On a Mission of Protecting Abraham Lincoln is credited with saying that “A lawyer’s time and advice are his stock and trade.” Whether the quote is mis-attributed to Lincoln is irrelevant to the greater message, which is that attorneys are “knowledge workers.” To state it as bluntly as one attorney once explained to an executive where I worked, “My...

Cybercriminals are running an online competition offering big prizes to anyone who believes they have found an unusual way to help crooks steal cryptocurrency. As security researchers at Intel471 describe, an underground cybercrime forum popular with cybercriminals has issued a call for papers that will describe "unorthodox ways to steal private...

Anthony Israel-Davis joins the show to discuss what you can do with the DBIR as a practitioner and his perspective on the proposed Cybersecurity Safety Review Board. https://open.spotify.com/episode/02DRlioMrZc98rU7wlwvid?si=YY-9l1KLTbmZz82VZvTadA Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5UDKiGLlzxhiGnd6FtvEnm Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com...

Are you doing enough to prevent scammers from hijacking your social media accounts? Even if you have chosen a strong, unique password for your online presence and enabled two-factor authentication it's possible that you've overlooked another way in which online criminals could commandeer your social media accounts and spam out a message to your...

Organizations are increasingly faced with threats from sophisticated criminal organizations and nation-state actors. To mitigate the risks posed by cyber criminals, organizations must secure and protect their proprietary and sensitive information. They must also commit to training their employees to do their part to protect proprietary and...

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...

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...

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...

Imagine an arc. Not just any arc. A rainbow. When we think of a rainbow, it conjures impressions of color, inspiration and even supernatural characteristics. Does your cybersecurity program long for a magical pot of gold at the end of a rainbow? With all the moving parts of cybersecurity, sometimes it seems like we are merely chasing rainbows. ...

A bipartisan Senate bill would require some businesses to report data breaches to law enforcement within 24 hours or face financial penalties and the loss of government contracts. The legislation from Senate Intelligence Chair and Democratic Senator Mark Warner with Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Susan Collins is just one of several new...

SIEM (pronounced like “sim” from “simulation”), which stands for Security Information and Event Management, was conceived of as primarily a log aggregation device. However, a SIEM’s primary capabilities are to provide threat detection, better enable incident investigation, and speed up your incident response time, while also giving you a unified,...

The United States Department of State is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification of anyone, working for a foreign government, who participates in a cybercriminal attack against American critical infrastructure. The news of the reward comes at the same time as the White House announced it was setting up a...

There are multitudes of advantages that the cloud has to offer to companies. These include making the task of security management more accessible. However, there are still many gray areas associated with the cloud and its implications for an organization's overall security. With the widespread implementation of cloud-based computing within enterprises...

Security researchers at AT&T Alien Labs report that a notorious hacking group has been targeting engineers working in the defence industry. In recent months there have been a series of reports of malicious emails that use the disguise of a job offer to target defence contractors in the United States and Europe. Attached to the emails are Word...

In the modern digital landscape, cybersecurity is paramount, making the differentiation between vulnerability scanning and penetration testing essential for safeguarding organizational assets. Vulnerability scanning offers a broad sweep for potential security weaknesses, serving as an early warning system. Penetration testing takes a more targeted...

The corporate network can be a busy place with devices connecting, reconnecting and disconnecting every day. With the ever-growing landscape of today’s corporate networks, the difficulty of knowing and understanding what is on an enterprise network has highlighted the importance of effective asset discovery. So what does asset discovery involve?...

Container orchestration platform Kubernetes announced in December 2020 that its third and final release, Kubernetes v1.20, would deprecate dockershim and subsequently Docker as a container runtime. This deprecation has brought multiple changes that admins must be aware of and accordingly respond to. To best understand these changes and how...

Back in 2018, the State of Security spent a lot of time going over v7 of the Center for Internet Security’s Critical Security Controls (CIS Controls). We noted at the time how the Center for Internet Security shuffled the order of requirements for many of the existing controls in that version. It also cleaned up the language of the CIS Controls,...

Cloud-native applications that are based on new types of infrastructure such as containers and serverless platforms are being rapidly adopted by organizations worldwide. While cloud-native applications deliver compelling benefits such as elastic scalability, unmatched resilience and rapid development velocity, they also raise challenges.Cloud-native...