‘Tis the season! Winter holidays are upon us, and with it brings the yearly high-volume online shopping season we all know as Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM). With the total US consumer spending estimated at over $717 billion in the 2018 BFCM season, retailers know that the next few weeks are a critical time for their infrastructure. Unfortunately...

In my last blog, I gave you some insight into some of the starting steps for adjusting your security strategies for a SaaS-enabled world. Here, I explore some of the additional adaptions to consider with PaaS. Traditional IT organisations have seen significant gains in adopting Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions. In this blog post, the second in a...

Catch Hospitality Group revealed that a point-of-sale (POS) malware incident might have exposed some of its customers' data. The restaurant and catering company launched an investigation and retained the services of a digital forensics firm after detecting unauthorized activity on its payment...

Depending on your familiarity with the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) publications, part one of this blog was intended as either an introduction or a nagging reminder of the ‘Egregious Eleven’ security threats to cloud computing. It also hopefully made some helpful observations about the first six items on the list. Part two now looks at the...

A convicted Nigerian fraudster earned more than $1 million from a scam that he executed while serving a multi-year prison term. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) launched an investigation into how Hope Olusegun Aroke had pulled off the heist while serving a 24-year sentence at the...

Security researchers have released a new decryption tool that could help victims of Jigsaw ransomware recover their affected files for free. In a blog post announcing the new utility, Emsisoft explained that its decryptor can work against 85 extensions employed by the ransomware family. The security firm also said that they would update their tool...

This is a follow-up/continuation to Part One of the series, where I recommend reading to help provide some background into why we should all consider reviewing our OPSEC (Operational Security), not just those with something to hide. Have you actually thought about how much you are tracked on a daily basis? Think about everything you post on social...

Macy's is notifying customers about a data security incident that might have exposed some of their personal and financial information. The American department chain store said that it first learned of the incident back in mid-October. At that time, Macy's security teams launched an investigation into...

Ransomware hit Louisiana's state government hard yesterday, shutting down multiple websites and email systems after it fell victim for the second time in just a few months to a ransomware attack. In a series of tweets, Louisiana state governor John Bel Edwards revealed that his office had activated a cybersecurity response team in response to an...

As business adoption of cloud services continues to grow at a rapid pace, so does the need to adapt security methods to accommodate the myriad of options. Traditional best practices often still provide a solid foundation from which to build on, but depending upon the technologies you opt to migrate to the cloud, different challenges and solutions...

Digital fraudsters are stealing Microsoft Office 365 administrator credentials as part of a broader phishing campaign targeting organizations. The campaign began with a phishing email that leveraged Microsoft and its Office 365 brand to lull recipients into a false sense of security. This attack email was unique, however, in that it originated from...

According to IBM, 98 percent of companies will be using multiple hybrid cloud environments by 2021. This trend isn’t surprising. There are many benefits to operating in the cloud such as improved productivity, an increase in elasticity and huge cost-savings, to name a few. However, we keep seeing a range of issues when it comes to cloud security....

MITRE’s ATT&CK framework is ever evolving. The latest October update extends enterprise coverage to the cloud and adds a considerable list of cloud-specific adversarial techniques. The cloud has seen phenomenal growth over the past few years, as it offers businesses flexibility, reliability and cost-savings. Along with this growth comes new security...

Digital fraudsters have launched a new phishing campaign whose attack emails instruct recipients to click on a "Keep same password" button. Bleeping Computer observed that the phishing campaign uses attack emails that arrive with "Account Update" as their subject line. The emails list recipients' email addresses and inform them that their account...

Yet another company has been found lacking when it comes to securing its consumers' data. Utah-based InfoTrax Systems provides back-end services to multi-level marketing companies (MLMs) such as dōTERRA, ZanGo, and LifeVantage, providing website portals where individuals can register as a distributor, sign-up new distributors, and place orders for...

Solara Medical Supplies, LLC ("Solara") revealed that it's in the process of notifying individuals potentially affected by a data breach. On November 13, Solara stated that it had learned of a security incident back in late-June 2019. The medical supplies provider said that an unknown actor used a...

One cannot underestimate the effect that the ongoing skills gap is having on organizations’ digital security strategies. Gartner estimates that the global number of unfilled digital security positions is expected to grow to 1.5 million by 2020. Reflecting this trend, more than 70 percent of organizations feel that hiring skilled infosec personnel...

How many times has a vendor released a critical cybersecurity patch for an operating system that is in “end of life” (EOL), or the lifecycle period where the vendor no longer issues patches for bug fixes, operational improvements and cybersecurity fixes free of charge? So if a vendor takes the time and resources to break this freeze and issue a patch...

Researchers have detected a new ransomware family they're calling "PureLocker" which attackers are using to target enterprises' production servers. Intezer detected a sample of the ransomware masquerading as the Crypto++ C++ cryptography library. In their analysis of the sample, they noticed something unusual when they saw that alleged library...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s November 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-859 on Wednesday, November 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-1429 A vulnerability in the scripting engine in Internet Explorer can lead to code execution. The attacker could...