Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a type of multi-factor authentication that verifies a user based on something they have and something they know. The most popular 2FA method currently in use is the token code, which generates an authentication code at fixed intervals. Generally, the user will enter in their username, and their password will be a secret PIN number plus the code generated on the...

Federal law enforcement is investigating claims of an anonymous hacker allegedly infiltrating the personal email account of CIA Director John Brennan earlier this month. According to a report by The New York Post , Brennan’s private AOL account contained sensitive information, including Social Security numbers and personal information of more than a dozen top American intelligence officials, as...

A security firm has observed that hackers associated with the Chinese government attempted to infiltrate U.S. firms even after the United States and China agreed to neither conduct nor support activities that would result in the theft of intellectual property online. On September 25th, at the end of Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to the United States, the White House released a statement...

Defensible and defended are not the same thing. There are characteristics of an environment that make it more or less defensible. While IT and OT environments both have some mixed results, in general, OT environments are more defensible than IT environments. My hypothesis, as a reminder, is that a more defensible network is one in which currently unknown attacks can be more easily thwarted in the...

Consumers today demand options, value and security in order for their loyalty to a brand to stay intact. According to a recent study, nearly half of consumers across generations said they’d be willing to switch retailers if the company offered enhanced payment security measures, and accepted other forms of payment, such as Google Wallet or digital currencies. The 2015 Next Generation of Commerce...

Over the next five years, healthcare providers that fail to make cyber security a strategic priority will potentially lose more than $300 billion of cumulative lifetime revenue, according to a new report by Accenture . The company predicts that one in 13 patients­ – approximately 25 million people – will have their medical and/or personal information stolen from healthcare provider’s digitized...

Earlier this week, as part of Week 3 of National Cyber Security Awareness Month ( NCSAM ), we discussed tips on how we can safely use our mobile devices to access our online accounts while on the go. We now focus on best practices for securely navigating the world of social networking. The Dangers of Indulging in Social Media Like any online account, we should protect our social media channels...

I am looking forward to presenting at BSidesDC this weekend, where I'll be giving a talk titled "Point-of-Sale to Point-of-Fail." In my presentation, I will be discussing the recent rash of retail breaches over the past couple of years and how and why they are occurring, and what retailers can do to protect themselves. The epidemic of mega-retail breaches reveals a number of weaknesses in point-of...

US-CERT published an advisory today regarding the Dridex banking Trojan following a massive resurgence of the malware over the past few weeks as part of a large phishing campaign. Dridex is an evolution of an increasingly sophisticated family of malware focused on stealing banking credentials. This particular strain of bank credential-stealing malware was first seen one year ago and has quickly...

Getting root is fun, and with IoT gadgets, getting root is generally easy. This is why the IoT Hack Lab @ SecTor will be so much fun! If you still reminisce about (or look forward to) the first time you got root on a device, and you will be in Toronto on October 20-21, visit us at the convention centre where we’ll be setup in the expo hall. Expo passes are free with pre-registration using the code...

This week marks Week 3 of National Cyber Security Awareness Month ( NCSAM ). A program sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in cooperation with the National Cyber Security Alliance and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, NCSAM emphasizes our shared responsibility in strengthening the cyber security posture of our workplaces, homes, and digital lives. The...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses 6 new Microsoft Security Bulletins. VERT is actively working on coverage for these bulletins in order to meet our 24-hour SLA and expects to ship ASPL-638 on Wednesday, October 14th. Ease of Use (published exploits) to Risk Table Automated Exploit Easy Moderate Difficult Extremely Difficult No Known Exploit MS15-107 MS15-106 MS15-108 MS15-109 MS15-110 MS15-111 Exposure...

On Tuesday, a new law came into effect that will now require large Australian telecommunication companies to store customers' metadata for two years. Malcolm Turnbull, the current prime minister of Australia, first introduced the bill to the Australian parliament while he was communications minister in an effort to assist the government with national security issues , including investigations into...

In continuing our VERT Vuln School series on SQL Injection vulnerabilities , we’re going to take a look at how attackers can leverage this vulnerability to steal and exfilitrate data. Once we views bob ’s account balance page, we notice that there’s another input-field that might be of interest, the GET variable “cc”. A common way to test for SQL injection vulnerabilities is to insert a single...

I was reading an article in one of my favorite security magazines, and the author mentioned a phrase and included the parenthetical thought “(Google that)”. At first, this seemed comical but a short paragraph later, the author repeated the technique, advising the reader to “Google that” with respect to another thought. This phrase doesn't just pop up in magazine articles, either. About a week ago...

A new report reveals that cyber insurance premiums are on the rise in response to a growing number of high-profile hacks and breaches. According to Timetric's Insight Report: The Future of Cyber Risk Insurance , insurers are raising the deductibles on existing companies' information security policies, whereas others are limiting the amount of coverage they provide. Together, these restraints could...

If you are reading this article, you are probably aware that Security Incident and Event Management solutions, or SIEMs, are powerful systems that allow IT professionals to gather and analyze activity in a company’s infrastructure through the collection and correlation of logs. Though SIEM solutions have a significant amount of built-in content in the form of alerts, rules, reports and dashboards...

In December 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, concerned about privacy implications of the new “instantaneous camera,” penned The Right to Privacy , where they argue for protecting “all persons, whatsoever their position or station, from having matters which they may properly prefer to keep private, made public against their will.” 125 years later, our private information has become currency...

As a regular reader of Tripwire, you are aware that October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month . If you are a business owner, you are aware that every month is Cyber Security Awareness Month. To stretch the point one step further, as an employee, did you know that you are a valuable member of your organization’s Cyber Security Awareness team? A problem with many office environments is that...

The internet is a little bit safer today, and that is something we should all be grateful for. The reason? Security researchers have taken on organised criminal gangs who have been using the notorious Angler Exploit Kit in malware campaigns stealing up to $3 million each month through ransomware attacks. The Angler Exploit Kit is a prime weapon in the arsenal of online criminals, helping them to...