Honeypots are not a new idea. They have been part of the cybersecurity world for decades and have frequently gone in and out of "fashion" over that period. Recently, though, they have become an increasingly important part of vulnerability management. That's for a couple of reasons. Honeypots offer real-world data on the types of threats that...

Whilst working for a management consultancy, I learned a lot more about industrial control systems (ICS) than I ever imagined I would. In many cases, this wasn’t from working on them directly; it was from simply speaking to the technicians and reading documentation. Oftentimes, we have the false belief that our systems are safe from compromise because...

The City of Lake City has confirmed that a "Triple Threat" ransomware attack affected the functionality of several of its computer systems. According to its Facebook statement, the Floridian municipality became the target of a ransomware program known as "Triple Threat" on 10 June 2019. This malware...

Tripwire's May 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Adobe. First and most importantly this month are the patches available to resolve the BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) Remote Desktop Services remote code execution vulnerability. As noted by Microsoft: [This] remote code execution vulnerability...

Perhaps it’s too melodramatic to claim that the debate over how to define a data breach "rages on" because we haven’t seen bodies flying out of windows yet, but it is a serious question with genuine financial ramifications now that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its accompanying fines for mishandling data have arrived to save (and...

Every year when I go to Black Hat USA and DEFCON, I am reminded of the constant battle between light and dark…wait…that’s Return of the Jedi…. I mean of the constant battle between infosec and the big bad hacker. And it’s not just the uber sophisticated hacks that involve fuzzing and SQL Injections (Am I showing my age there?) or any of the other...

Digital criminals used percentage-based URL encoding to help their phishing campaign evade detection by secure email gateways. In mid-September, the Cofense Phishing Defense Center came across a phishing email that originated from a compromised email account for a recognizable American brand. The message informed recipients that they had a new...

Toyota Boshoku, a seating and interiors supplier for Toyota cars, has revealed that it was tricked into moving a large amount of money into a bank account controlled by scammers. In a statement published on its global website, Toyota Boshoku Corporation said that its European subsidiary was duped into transferring approximately four billion yen ...

Digital criminals demanded $5.3 million in ransom from the City of New Bedford, Massachusetts following a ransomware attack. Jon Mitchell, Mayor of New Bedford, explained in a press briefing that the ransom demand came shortly after the City's Management Information Systems (MIS) staff detected a ransomware attack in the early morning hours of 5...

As the digital economy has grown and changed, cybersecurity has become an integral part of operating nearly any successful business. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is at the forefront of the modern cybersecurity organization, and CISOs have to adapt to the changing times in front of them. It used to be that the path to becoming a CISO...

MageCart, the notorious malware that has been haunting online stores by stealing payment card details from online shoppers at checkout, is reinfecting the same websites time and time again. Dutch security consultant Willem de Groot, who has been tracking MageCart and similar threats since 2015 and has come across over 40,000 compromised stores, says...

Researchers discovered 14 malware families targeting dozens of e-commerce brands just over one week before Black Friday. Kaspersky Lab observed the threats targeting 67 e-commerce brands including 33 consumer apparel sites, eight consumer electronic outlets and three online retail platforms. Banking trojans made up more than half of the malware...

According to Gartner, threat intelligence is evidence-based knowledge, including context, mechanisms, indicators, implications and actionable intelligence. When security research teams or government agencies release threat intelligence reports, some of the more tactical actionable intelligence is in the indicators. These indicators include (but are...

We are familiar with the problem of ransomware – malicious software that seeks to encrypt user data and demand a ransom in return for the decryption key. There are several defensive measures that help work against crypto-malware. Backups work, in theory, but are not always available or are partial. We need to realize that ransomware does, and will,...

Security researchers are warning that a botnet has been exploiting a five-year-old vulnerability to hijack home routers over the last couple of months. Analysts working at Qihoo 360's Netlab team say that they first identified the new botnet in September 2018. They have dubbed it "BCMUPnP_Hunter" because of its exploitation of a security hole in the...

Tripwire Data Collector has been providing industrial organizations with visibility into their operational technology (OT) environments since its release in mid-2018. Data can be gathered and monitored via multiple avenues – not only native industrial protocols, such as EtherNet/IP CIP and Modbus TCP, but also integrations with management...

The internet can be as dangerous a place as any. And every so often, it gets shaken up by some new threat that jeopardizes the safety of users across the globe. Thus, one of the latest scares that has come to our attention is that of the so-called “Programmer who cracked your email” Bitcoin scam. Exactly how serious this ‘scare’ is still remains to...