TikTok, the popular video posting app, has come under increased scrutiny. Recently, two lawsuits filed against the platform accused TikTok of privacy violations. According to a report from Reuters, a plaintiff accused TikTok of creating an account without her knowledge or consent in one lawsuit filed in California. The lawsuit accused TikTok of...

This is the third and last blog I will write for State of Security on the topic of the groundbreaking, maverick TV series ‘Mr Robot.’ As this week, the credits rolled one final time on the show's mind bending and utterly bizarre (even by its own standards) conclusion. A lot has changed since the first season aired, both for cybersecurity and the...

A newly discovered PayPal phishing scam attempts to steal much more than just a user's login credentials for the online payments service. Slovakian security firm ESET observed that the scam began by targeting users with an attack email warning them of unusual activity involving their account. The email urged recipients to click on an embedded link...

That phrase came to me many years ago when working on a multi-million pound IT outsourcing deal. We were up to our necks in the finer points of platform-wide and stack-deep security, and I realised we were fighting amongst ourselves more than challenging the final competing vendors. This infighting was partly due to the large amount of IT staff in...

A list of some of the worst passwords for 2019 revealed that users continue to turn to "123456" above all of the other ill-advised combinations. In total, TeamsID published 50 of the worst passwords used during the past year. The top 15 of these are presented below: 123456 123456789 qwerty password 1234567 12345678 12345 iloveyou 111111 ...

As a regular reader of Tripwire, you are aware that October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Way back in 2015, when the world was an entirely different place, I contributed an article that offered some tips for protecting yourself. Those tips are still relevant: Password management. This should be very old news, but the majority of...

Fall is officially here, and that can only mean that SecTor is right around the corner! All summer long, I’ve been planning and prepping new ideas for this year’s IoT Hack Lab and training session. With just a few weeks to go until the conference kicks off, I’m more than a little excited about the new hacks we’ll be demonstrating, dissecting and...

Samples of a new malware family called "Divergent" are using both NodeJS and WinDivert in a series of fileless attack campaigns. Cisco Talos didn't identify the exact delivery method for Divergent. Even so, its researchers observed that the samples they analyzed staged and stored configuration date on the registry like other fileless malware. They...

Security researchers have determined that over 12,000 variants of the WannaCry ransomware family are preying upon users in the wild. Sophos attributed this rise of variants to threat actors taking the original 2017 WannaCry binary and modifying it to suit their needs. These versions have subsequently produced numerous infection attempts. In August...

After an extended delay, we’ve finally reviewed our next book for #TripwireBookClub. This time around, we looked at Practical Binary Analysis written by Dennis Andriesse and published by No Starch Press. This book is a deep dive into binary analysis, and I think that it’s best just to quote the opening paragraph of the book’s preface: “Binary analysis...

The COBALT DICKENS threat group stayed busy over the summer by launching a new global phishing operation targeting universities. In July and August 2019, Secureworks' Counter Threat Unit (CTU) researchers observed COBALT DICKENS using compromised university resources to send out library-themed phishing emails. These emails differed from those used...

The cost of a breach is on the rise. A recent report from IBM revealed that the average cost of a data breach had risen 12 percent over the past five years to $3.92 million per incident on average. Additionally, this publication uncovered that data breaches originating from malicious digital attacks were both the most common and the most expensive...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s September 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-849 on Wednesday, September 11th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-1214 An elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) driver can allow an...

Changing consumer demands posed a serious challenge to the IT industry; it pushed firms to brainstorm about quick product delivery. This demand eventually gave rise to the demand for collaboration between Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams, welcoming the DevOps trend. As a result, everything started progressing with increased development,...

For years, ransomware actors have developed new families and attack campaigns in increasing frequency and numbers. Such activity peaked in 2017 but then fell in tandem with cryptocurrency miners’ rise. This development was short-lived, however. Between Q4 2018 and Q1 2019, Malwarebytes observed a 195 percent increase in ransomware detections...

Google has decided to expand the scope of one of its bug bounty programs as well as launch another security rewards initiative. On 29 August, Android Security & Privacy team members Adam Bacchus, Sebastian Porst, and Patrick Mutchler announced that the Google Play Security Reward Program (GPSRP) will...

Over the years, PayPal has earned a reputation for being a secure and easy way to send and receive money. However, no payment system is entirely immune to scams, and cybercriminals often exploit these platforms due to their widespread popularity and trust among users. PayPal is the most widely used online payment system in the US, making it a...

What is cyber resilience? If you search the definition within the Oxford Dictionary, resilience alone is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” If you narrow the definition down to cyber resilience, it shifts to maintaining vs recovery. As noted on Wikipedia, it becomes “the ability to provide and maintain an...

It may not be the most efficient way to steal data from an organisation, let alone the most practical, but researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have once again detailed an imaginative way to exfiltrate information from an air-gapped computer. And this time they haven't done it by listening to a PC's fan, or watching the blinking LED lights...

Energy efficiency and availability is a major concern for all countries and governments. The electric grid is a vital sector, and any malfunctions will create ripple effects on any nation’s economy. As the grid is heavily dependent on cyber-enabled technologies and a vast chain of suppliers, contractors, and partners, the ability to safeguard the...