The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) can now sue a company for failing to adequately protect client data. Let that sink in for a moment. In short, the recent court ruling confirmed the FTC’s authority to create, impose, and enforce data security rules on virtually any business that holds consumer data. QUICK BACKGROUND On August 24, 2015, the US...

British retailer WHSmith has suffered a data breach that has resulted in users' personally identifiable information (PII) being sent out to hundreds of customers' inboxes. According to The Guardian, personal information including names, phone numbers, and email addresses that users typed into the retailer's contact form was not sent to the company...

Up until this month, I wasn't aware of Ashley Madison's site or the nature of the services they offered – what may be described ‘RaaS’ (Relationships as a Service). However, since this organisation has come to my attention, I have conducted research and completed interviews for BBC TV, the radio, news publications, and a host of other agencies,...

With billions of transactions occurring online every day, business today truly occurs without boundaries. Clients, partners, merchants and other associates all need to access your network—or your cloud—to make purchases, discover information, or use applications. While these new classes of users are critical for sustaining a competitive edge, your...

Every network security manager fights an escalating and asymmetric war against adversaries aiming to penetrate networks or disrupt services hosted there. Symantec reported that major attacker-caused data breaches rose almost 25 percent last year, while Verisign reported almost a 300 percent increase in average DDoS attack size. Asymmetries abound:...

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) group has claimed responsibility for a series of global outages to Xbox Live, Microsoft's online gaming network for the Xbox console. Recently, members of the group, which calls itself the New World Hackers, sat down with Newsweek to explain the motivation behind its alleged attacks. “Well, didn’t even take as...

Even if you are not a developer, you should be familiar with GitHub. If you are not familiar, then consider this blog post your introduction. GitHub is a large cloud-based software repository that uses the git protocol. Creating a GitHub account is painless and free for anyone who is interested. You don’t even need to supply a valid email address to...

Since the Middle Ages, chess has been used to teach strategic and tactical concepts to military leaders. For the same reasons, chess can be a great tool for today’s security leaders. We’re going to take a look at the parallels between chess and security in a series of blog posts. In Part 1, we will consider the specific elements that make up the...

In today's interconnected world, computer crime knows no age requirements. People of all ages are capable of committing malicious acts online. That includes teenagers. For example, in October 2015, a teenager allegedly breached the email account of CIA Director John Brennan. UK authorities now believe that they have arrested that same individual,...

Apple has contested a court order requiring it to create an iOS backdoor that would assist an FBI investigation into last year' San Bernardino shooting. On December 2nd, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife killed 14 people and injured 22 others at a holiday luncheon for Farook's coworkers. The couple was...

Active Directory should be the single source of truth for user and account management. With Windows Server system penetration, it is surprising to note that a significant majority of Microsoft customers do not extend their user management processes into the Active Directory. This is a world where your employees are granted accounts on partners or...

In today's ever-evolving world, the PC is no longer the sole endpoint found on organizations' networks. It is joined by the likes of servers and point-of-sale terminals (PoS), endpoint devices which are contributing to a growing complexity of modern IT environments. Such change demands that IT professionals rethink their organizations' endpoint...

Sometimes things would be better if people didn't keep their word. Take hackers, for instance. Hackers using the online handle "DotGovs" published information about 9,000 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) workers earlier this week after stealing it from the Department of Justice's intranet. Many of us probably hoped that DotGovs couldn't be...

The Obama administration has announced its intention to appoint the United States' first ever federal chief information security officer (CISO). On Tuesday, the President is expected to roll out a budget of $19 billion for federal information security spending. That budget, which marks a 35 percent increase over last year's allotment of $14 billion,...

A hacker has published the personal information of more than 9,000 employees at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ahead of a data dump involving 20,000 FBI officials. On Sunday, an account on Twitter posted the names, titles, email addresses, and phone numbers of 9,000 DHS employees. The...

Hit by ransomware and have no backup? Most of the time, regretfully, you have no chances to recover the encrypted data beyond paying the ransom to the extortionists. The crypto algorithms employed in these attacks cannot be cracked, and the private decryption key is kept on servers inaccessible to the victims. But let’s be positive. Quite a few...

An American man has received five years of probation for co-creating the BlackShades remote access trojan (RAT). On Friday, Michael Hogue, 25, of Arizona, who went by the name "xVisceral" online, received his sentence from U.S. District Judge Keven Castel in Manhattan after pleading guilty back in 2013 to distributing the malware and conspiring to...

In the 21st century, we can expect information technology to play a major role in international espionage and conflict. We hear constant news reports of data theft. Accusations made by world powers of online tampering or detrimental hacking are a common occurrence. Many of these accusations go unfounded, but they prove that the internet is...

Yahoo Mail! has patched a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability and awarded a researcher $10,000 for finding the flaw. Discovered by Finnish researcher Jouko Pynnonen, the bug allowed an attacker to embed malicious Javascript code into a specially crafted email. The code would automatically execute whenever the message was viewed,...

Netflix has announced its intention to counter the use of proxies among members who wish to view content outside of their immediate geographic territory. David Fullagar, Vice President of Content Delivery Architecture at Netflix, broke the news in a blog post on Thursday: "[I]n coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to...