If you had asked 10 year old Tyler what he wanted to be when he grew up, the answer would have been a very enthusiastic, “Teacher!” Over time, however, that desire lessened as my fascination with technology grew. I ultimately ended up attending Fanshawe College to study Computer Systems Technology. I never fully abandoned that desire to teach,...

Earlier this month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) published a joint report entitled “Cyber Planning Response and Recovery Study” (CYPRES) in partnership with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and eight of its Regional Entities (REs) in order to review the methods for responding to a cybersecurity event. The...

Scammers are impersonating governmental departments within the State of Texas to send out fake Requests For Quotations (RFQs). On September 21, Abnormal Security revealed that it had spotted an attack email that impersonated the Texas Department of State Health Services. Scammers used spoofing techniques to camouflage the sender address as an...

A patient died after being redirected to another medical facility as the result of a German hospital having suffered a ransomware infection. On September 17, the Associated Press reported that a woman who needed urgent medical attention died after being transferred from University Hospital of...

In a fast-changing world, stopping to assess your success isn’t really an option anymore. It is increasingly important that security teams are constantly proving their worth and tracking their successes with a view to constantly improving so as to not to get caught behind the times and therefore exposed. How to Make Sure You’ve Got the Momentum You...

The Office of Management at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) disclosed a security incident involving the personal data of 46,000 veterans. The VA detailed the data breach in a statement published on its website on September 14. According to this press release, the VA's Financial Services...

Security configuration management (SCM) can help organizations do much more than just harden their attack surfaces against intrusions. This fundamental control also has the ability to make your audits flow more smoothly. Indeed, it allows organizations to pull reports from any point in time and demonstrate how their configuration changes and...

A phishing attack used real-time validation against an organization's Active Directory in order to steal users' Office 365 credentials. According to Armorblox, the phishing attack targeted an executive working at an American brand that was named one of the world's Top 50 most innovative companies for 2019 on a Friday evening. The email used spoofing...

The U.S. Department of Defense released the first version of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) back on January 31, 2020. Since that time, there has been a flurry of different industry experts working towards helping clients understand and prepare for getting certified under CMMC. But what is it? The Cybersecurity Maturity Model...

So far, there has not been a perfect solution to ridding the world of software and hardware weaknesses. Keeping up-to-date with which weaknesses have are most common and impactful can be a daunting task. Thankfully, a list has been made to do just that the Common Weakness Enumeration Top 25 (CWE). The CWE Top 25 is a community-developed list of the...

Security researchers at Slovak security firm ESET have discovered a new family of malware that they say has been using a variety of techniques to steal cryptocurrency from unsuspecting users since at least December 2018. The malware, which has been named KryptoCibule, uses a variety of legitimate technology - including Tor and the Transmission...

All of us know what a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) does from afar. A CISO upholds the organization’s overall security by overseeing the operations of the IS practice, the IT security department and related staff. In this capacity, those who become a CISO attain the highest paying job in information security, as it carries the associated...

Researchers observed that the Emotet gang had incorporated a new "Red Dawn" template into their weaponized Word Documents delivered to users. Until recently, Emotet's handlers had been targeting users with a iOS-themed document template for their malicious Word documents. The template explained that a sender had created the document on iOS, and it...

La mayoría de los clientes tienen en mente "ahorrar dinero" al pasarse a la nube. El "cloud deployment" de Google y encabezados de blogs y sitios de noticias están dominados por artículos positivos que ofrecen evidencia anecdótica de cómo la nube puede ahorrar dinero a los clientes. Más comúnmente, los consultores en la nube o los proveedores de la...

There is a story from years ago about a warehouse network of computers that was separated from the main network. Those machines were running older OSes. But since they weren't connected to the company network, didn't hold company data, and only ran the warehouse machines, they were deemed secure. One day, the sysadmin noticed that all of those...

Gone are the days when security teams could focus all of their efforts on keeping attackers out of the network. There’s no inside or outside anymore. The modern network is porous; it allows greater numbers and types of devices to connect to it from all over the world. This characteristic might serve organizations’ evolving business needs as they...

Accidents or mistakes are bound to happen. Even if healthcare providers and business associates are compliant to HIPAA Standards, there is always a possibility of unintentional or accidental disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI). Accidental disclosure of PHI includes sending an email to the wrong recipient and an employee accidentally...

Experian South Africa announced that it's in the process of investigating a security incident involving a fraudulent data inquiry. On August 19, the South African branch of the consumer credit reporting agency said in a web statement that a South African individual purporting to represent a...

Security researchers released a decryption tool that enables victims of WannaRen ransomware to recover their files for free. On August 19, Bitdefender announced that it had made a WannaRen decryption utility publicly available for download. The security firm urged victims of this ransomware to save the decryptor somewhere on their computer after...

Malicious actors launched credential stuffing attacks that targeted Canada's GCKey service and Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) accounts. On August 15, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat announced that the Government of Canada was in the process of responding to a series of credential stuffing...