The U.S. government had its longest government shutdown in history between December 22, 2018, and January 25, 2019. It’s not yet clear what overall impact this closure had on U.S. digital security. In the short term, a SecurityScorecard report found that federal agencies’ network security ratings slightly declined but that both their endpoint security...

Following a ransomware attack at a medical billing company, thousands of patients are being warned that their highly sensitive medical information and personal details were amongst the breached data. Michigan-based Wolverine Solutions Group (WSG) says that it discovered its systems had suffered a security breach on September 25 last year. Malware...

It would be hard to be involved in technology in any way and not see the dramatic upward trend in DevOps adoption. In their January 2019 publication “Five Key Trends To Benchmark DevOps Progress,” Forrester research found that 56 percent of firms were ‘implementing, implemented or expanding’ DevOps. Further, 51 percent of adopters have embraced...

The Jokeroo ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) offers various membership plans through which would-be digital criminals can become affiliates. In his analysis of the ransomware-as-a-service, Bleeping Computer creator and owner Lawrence Abrams found that Jokeroo differs from similar platforms in that it offers at least three different membership tiers....

A complete security program involves many different facets working together to defend against digital threats. To create such a program, many organizations spend much of their resources on building up their defenses by investing in their security configuration management (SCM), file integrity monitoring (FIM), vulnerability management (VM) and log...

A new variant of the CryptoMix Clop ransomware family claims to target entire networks instead of individual users' machines. Security researcher MalwareHunterTeam discovered the variant near the end of February 2019. In their analysis of the threat, they noticed that the ransomware came equipped with more email addresses than previous versions of...

The discovery of a significant container-based (runc) exploit sent shudders across the Internet. Exploitation of CVE-2019-5736 can be achieved with "minimal user interaction"; it subsequently allows attackers to gain root-level code execution on the host. Scary, to be sure. Scarier, however, is that the minimal user interaction was made easier by...

Tripwire's February 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together the top vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Adobe. First on the patch priority list this month are patches for Microsoft's Browser and Scripting Engine. These patches resolve 23 vulnerabilities, including fixes for Memory Corruption, Elevation of Privilege, Spoofing, Security Feature...

This Thursday, March 7, 2019, I’ll be facilitating a Learning Lab titled Fine Tuning Your Cyber-Defense Technologies with the ATT&CK Framework at the 2019 RSA Conference in San Francisco, CA. This will be my fourth time speaking at RSA, and this will be my second time facilitating a learning lab, which I'm happy about. I really enjoy the learning labs...

TikTok has agreed to pay a penalty of $5.7 million in order to settle allegations that it illegally collected children's personal data. The penalty effectively settles a complaint submitted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission against TikTok alleging that the video social networking app had...

If you think back to last year, Coinhive was everywhere. The service offered any website an arguably legitimate way of generating income that didn't rely upon online adverts. And plenty of well-known sites, such as Showtime, Salon.com and The Pirate Bay, were happy to give it a go. Rather than making money through ads that might irritate you or...

Ring Doorbell has patched a flaw that allowed attackers to spy on and inject their own application footage, thereby undermining users' home security. Researchers at Dojo, Bullguard's Internet of Things (IoT) security team, discovered the vulnerability while performing an independent security assessment of the smart doorbell. They began their...

Researchers have uncovered a new family of malware called "Farseer" that's designed to conduct surveillance against Windows users. Discovered by Palo Alto Networks, Farseer works by using a technique known as "DLL sideloading" to drop legitimate, signed binaries to the host. These binaries usually consist of trusted applications that don't raise...

With connectivity to the outside world growing, cyber attacks on industrial computers constitute an extremely dangerous threat, as these types of incidents can cause material losses and production downtime for a whole system. Moreover, industrial enterprises knocked out of service can seriously undermine a region’s social welfare, ecology and...

A couple of phishing schemes are currently targeting contractors who do business with two U.S. federal government agencies. Anomali Labs uncovered a malicious server hosting the two schemes in late February 2019. The first scheme begins when users visit transportation[.]gov[.]bidsync[.]kela[.]pw, a suspicious-looking subdomain which contains the...

For various reasons, many executives and senior team members with privileged status on the network and/or access to financial assets oftentimes need to access corporate IT systems from a public place outside the office. What is very common in these types of places is that they’re covered with security cameras. Such devices are a must-have for...

By now, everyone should have heard about the telephone scams involving a caller claiming to be from the CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) or the IRS (Internal Revenue Service). These tax agency scams generally receive the most coverage, but some don’t get much attention. Recently, people have also received calls from individuals claiming to be from their ...

Sandbox environments are a common feature of many cybersecurity solutions in their fight against advanced malware. Firewalls, endpoint protection, and even next-generation machine learning systems use sandboxes as one of their lines of defense. However, not all sandboxes are created equal. Sandboxes can take different approaches towards malware...

A new bill would strengthen California's data breach notification law by expanding businesses' obligations to inform their customers in the event of a security incident. On 21 February, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Assembly Member Marc Levine (D-San Rafael) revealed AB 1130. This...