect cell phones but, in fact, they are only detecting energy in cellular frequencies near a sensor. Other solutions can’t tell if it is one cell phone close to a sensor or 10 cell phones farther away. only Bastille can tell you how many cell phones are in a room and where those phones are located.

DETECTION IN REAL TIME

Bastille alerts on the presence of a cellular phone in a facility within seconds.

DVR PLAYBACK

Bastille records all the cell phones seen, and their movements, to enable DVR-like playback for forensic purposes. so if you want to find out what happened in your facility 2 months ago, you can jump back to that date and replay all activity before and after that event.

LOCATE WITHIN 2 METERS

Bastille sees every cellular phone within a space and puts a separate Dot-on-a-map to mark the location of each device. location accuracy is within 2 meters.

DETECT WHEN A CELL PHONE COMES ON

If someone brings in a cell phone which is powered down, Bastille can alert you when it is powered back up in your facility.

DETECT UNAUTHORIZED CELL PHONE ACTIVITY

Some organizations allow employees to bring personal cell phones into secure facilities but ask them to leave the secure area if a call comes in. Bastille alerts you when an inactive personal cell phone becomes active and lets you track whether it leaves the secure area to continue to call.

ALERTING VIA YOUR EXISTING SYSTEMS

Bastille integrates with your existing SIEM and/or alerting systems via its open standards based Apis. native integration with systems like Splunk(R) and Elasticsearch/Kibana(R), PagerDuty(R), SMS and email. Alternatively customers can view alerts via the Bastille Portal, and use that platform to dig into alerts for more information.