How many internet-connected devices do you own? If you took a quick inventory around your house, you may be surprised at exactly how many there are. Have you ever wondered how they all communicate, not only with each other, but with the internet as well? This is, in part the result of technology known as IP addressing. What is an IP address? An IP (Internet Protocol) address is your computer's...

The US healthcare sector continues to be aggressively targeted by ransomware operators. Royal and BlackCat are two of the more recent – and highly sophisticated – ransomware threats. These two new flavors of ransomware pose serious potential impacts on the healthcare sector, but there are appropriate mitigation and defense strategies that organizations can take to protect against them. What is...

Bad enough for your company to be held to ransom after a cyber attack. Worse still to then have one of your own employees exploit the attack in an attempt to steal the ransom for themselves. That's the situation gene and cell therapy firm Oxford BioMedica found itself in. On 27 February 2018, the Oxford-based firm discovered that it had suffered a cyber attack after it received a ransom demand...

Back in 2015, we published an article about the third party risks that are introduced into a home network. Now, eight years later, it is a good time to revisit the landscape of the home network. If we think about the technology in most homes in 2015, it was fairly sparse, consisting only of a router with an internet connection. The speed of most home internet connections was well below 100Mbps. It...

Polymorphic and metamorphic malware constantly changes itself in order to avoid detection and persistently remain on the system. This adaptive behavior is the main distinctive attribute of these types of malware, which is also why they are harder to detect; it is also why they pose a great threat to systems. On the surface, the functionality of this sort of changing and mutating malware appears...

Cybersecurity awareness is on the rise as more organizations adopt security awareness training programs. Why the hype? In several recent reports, we break down our findings around why SAT is on the rise—and why companies need it now more than ever. Employees are discovering cyberattacks the hard way Recent study by Fortra's Terranova Security in collaboration with Ipsos revealed employees'...

This one took a bit longer to read than most of the books we review, but that’s entirely on me… everyone else finished it a while ago. This time around, we’re looking at How to Hack Like a Legend: Breaking Windows by Sparc Flow. The No Starch Press page says that the book is “packed with interesting tricks, ingenious tips, and links to useful resources to give you a fast-paced, hands-on guide to...

I’m going to jump on board the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) bandwagon in this blog and talk about why I’m excited about some of the prospects for this being applied to the compliance and file integrity monitoring data that Tripwire has been specialising in for many years. An Analyst’s Ally A problem faced by many security teams is understanding all the signal data collected...

The Tripwire Vulnerability Exposure and Research Team (VERT) keeps its finger on the cybersecurity pulse. Check out some of the stories that stood out for us recently: Multiple Vulnerabilities in Netgear Routers Netgear RAX30 routers are subject to multiple vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities could be chained together to achieve an authentication bypass and code execution. It is advised that...

The Artificial intelligence (AI) based language model, ChatGPT, has gained a lot of attention recently, and rightfully so. It is arguably the most widely popular technical innovation since the introduction of the now ubiquitous smart speakers in our homes that enable us to call out a question and receive an instant answer. But what is it, and why is it relevant to cyber security and data...

Gabrielle is a security engineer. She deploys tools to scan for threats and vulnerabilities, read logs, and manage the security risks for her company, but is all that data really helping? Sometimes, it seems like she works in a noise factory instead of a SOC. The cacophony of all the log and event data and vulnerability scans are pouring into the SIEM, and it’s Gabrielle’s job to listen to the...

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), FBI, and others have issued a joint alert, advising organisations of the steps they should take to mitigate the threat posed by BianLian ransomware attacks. BianLian, which has been targeting different industry sectors since June 2022, is a ransomware developer, deployer and data extortion group which has predominantly targeted...

‘A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for,’ said Dr. Grace Hopper, Rear Admiral of the US Navy and a computer pioneer. As soon as the ship leaves the harbor, or even the dock, there are risks. Depending on conditions and purposes, the ship's crew might decide they are negligible, that they can be recovered from, or that the potential rewards are worth the risk. The same...

While there are an estimated 30,000 daily cyber attacks on business websites, there are roughly ten times as many attacks against social media accounts every single day, equating to roughly 1.4 billion accounts every month. Social media attacks and scams have become pervasive problems, with threat actors finding innovative new ways to deceive users and steal their information. While social media...

Zero Trust seems to no longer command the volume of articles that once set it up as a trend that promised a bright new future for security. This is in part because security is a journey. Rushed implementations and low returns often result in burnout with new technology, and generally the real work happens in the quiet stages when analysts and consultants are putting together the tooling and...

In our webinar, Insights for Navigating PCI DSS 4.0 Milestones, we discuss some of the challenges organizations face as they try to comprehend the new requirements of PCI DSS 4.0. One of the questions we commonly hear is, “How do we prepare for PCI 4.0 deadlines while still maintaining day-to-day operations?” The discussion involved David Bruce, our Head of Product Management, and guest experts...

2023 started much the same as the year before, with state legislatures producing an impressive list of privacy-related bills in the U.S. Twenty-three states introduced comprehensive privacy legislation, with many more targeted privacy bills being considered as well. Iowa's governor signed the sixth comprehensive privacy law to close out the quarter. Internationally, things started rather slowly —...

A Social engineering attack is the process of exploiting weaknesses in human psychology to manipulate and persuade others to perform in a way that is harmful. Prior to the digital age, criminals would carry out these attacks in person, in what was known as a confidence game. The perpetrators were referred to a “con men”, regardless of their gender. In the cybersecurity realm, these attacks are...

Here at The State of Security, we cover everything from breaking stories about new cyberthreats to step-by-step guides on passing your next compliance audit. But today we’d like to offer a straight-forward roundup of Fortra's Tripwire product suite. Get to know the basics of Tripwire’s core solutions for file integrity monitoring (FIM), security configuration management (SCM), vulnerability...

What is Akira? Akira is a new family of ransomware, first used in cybercrime attacks in March 2023. Akira? Haven't we heard of that before? Maybe you're thinking of the cyberpunk Manga comic books and movie that came out in the 1980s. Or perhaps you're thinking of an unrelated ransomware of the same name which emerged in 2017. Maybe that's it. So what's the scoop with the new Akira ransomware...