From small- and medium-sized organizations to large enterprises, every business is under continuous threat of security risk in today’s digital world. With the growing digital footprint and cloud adoption, organizations continue to experience sophisticated cyberthreats that hold the potential to disrupt business continuity. A vast majority of these...

There are two significant trends occurring right now that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone reading this post. First, businesses are gathering and leveraging more and more data to improve their core services. Second, more compliance and regulatory standards are popping up from governments and private organizations. As these businesses realize that...

Recovering CISO and Director of (TL)2 Security Thom Langford joins the show to debate Tripwire’s Paul Edon on facial recognition vs. security. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6fFEo0k55WgGqM6Yzi0Mbi?si=-Bkeyld4QtuTSeq6IKQseQ Spotify:...

This is a true story. I was sitting at breakfast the other day with my wife. As we waited for our food to arrive, four people were sitting at a socially distanced table. They were discussing how they have to restart their computers every month because of “something Microsoft does that makes me restart.” The conversation continued: Diner 1: “That’s...

As I had mentioned previously, this year, I’m going back to school. Not to take classes but to teach a course at my alma mater, Fanshawe College. I did this about a decade ago and thought it was interesting, so I was excited to give it another go. Additionally, after a friend mentioned that their kid wanted to learn Python, I developed an Intro to...

Complying with Standards drawn by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council can be complicated and time-consuming. But, with a PCI DSS Gap Analysis, the process becomes a lot easier, streamlined, and less exhaustive. PCI Gap Analysis is the first step towards the Compliance process. The assessment provides details on your current security...

2020 was dominated by news of the pandemic and anchored by reality that we all found ourselves in – entire families logging in remotely, trying to keep school and work feeling “normal.” While we tested the limits of what a home office could sustain, the privacy and security of a fully remote world was put front and center. In this piece, we take a...

As the retail world’s center of gravity shifts to the cloud, payment card fraud has followed suit. According to Verizon’s retail vulnerabilities study, attacks against e-commerce applications are by far the leading cause of retail data breaches. This trend mirrors similar outcomes in other industries, like food service. A complimentary Verizon study...

Digital attackers launched a new ransomware campaign dubbed "PLEASE_READ_ME" in an effort to target MySQL servers. Guardicore first spotted the attack back in January 2020. After that, it witnessed a total of 92 attacks emanate from 11 IP addresses, with most based in Ireland and the United Kingdom at the time of analysis. The security firm found...

Security researchers detected a new spear-phishing attack that's using an exact domain spoofing tactic in order to impersonate Microsoft. On December 7, IRONSCALES revealed that it had spotted the campaign targeting Office 365 users. Those users primarily worked in the financial services, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, utilities and telecom...

Today’s VERT Threat Alert addresses Microsoft’s December 2020 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-918 on Wednesday, December 9th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs There are no In-The-Wild or Disclosed CVEs patched this month. CVE Breakdown by Tag While historical Microsoft...

Tripwire's November 2020 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle. First on the patch priority list this month are three vulnerabilities in Oracle WebLogic Server that have recently been included within the Metasploit exploit framework. Supported versions of Oracle WebLogic Server that...

In this blog series, I will be putting the spotlight on useful Ghidra features that you may have missed. Each post will look at a different feature and show how it helps you save time and be more effective while reverse engineering. Ghidra is an incredibly powerful tool, but much of this power comes from knowing how to use it effectively. What is...

If high-tech gadgets are on your holiday shopping list, it is worth taking a moment to think about the particular risks they may bring. Under the wrong circumstances, even an innocuous gift may introduce unexpected vulnerabilities. In this blog series, VERT will be looking at some of the Internet’s best-selling holiday gifts with an eye toward their...

Chloe Messdaghi, VP of Strategy at Point3, advocate and activist joins the show to explain common misconceptions about the hacking community and how we can do better to combat those stigmas. She also unpacks the diversity challenges specifically in the infosec industry. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7G9cXfVFeFxCfoEdhZlHOk?si...

Malicious actors launched a phishing attack that's using redirector websites with custom subdomains in order to evade detection. On November 16, Microsoft Security Intelligence tweeted out that it had spotted the phishing attack attempting to lure in recipients with emails disguised as password update reminders, helpdesk tickets and other seemingly...

Recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s exam division issued a Risk Alert (the “Alert”) where it carried out several targeted cybersecurity investigations. The agency is now concerned with how there’s been an increase in a specific type of hack known as “credential stuffing.“ This cyberattack involves using stolen credentials to log into...

The cybersecurity industry is more well-informed than most, but even so, misconceptions arise and spread, helped along by the fact that the rise in cybersecurity incidents has led to substantial “pop culture” intrigue with all things cybersecurity. One of the more harmful of these misconceptions is the conflation of “hacker” and “attacker,” terms...

The University of Utah paid a fee of more than $450,000 to attackers after they infected a portion of its servers with ransomware. The University of Utah's CSBS building. On July 19, 2020, the Information Security Office (ISO) notified the university's College of Social and Behavioral Science (CSBS)...

A friend of mine received an interesting piece of snail mail the other day. It was one of those inheritance scam letters that usually arrive in E-Mail. An image of the letter is shown below: In summary, the author, a high-ranking bank official, has an unclaimed inheritance that he is willing to split...