Black Friday is a big day for shoppers. In 2016, 154 million consumers shopped over Thanksgiving weekend and spent $9.36 billion, constituting a year-over-year increase of 16.4 percent. More than half of that money spent ($5.27 billion) occurred online. Building on those figures, Black Friday 2017 looks like it will be even bigger than in previous...

As the Internet continues to be an important part of our lives, it also becomes a more dangerous avenue for cybercrime. The risk increases as the massive online community’s use of the Internet becomes more rampant. And despite the public being aware of cybersecurity issues, anonymous online criminals are able find more victims and creative ways to...

Federal and local authorities have arrested eight individuals in connection with a credit card skimming scheme that caused losses in excess of $3.5 million. On 17 November, representatives of the United States Attorney Western District of Kentucky's office, Kentucky FBI division, Secret Service, and the Louisville Metro Police Department announced...

For as long as I can remember, members of the public have been losing money to scammers, as they've been tricked into sending their hard-earned cash via Western Union. Scammers prey on the vulnerable and gullible, tricking them into wiring money via Western Union with the promise that it will help with medical bills, pay for for a new internet...

Criminals demanded a ransom of approximately $8,000 after they attacked the Sacramento Regional Transit's (SacRT) computer system. The attack occurred on 18 November, reports The Sacramento Bee, when unknown attackers defaced the public transportation agency's main website with the following message: I’m sorry to modify the home page, i’m good...

Recently, my nine-year-old son informed me that he had observed over time how I always seem to help other people and how others always depend on me. I said to him that, in a way, he is much the same, as he is always saying 'yes' to doing little jobs. Together, we defined ourselves as being 'yes persons.' However, as our conversation evolved, I said to...

With the rise in popularity of containers, development and DevOps paradigms are experiencing a massive shift while security admins are left struggling to figure out how to secure this new class of assets and the environments they reside in. While containers do increase the complexity of the ecosystem that security admins are responsible for securing...

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) leaked sensitive data online through a publicly accessibly Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 bucket. Public search engine Censys indexed the misconfigured asset on 14 November during a regular security audit of the S3 environment. Researchers at the Kromtech security center don't know who might have accessed...

Last time, I had fun talking with Victoria Walberg. She really understands cloud and IoT cybersecurity. This time, I got to speak to Beth Cornils. She has a pretty cool job that involves making IoT cars safe! Kim Crawley: Hi, Beth! Tell me about what you do. Beth Cornils: I am a product manager for an autonomous vehicle company. Prior to that, I was...

Scammers stole S$80,000 from a woman by tricking her into visiting a fake phishing website for the Singapore Police Force (SPF). On 13 November, local law enforcement received a report from the woman that someone had stolen several thousand Singapore dollars from her bank account. She told investigators that the trouble started sometime earlier when...

If you thought it was scary when security researchers remotely hijacked a Jeep as it was driven down the freeway, consider this - now airplanes are getting hacked. The US Department of Homeland Security has revealed that a Boeing 757 airliner was successfully hacked as it sat on the runway at the airport in Atlantic City, New Jersey on September 19,...

In the first part of this blog series, we discussed some core objectives, characteristics and principles of the GDPR, which is due to take effect on 25th May 2018. In this second article, we will discuss in greater depth some of the core IT security objectives relating to GDPR. The purpose of the GDPR is to establish directions to protect “natural...

Microsoft has patched a 17-year-old bug hidden in its Office suite that attackers can use to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable machines. The vulnerability resides in Microsoft Equation Editor (EQNEDT32.EXE). It's a component that allows users to insert and edit equations into Microsoft Word documents as an Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) item....

Phishing is becoming a major threat vector for organizations all around the world. Phishing is the exercise of sending illegitimate emails designed to elicit a response from the end user, whether that’s clicking on a link that infects them with malware or tricking the user into volunteering information that they normally would not provide like a...

Unless you’ve been living in Slab City or off the grid for a while, you’ve probably heard this year’s omnipresent buzzword ‘blockchain.’ But perhaps you're a bit clueless as to what this newer technology entails. In a recent HSBC survey of 12,000 respondents in 11 countries, 80 percent of people could not explain how blockchain works. Don’t worry,...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses the Microsoft November 2017 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-752 on Wednesday, November 15th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2017-8700 A Cross Origin Resource Sharing bypass could allow information disclosure in ASP.NET Core. Microsoft has...

Security researchers have discovered a new banking Trojan that is actively targeting U.S. financial institutions. Dubbed IcedID, the malware is believed to have emerged in the wild back in September 2017, when its first test campaigns were launched. According to IBM X-Force, IcedID was developed with “modular malicious code and modern capabilities”...

A cryptocurrency miner has earned its place on a list of the top 10 most wanted malware for the month of October 2017. The browser-mining service in question goes by the name "CoinHive." It's a piece of JavaScript that site owners can embed into their websites. Whenever a user visits their domain thereafter, CoinHive will activate and begin mining for...

In part one of this two-part series, I described what we know about the September 14 attack against the drug sites on the Tor network. To review: The attack simultaneously took down 11 drug sites on the dark web, yet traffic patterns were unaffected. The site administrators indicated a problem on a public forum; and There was no discernible...

Last time, I spoke with Nitha Suresh. She's written IEEE papers and knows her stuff when it comes to pentesting and aircraft data networks. This time, I had the pleasure of interviewing Victoria Walberg. She has a lot of ideas when it comes to IoT and the cloud. Kimberly Crawley: Please tell me about what you do, Victoria. Victoria Walberg: I'm a...