Agencies of the US Government have issued a joint warning that hackers have revealed their capability to gain full system access to industrial control systems that might help enemy states sabotage critical infrastructure. In a joint cybersecurity advisory issued by the Department of Energy, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA...

In this episode, Jarell Oshodi, Deputy Chief Privacy Officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, discusses the role of privacy in the cybersecurity field. As an attorney, she brings a unique perspective to the conversation on how we can work better with our privacy officers. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6I9ixrw6IDnWdnHKiNU3e7...

What does the term “Legacy Systems” mean to you? What image does it conjure up?Well, the word “legacy” can mean “something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past.” For example, the “legacy of the ancient philosophers”, or perhaps “legacy of ancient IT professionals.” A legacy is something that is passed from one...

To put the impact of cybercrime into perspective, let’s examine some important, and startling, numbers: Data breach costs increased from $3.86 million to $4.24 million in 2021. Every 39 seconds, there is an attack. About 90% of healthcare organizations have fallen victim to at least one breach within the past three years. The bottom line?...

Many UK business and technology executives aren’t hopeful about their digital security going into 2022. In a survey of 3,600 business and technology executives, of which 257 were from the UK, PwC learned that a majority (61%) of respondents expected to see an increase in reportable ransomware attacks next year. An even greater proportion (64%) of UK...

What is this AvosLocker thing I’ve heard about? AvosLocker is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gang that first appeared in mid-2021. It has since become notorious for its attacks targeting critical infrastructure in the United States, including the sectors of financial services, critical manufacturing, and government facilities. In March 2022, the...

What is EDoS? Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) is a cybersecurity threat targeting cloud environments. EDoS attacks exploit the elasticity of clouds, particularly auto-scaling capabilities, to inflate the billing of a cloud user until the account reaches bankruptcy or large-scale service withdrawal. EDoS attacks exploit the cloud’s...

Requirements for reporting cybersecurity incidents to some regulatory or government authority are not new, but there has always been a large amount of inconsistency, globally, in exactly what the requirements are. More recently, there’s been a growing trend across government and regulatory bodies in the United States towards shorter timeframes for...

Endpoint devices played a big part in malware and ransomware attacks in 2021. According to a study covered by Help Net Security, security researchers detected more malware and ransomware endpoint infections in the first nine months of the year than they did for all of 2020. Attack scripts leveraging PowerSploit, PowerWare, and other tools were...

What is this Ragnar Locker thing I’ve heard about? Ragnar Locker is a family of ransomware, which first came to prominence in early 2020 when it became notorious for hitting large organisations, attempting to extort large amounts of cryptocurrency from its victims. So just your bunch of cybercriminals then? Yes, although on their underground...

There has been a lot of talk about cyber weapons and the cyber dimension of global politics after the NotPetya and WannaCry attacks of 2017 and the Stuxnet worm, first discovered in 2010, when it was used to attack the control mechanisms of Iran’s uranium enriching centrifuges. Professor Ciaran Martin CB, former CEO of the UK National Cyber...

All of us at Tripwire’s Vulnerability Exposure and Research Team (VERT) are constantly looking out for interesting stories and developments in the infosec world. Here’s what cybersecurity news stood out to us during the week of February 28, 2022. I’ve also included some comments on these stories. High-Severity Flaws Discovered in Schneider, GE...