You’ve seen the high-level stats on the cybersecurity skills gap, but I’ll remind you of some of the main ones from the (ISC)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study:In the United States, the cybersecurity workforce gap is nearly 500,000.The cybersecurity workforce needs to grow by 62% in order to meet the demands of U.S. businesses today.The global...

Companies are facing increased and complex cybersecurity challenges in today’s interconnected digital economy. The cyber threats have become more sophisticated and may harm a company via innovative new forms of malware, through the compromise of global supply chains or by criminal and hostile state actors. The hard truth is that it is difficult to...

The University of Maastricht publicly revealed that it paid a ransom of 30 bitcoins to recover its computer systems following a ransomware attack. Nick Bos, vice president of the university, shared what officials knew about the digital attack at a press conference. Bos noted that the security...

I think we all know what log management is. As discussed in a 2017 article for The State of Security, log management is about systematically orchestrating the system and network logs collected by the organization. That being said, there’s still some confusion surrounding why an enterprise would want to collect log data in the first place. There are...

A spam campaign leveraged malicious RTF documents to distribute notorious infostealers including Agent Tesla and Lokibot. While digging through a few other spam campaigns, Lastline observed unusual use of the C# compiler from the command line in some samples. Its researchers performed additional analysis and found that the samples belonged to the...

The United Parcel Service (UPS) revealed that a phishing incident might have exposed the information of some of its customers. In its "Notice of Data Breach" letter, UPS disclosed that an unauthorized person had used a phishing attack to gain access to store email accounts at some of its store...

The NIS Directive is the first EU horizontal legislation addressing cybersecurity challenges. It is a true game-changer for cybersecurity resilience and cooperation in Europe. As we noted in a previous blog post, the Directive has three main objectives: Improving national cybersecurity capabilities Building cooperation at EU level Promoting a...

Canadian online pharmacy PlanetDrugsDirect.com has contacted customers warning them that their data might have been exposed in what they euphemistically describe as a "data security incident". In an email seen by Bleeping Computer, the website warned that exposed personal data could include the following: Customer names Postal addresses Email...

Finding a security vendor that is the best fit for your company’s business objectives, culture, risk profile, and budget is challenging today. The purpose of this blog is to suggest that working with a “vendor partner” is more than working with a standard technology vendor in that a partner aligns not only with “Technology” concerns but also with ...

Attackers provided victims who paid with an updated Ryuk ransomware decryptor that could potentially damage their larger files. Emsisoft found that malicious actors had added numerous new features to Ryuk ransomware over the past year. In a lesser-known case, attackers gave Ryuk the ability to partially encrypt files that exceeded 54.4 MB in size....

As we begin our new decade of the 2020s, we can look back at the last 30 odd years and examine the collaboration between technology and our daily lives. If you think of your day-to-day, it’s easy to see how much our society relies on technology. Consider our smart devices such as mobile phones, watches, even homes. However, what about the technology...

The shopping season is upon us, and like it or not there are lots of individuals who would love to replace your happiness with their sadness. Thus, at this festive time of the year, it is imperative to give some thought and prep time to you and your family’s shopping habits and the security that surrounds those habits. If you’re like most people,...

CyrusOne, a major provider of enterprise data center services, is reported to have suffered a ransomware attack. The Dallas-headquartered company, which operates more than 30 data centers across the United States, China, London, and Singapore, is reported by ZDnet to have had some of its systems infected by the REvil (Sodinokibi) ransomware....

Many of the current telephone scams use caller ID spoofing to mask the identity of the caller. A few of those telephone scams spoof caller IDs that don’t match the North American standard for legitimate numbers. These blatantly obvious spoofed caller IDs are the target of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). Last...

In this, the final post in my series on considerations for managing your security with cloud services, we will be looking at Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). If you haven’t yet read the previous blog entries about SaaS and PaaS, it’s worth going back to read these first, as much of the thinking associated with these services is also true for IaaS...

Catch Hospitality Group revealed that a point-of-sale (POS) malware incident might have exposed some of its customers' data. The restaurant and catering company launched an investigation and retained the services of a digital forensics firm after detecting unauthorized activity on its payment...

Depending on your familiarity with the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) publications, part one of this blog was intended as either an introduction or a nagging reminder of the ‘Egregious Eleven’ security threats to cloud computing. It also hopefully made some helpful observations about the first six items on the list. Part two now looks at the...

Mexican state-owned petroleum company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) said that it quickly neutralized a digital attack that struck its computer systems. In a statement released on November 11, a spokesperson for Pemex said that the company had quickly responded to digital attacks that struck its systems...