Security products are not simple e-commerce websites. They are enterprise software products that enable pivotal business goals for customers. Yet as complexity grows, ease of use and other aspects of user experience (UX) can be overlooked and de-prioritized to make way for more features. But as Haroon Meer of Thinkst was quoted in CSO Online: "It...

You can hack a toaster, a TV and a car... but a mainframe? Isn’t everything on Windows and Linux? Who still uses mainframes (specifically IBM’s flagship System Z running Z/OS)? They’re obsolete, specialized and cumbersome, just like the stuff that runs on them: TSO, JES, Walker, CICS, VTAM, MVS, IMS. And they’re pretty much sequestered from all the...

After just a few hours with a shiny new Nexus 5X running the latest version of Android 6.0 AKA “Marshmallow” release, a few behaviors have already caught my attention as welcomed security and privacy changes for the user-experience. (A few other items have caught my interest as points of potential vulnerability, but I’ll leave that for another day.)...

The Bank of England, in partnership with some of the biggest US Banks, will take part in an extensive cyber-attack simulation, as officials examine the financial industry’s readiness in the event of a security breach on its systems. The exercise, known as Operation Resilient Shield, is intended to be the most sophisticated test of communications and...

British Gas has emailed approximately 2,200 customers urging them to change their passwords after their login credentials were posted online. According to The Guardian, the account details were posted to the online text-sharing service Pastebin and, if accessed, could have allowed an attacker to view the names, addresses, and previous energy bills...

My last on-topic post pontificated about the dangers and surprise of letting third parties into your house or codebase, where I discussed the addition of a TV DVR system to my home network. In this post, I'm going to go into some details about what I found on the network for the pure pleasure of it – no pontificating about anything, just the fun of...

TalkTalk, a UK telecommunications company, is an investigating a data breach that might have compromised the personal information of as many as four million customers. On Friday, Trista Harrison, Managing Director (Consumer) of TalkTalk, posted an update on the company's website about the incident: "We are very sorry to tell you that yesterday a...

Now in its 18th year, The Global State of Information Security® Survey 2016 – a worldwide survey by CIO, CSO and PwC – observes a fundamental shift in the way business leaders are responding to today’s biggest security challenges. Recognizing the rising cyber risks, a growing number of boards and executives are taking action to improve their...

In the past few years, it has become abundantly clear that enterprises leveraging threat intelligence have a distinct advantage in protecting their critical infrastructure. With CSOs and security teams overwhelmed by massive amounts of threat data, organizations are doing everything they can to collect, analyze and evaluate as much data as they can,...

A security firm has observed that hackers associated with the Chinese government attempted to infiltrate U.S. firms even after the United States and China agreed to neither conduct nor support activities that would result in the theft of intellectual property online. On September 25th, at the end of Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to the United...

Over the next five years, healthcare providers that fail to make cyber security a strategic priority will potentially lose more than $300 billion of cumulative lifetime revenue, according to a new report by Accenture. The company predicts that one in 13 patients­ – approximately 25 million people – will have their medical and/or personal information...

Earlier this week, as part of Week 3 of National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM), we discussed tips on how we can safely use our mobile devices to access our online accounts while on the go. We now focus on best practices for securely navigating the world of social networking. The Dangers of Indulging in Social Media Like any online account...

I am looking forward to presenting at BSidesDC this weekend, where I'll be giving a talk titled "Point-of-Sale to Point-of-Fail." In my presentation, I will be discussing the recent rash of retail breaches over the past couple of years and how and why they are occurring, and what retailers can do to protect themselves. The epidemic of mega-retail...

Endpoints are more important than ever in today's connected world. As business increases, most organizations find it necessary to connect a variety of new devices to their networks to keep up with the demands of competing in a global economy. Each of these endpoint nodes may be devices with which employees interact on an ongoing basis, but they...

Securing the Internet of Things (IoT) has become increasingly difficult. Devices are often shipped with out-of-date operating systems and unmaintained code, which is littered with vulnerabilities. To add to the frustration, traditional security tools cannot be installed on many of these devices. For many users, especially home and SMBs, there are...

With a continued interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS) as a cloud model, concerns about SaaS security are also growing. Total cost of ownership (TCO) used to be the most frequently cited roadblock among potential SaaS customers. But as cloud networks become more frequently used for strategic and mission-critical business applications, security now...

Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, the RSA Conference creates invaluable opportunities for attendees to connect with top security leaders, discover innovative technologies and deliberate the industry’s most pressing issues. With over 30,000 attendees, this annual event continues to help drive the information security agenda worldwide, and...

A hospital located in Southern California has paid $17,000 for the restoration of its system following a ransomware attack. News first broke last week about how staff at the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center began noticing issues in the hospital's IT system in early February. The Center decided to temporarily suspend its computer system, which...

There’s so much doom and gloom in the security industry because of ransomware. And yet, occasional success stories inspire us to fight back. Last time we wrote about ten ransomware recovery cases. New ransom Trojan variants have surfaced ever since, including the one dubbed HydraCrypt. The operators of TeslaCrypt campaign pulled off defiant attacks...

Research reveals that attackers exploited a vulnerability that allowed them to drain $103,000 out of password-protected Bitcoin wallets. Security researcher Ryan Castellucci first presented on the vulnerability at DEF CON, one of Tripwire's top 10 conferences in information security. The flaw affects...