With so many of us frantically learning to juggle our roles as parents, workers and most recently teachers; is it just my wife and I who feel it necessary to monitor the online activity of our teenagers during this lockdown? Sure, there’s rich educational content out there, but it sits amongst social networks, streaming services, gaming consoles and...

At the beginning of March 2020, Fifth Domain reported that Colorado-based aerospace, automotive and industrial parts manufacturer Visser Precision LLC had suffered a DoppelPaymer ransomware infection. Those behind this attack ultimately published information stolen from some of Visser’s customers. Those organizations included defense contractors...

Whether you are reading this from somewhere in the United States or overseas, chances are you are doing it from the comfort of your home. Not because you chose to but because you were asked to do so in order to prevent Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) from spreading any further. If you are a parent, working remotely with your kids at home, you...

The website for a public health department in Illinois went down after the agency suffered a NetWalker ransomware attack. According to local media reports, officials at the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District (C-UPHD) became aware of the ransomware attack on March 10 when the department's website went down. It took the agency, which serves 210...

It’s DBIR season! Put down your pens, stop watching “The Last Dance” and get to reading the key findings of the 13th edition of the annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report! If “experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes,” as Oscar Wilde puts it in The Picture of Dorian Gray, then the more we know about the threats we face and...

Government officials said that a glitch in the State of Illinois' Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program exposed thousands of people's Social Security Numbers (SSNs) and other private data. Jordan Abudayyeh, a spokesperson for Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzer, sent a statement to WBEZ on May 16. In it, she revealed that the Illinois...

On May 1st President Trump signed an Executive Order on “Securing the United States Bulk-Power System.” The order cites foreign adversaries and their increased creation and usage of vulnerabilities against the power grid as the primary driver. In my opinion, perhaps more interesting is the inherent ties to the NERC standards, namely CIP-010 R4 and...

The Cyber Security Body of Knowledge project or CyBOK is a collaborative initiative mobilised in 2017 with an aspiration to “codify the foundational and generally recognized knowledge on Cyber Security.” Version 1.0 of the published output of this consultative exercise was quietly released last year and then more publicly launched in January 2020....

For most practical uses today, a combination of hardening and vulnerability detection is required to secure even the most basic digital environment. In each area it is important to see the progress you’re making in these competencies so that you can improve and build on the work you and your team have done over time. But with so many assets in your...

Malicious actors continue to abuse coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) as a lure to profit off of innocent people. Indeed, Arkose Labs found that 26.5% of all transactions recorded in Q1 2020 were fraud and abuse attempts—a 20% increase over the previous quarter and the highest attack rate ever observed by the security firm's researchers. It's therefore...

April is National Poetry Month, a time when we can celebrate poets and their craft. To join in the celebrations, we at the State of Security asked employees at Tripwire and in the wider infosec community to create and share some of their favorite cybersecurity-related poems with us. Here are some of our favorites from Twitter: https://twitter.com...

There’s no doubt about it, attackers want your credentials more than anything, especially administrative credentials. Why burn a zero-day or risk noisy exploits when you can just log in instead? If you were to break into a house, would you rather throw a brick through a window or use a key to the front door? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDT2qnpvKTk...

We find ourselves in strange times. In response to the ongoing coronavirus epidemic, organizations have swiftly closed their offices and mandated that all employees begin working from home. This development has created security challenges with which many organizations are still grappling. That’s not the only impact COVID-19 has had on security. Social...

Digital attackers used spearphishing campaigns to target oil and gas companies with samples of the AgentTesla infostealer family. In the first campaign spotted by Bitdefender, malicious actors sent out emails that appeared to originate from Egyptian state oil company Engineering for Petroleum and Process Industries (Enppi). Those emails invited...

The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is urging people to no longer use computers with Windows 7 installed for banking or email. A spokesperson for the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a part of GCHQ, encouraged consumers to upgrade their Windows 7 devices. As quoted in a report by Telegraph:We would urge those using the software...

In a previous post, I wrote about my key take-aways from Verizon’s 2019 Payment Security Report. While it's no surprise it was full of interesting and useful data, (Verizon’s yearly Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR) has become required reading.) I was delighted to find an excellent guide on the the 9-5-4 model, a means by which an organization...

Since the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on 25 May 2018, organizations and even private citizens have globally begun to re-assess what it means to ‘take security seriously’ and to better understand the massive difference between security and privacy. What you may not be familiar with is the Network and Information...

Dining, hospitality and entertainment corporation Landry's notified customers of a security incident that might have affected their payment card data. On December 31, Landry's revealed that it first learned of the incident after it detected unauthorized activity on the payment processing systems for...

It’s been another fantastic year on The State of Security blog. With over 350 blogs published from all walks of the security community, we like to think of the blog as more of an industry resource that caters to not only experienced security professionals but also to those who are new to the community. To finish the year off, I wanted to look back on...

Researchers identified more than 100 apps that used a common code package named "Soraka" to perform ad fraud on users' Android devices. The White Ops Threat Intelligence team observed that many of the apps did not have a suspicious reputation at the time of discovery. For instance, the "Best Fortune Explorer" registered no red flags with anti-virus...