The Biden Administration published a new executive order (EO) to strengthen the digital security of U.S. federal government networks. Published on May 12 by The White House, the executive order covered much of what many media outlets reported would appear in the draft. This included the issue of supply chain security. For example, the EO stated...

Ofwat, the water services regulator for England and Wales, has revealed that it has received over 20,000 spam and phishing emails so far this year. The Water Services Regulation Authority (better known as Ofwat) which is the government department responsible for regulating the privatised water and sewage industry in England and Wales, said it...

The cyber security skills gap was a problem prior to the pandemic. In a survey of 342 security professionals released in early 2020, Tripwire found that 83% of security experts felt more overworked going into the new year compared to how they felt at the start of 2019. Tripwire asked respondents to elaborate on that sentiment. In response, almost the...

In 2019, the hospitality industry suffered 13 percent of all data breaches, ranking third highest among targeted industries. It was two years later when NIST released SP 1800-27: Securing Property Management Systems to help hoteliers secure their Property Management Systems (PMS) and associated patron data. The National Cybersecurity Center of...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s May 2021 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-943 on Wednesday, May 12th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-31204 Up first in the list this month, we have a vulnerability that impacts .NET and Visual Studio and could allow a...

Over the weekend, the Alpharetta-based Colonial Pipeline was hit by an extensive ransomware attack that shut down its information technology (IT) and industrial operational technology (OT) systems. Simply put, an all-too-common ransomware event targeting IT systems encouraged a voluntary shutdown on the production side (OT) of the business to...

I am very excited to share that I will be offering my Ghidra training course at Black Hat USA 2021. As an online event, this is the perfect opportunity for Black Hat caliber training without hotel and airfare costs. Registration for "A Beginner’s Guide to Reversing with Ghidra "on July 31 and August 1 2021 is now available via the Black Hat web site...

For most internet users, there's not much of a perceivable difference between the domain name they want to visit and the server that the domain queries. That's because the Domain Name System (DNS) protocol does a good job of seamlessly routing users to different IP addresses that are all associated with a single domain name. The bad news is that...

Amidst the pandemic overwhelming the capacity of many hospital systems, malicious hackers have been quick to target healthcare providers and medical agencies. These cyber-attacks have hit both the United States and Europe in recent months, serving as a reminder for organizations to closely review their information security posture during these times...

Tripwire's April 2021 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Google Chrome and Microsoft.First on the patch priority list this month are patches for insufficient input validation vulnerabilities in Google Chrome (Chromium). Exploits for these vulnerabilities have been recently added to the Metasploit Exploit...

The US Defense Department and third-party military contractors are being advised to strengthen the security of their operational technology (OT) in the wake of security breaches, such as the SolarWinds supply chain attack. The guidance comes from the NSA, which this week has issued a cybersecurity advisory entitled "Stop Malicious Cyber Activity...

Human nature has shown that people re-use passwords, at least for non-work accounts that aren’t requiring quarterly changes. How can it affect your current security that you've reused an old password or passphrase from 2012? Surprisingly, quite a lot. Hashed passwords and the plain text equivalent from a breached site can be paired with your then...

It’s often said that cybersecurity is hard. Anyone who has ever worked their way through the SANS Critical Controls, PCI-DSS or even something deceptively minimalist as the OWASP Top 10 knows that success in achieving these security initiatives requires time-consuming, diligent and often a multi-team effort. Now imagine amplifying that...

It was 1977, and soon-to-be-fans were greeted with a masterful score and scrolling text. Darth Vader and Princess Leia share the screen in those opening moments, and the Star Wars universe was created. Nearly 30 years later, a new film would introduce us to the events immediately preceding the “scene that launched a franchise,” but how did things...

The Biden administration said it’s drafting an executive order to help the United States government better defend itself against digital supply chain attacks. A Step Up for Federal Procurement According to NPR, the executive order that’s being drafted will include several initiatives designed to strengthen the security of the United States’...

Most large-scale entities need to prove compliance with multiple regulatory standards. In their efforts to meet their compliance mandates, organizations could suffer a major drain on their time and resources. This possibility holds true regardless of whether they’re finance companies, retailers, manufacturers or hospitality firms. Organizations...

Data privacy has been a hot topic in the tech world for years now. With every new technology come new regulations that require companies to completely re-examine the way they handle private data. Most companies already have a basic data privacy policy they constructed alongside lawyers and tech experts to avoid facing serious fines and penalties....

If I were to ask you why you scanned for compliance at your company, I’d bet you’d tell me it was to help you pass requirements easier, to ensure that your audits are good on the first pass and so that you could troubleshoot technical issues with another process. You didn’t know about that last one? Wait, are you telling me you don’t know about the...

Now that the ongoing worldwide trend toward “going digital” has been accelerated by COVID-19, taking extra precautions to protect your organization’s data, communications and information assets is more important than ever. Of course, there are many traditional and emerging ways to protect and secure your business: Employing cybersecurity...

Getting teams to improve security can be hard work, but it’s an important job that organisations must take seriously to protect an increasingly risky world. For this post, I wanted to explore some ways that an organisation or individual might start building a new security “habit” so that, in time, acting securely becomes automatic. Define it The...