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...

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...

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...

Car maker Toyota admitted earlier today that it had suffered what appears to have been a malware attack at its facilities in Melbourne, Australia that knocked out its website and other communications. The first public sign of a problem appeared on Toyota Australia's website, which was offline for a period of time in the aftermath of the attack. The...

In September of 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the addition of the Session Manager to the AWS Systems Manager. The session manager enables shell or remote desktop level access to your AWS EC2 Windows and Linux instances, along with other benefits. This is a great new feature, but care should be taken when enabling this capability. While the...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s February 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-817 on Wednesday, February 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-0676 The first vulnerability in the list today is an Internet Explorer vulnerability that is already seeing active...

Often claimed as a worst-case scenario, a container breakout vulnerability has been discovered in RunC, the universal container runtime used by Docker, Kubernetes and other containerization systems. Further research has discovered that a similar version of the same vulnerability affects the LXC and Apache Mesos packages. Identified as CVE-2019-5736,...

Anyone who has a presence on the internet is likely to be suffering from breach fatigue. Data leaks are reported in the headlines on a daily basis, and users can feel so overwhelmed by the sheer number of breaches that they feel there's little they can do to keep ahead of hackers. It can almost feel like a full-time job as you try to determine if...

Technology has advanced to a state where clients now expect a constant stream of updates for their software and applications. To fulfill this demand, developers commonly turn to what’s known as a CI/CD pipeline. As noted by Synopsys, this practice embraces two important software development concepts of today’s streamlined world:Continuous Integration ...

Over the past several months, increased attention has been paid to U.S. federal government policies surrounding internal use of IoT devices. In January 2018, researchers discovered they could track the movements of fitness tracker-wearing military personnel over the Internet. In July, a similar revelation occurred with fitness app Polar, which was...

Governments, businesses and societies as a whole benefit enormously from Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI assists organisations in reducing operational costs, boosting user experience, elevating efficiency and cultivating revenue. But it also creates a number of security challenges for personal data and forms many ethical dilemmas for organisations....

“Worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach more than $114 billion in 2018, an increase of 12.4 percent from last year, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. In 2019, the market is forecast to grow 8.7 percent to $124 billion.” That’s good, right? Well maybe-not-so-much. The current dystopian cyber...

The U.S. Government is constantly working to improve its ability to respond to the growing threat of cyber-attacks facing the national power grid. Towards that end, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the revised critical infrastructure protection reliability standards for cybersecurity management controls on April 19, 2018. The...

As part of this two-part series, let’s now look to another exhibit demonstrating of how people act as the first, last and best data and privacy defense. Exhibit B: Potentially Unwanted Leaks If you have some technical literacy, you may have heard of potentially unwanted programs (“PUPs”). It’s all that glop and gloop – malware, viruses, trojans,...

In this third installment of #TripwireBookClub, we look at “Gray Hat Python,” written by Justin Seitz and published by No Starch Press. I had the opportunity to briefly meet Justin at CanSecWest the year this book was published, which only increased my interest in the book and ensured my preorder. I read it back then (2009), and now, nine years...

Container security is not a unitary action but a multifaceted process. It involves securing the build environment using secure code control and other strategies. The procedure also necessitates securing containers’ contents via code analysis and unit tests. At some point, organizations need to develop a plan to secure their containers in production...

If you are like most infosec professionals, each day brings new and interesting challenges. However, like most jobs, there are valleys that we fall into along the course of our professional development. How long can you stare at your SIEM tool before you start to experience some mild tunnel vision, or worse, severe burnout? Neither of these are...

Hackers planted malware on an automated teller machine (ATM) server belonging to an Indian bank as part of a criminal scheme which saw the theft of nearly 944 million rupees (US $13.5 million) in a co-ordinated attack across 28 countries last weekend. India's Cosmos Bank, based in the western city of Pune, suffered an attack which saw hackers use...