Ransomware is still rampant across organizations worldwide, with roughly 56 percent of businesses experiencing a ransomware attack in the last 12 months, new research revealed. The findings come from SentinelOne’s 2018 Global Ransomware Study conducted by Vanson Bourne, which surveyed 500 businesses in the UK, France, Germany and the United States....

It appears we reached a global level of moral outrage surpassing a high warp factor during the week commencing 19th March 2018 with widespread news coverage of the machinations of Cambridge Analytica (CA). [I write as a long-time cynic who did not need to experience last week to know that “I am the product.”] We are all making choices daily – for...

The city of Atlanta is struggling to recover from a ransomware infection days after the initial attack targeted its computer network. As of 26 March, the municipality was still struggling to collect customers' online payments for bills and fees. Such disruption continues to plague the State of Georgia's capital city at a time when Atlanta is busy...

Industrial control systems (referred to as ICS) have faced an ever-growing volume of threats over the past few years. From 2015 to 2016, IBM Managed Security Services reported a 110 percent increase in ICS cybersecurity attacks. The US accounted for most of these incidents, given it has the most Internet-connected ICS networks on the planet, but the...

Microsoft has launched a limited-time bug bounty program to help discover and address vulnerabilities similar to Spectre and Meltdown. On 14 March, the Redmond-based tech giant announced a framework for speculative execution side channel vulnerabilities. The program encourages researchers to submit their discoveries of hardware design weaknesses on...

For the first time on record, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) publicly blamed Russia for attempting to hack U.S. energy infrastructure. On 15 March, DHS and FBI published a joint Technical Alert (TA) via the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). In it, officials say Russian...

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the glue that holds the internet together. As the internet has developed into a multi-faceted ecosystem with every single ‘thing’ now considered an internet-connected endpoint, PKI has also had to develop quickly in order to meet the demands of the market. Back in the early 2000s, there weren’t many regulations out...

As certain as the changing of the seasons, the drive toward autonomous cars is gaining pace. Changes in the car industry clearly demonstrate that the way we use our vehicles is evolving. In an increasingly connected world, our cars are becoming an important part of our lifestyle. But a question mark keeps hanging over the process. Are we, and the...

Digital threat detection isn't as easy as it was more than a decade ago. The threat landscape no longer evolves slowly in pace with signature-based malware. It moves quickly and thereby complements the rate at which new software flaws are discovered and computer criminals exploit those weaknesses to compromise vulnerable systems. At the same time,...

Yahoo has agreed to pay $80 million to settle a federal securities class action lawsuit following the massive data breaches that compromised the personal information of three billion users. The suit was filed by several shareholders in January 2017, alleging the web services provider intentionally misled them about its cybersecurity practices, in...

At least 400,000 servers are thought to be running a vulnerable program that can be tricked by a remote hacker into running malicious code. The problem is in versions of the open-source Exim message transfer agent (MTA). Exim, which was initially developed at the University of Cambridge, may not be a program familiar to the average computer user, but...

This article is part 2 of 3 in the “Insider Enterprise Threats” series, outlining effective policies and practices for combating insider cyber security threats to the modern enterprise.In the first part of this series, we examined the seriously-overlooked threat posed by malicious insiders – employees, contractors, and more – and discussed user...

Colorado's Department of Transportation (CDOT) has suffered an infection from another variant of the same ransomware family that attacked it just days earlier. On 1 March, a variant of SamSam ransomware targeted employees at CDOT. The attack didn't hamper the Department's Traffic Operations Center,...

BEC, or Business Email Compromise, is a contemporary twist on a staple scam. Often in the shadow of the more extravagant, media-friendly super-hacks or ransomware compromises, BEC is leading the line on both the number of attack victims and the direct losses encountered by businesses. Although not as en vogue as other ‘nouveau’ cybersecurity threats...

Everyone in Silicon Valley and the tech industry, in general, is talking about “The Cloud.” “The Cloud” is something that’s not only trendy but also very useful for business. Why deal with the burden of running your own datacenters when companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft offer third-party cloud services that will be less expensive for your...

Colorado's Department of Transportation (DOT) shut down more than 2,000 computers after its network suffered a ransomware attack. First thing in the morning on 21 February, the DOT discovered that ransomware had struck all employee computers running Windows and protected by McAfee anti-virus software. It immediately launched an investigation into...

With distributed ledger technology (such as blockchain), there is growing interest in automating routine commercial transactions. But how will these smart contracts be interpreted under existing commercial contract laws? Although there is no federal contracts law for private commercial transactions in the United States, there is a widely adopted...

In these times of unabated data breaches, the typical Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) must feel like a moving target in a shooting gallery. It’s not a matter of whether an attack and possible breach will occur, it’s a matter of when. Being a CISO is a fascinating and important job. Often, though, it’s a thankless one. Unfortunately for...

Data breaches are getting more expensive. That's one of the findings of a new global study by the Ponemon Institute that examines the financial impact of a corporate data breach. So what is the actual cost of a data breach? Well, obviously it varies depending on the nature of the organisation that has lost control of its data, the nature of data...