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It's 2AM – Do You Know Who Your Smartphone is Talking to?

Image Our smartphones know everything about us – who our friends are, where we have been, our financial details, our health information and other intimate details of our lives. But can we trust our phones to keep these our personal information secret? One of the biggest security and privacy challenges of smartphones are the very apps...
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The Top 10 Tips for Building an Effective Security Dashboard

Image Today, enterprises must grapple with a panoply of numerous and highly sophisticated threats. In response to this dangerous landscape, it is no wonder that businesses are increasingly turning to security dashboards – a powerful communication vehicle for all information security professionals. An effective security dashboard...
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The Anatomy of a Sakawa Scam

Image The styles associated with Sakawa scammers have been highlighted in previous articles, but today I would like to describe the anatomy of a scam for people to be aware of just how they complete these wicked assaults on our inboxes. This could serve as a guide for Sakawa, but is intended to give insight. Nothing is new here –...
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VERT IoT Hack Lab @ SecTor

Image The one-month countdown is on and I figured it was time for a reminder that Tripwire VERT will be at SecTor in the Expo area running an IoT Hack Lab. If you aren’t considering attending SecTor, you really should be. Even if you don’t want to attend the full conference, there’s an Expo Only admission that is free on their website...
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$1M Bounty Announced for iOS 9 Exploits, Jailbreaks

Image A security firm has announced a one million dollar bounty in reward for anyone who submits exploits and jailbreaks for Apple's iOS 9 mobile operating system. In a blog post published on Monday, Zerodium officially unveiled "The Million Dollar iOS 9 Bug Bounty". "Apple iOS, like all operating system, is often affected by...
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Why Is Healthcare Data So Valuable?

Image Over the last year we've seen the healthcare industry become a motivating target for malicious actors attempting to take advantage of stolen healthcare data. This is a unique sector and completely different from organizations within the retail, financial or any other vertical for that matter. The difference here is when network...
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SYNful Knock: Opening the Door on Industry Ignorance

Image UPDATE 9/23/15: VERT has released a script based on FireEye's nping command to report if a host is affected or not. The script is available on the Tripwire VERT GitHub here. For IP360 customers, a variant of this is available as a custom rule. Please contact Tripwire Support or view the TechNote in TCC for details.  I’ve always...
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Exploring Third Party Risks to Network Security

Image My first few blog entries were written at a time when I had had a couple of prowler incidents at my house, and I wrote about how I installed security counter measures. After all this time, I was out maintaining the motion sensors, and it occurred to me I hadn't taken a look at my network security around the house lately and...
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Seven Years of Cyber Espionage: F-Secure Unveils 'The Dukes'

Image Finnish security and privacy company F-Secure recently published a white paper exploring the activities of 'The Dukes,' a group of hackers that has been targeting Western-based governments think tanks, and other organizations for at least the past seven years. According to F-Secure's research, the group is known primarily for...
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Defensibility: Comparing OT and IT Environments

Image ICS networks have a lot of considerations. Policies and processes can hamper success. But they are far more defensible than IT networks. — Robert M. Lee (@RobertMLee) September 15, 2015 Sometimes a tweet can catch your attention in interesting ways. Robert's use of the term 'defensible' to describe ICS networks got me thinking...
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Banks Allowed to Bring Class Action Suit Against Target for 2013 Breach

Image Earlier this week, a U.S. judge ruled that banks can proceed with a class action suit filed against Target for a data breach that occurred in 2013. A U.S. District Court judge in St. Paul Minnesota affirmed Target's negligence in the data hack, which compromised upwards of 40 million credit cards. This decision enables the $5...
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Cyber Liability Insurance's Data Problem: Mining for Destruction

Image Cyber liability insurance is becoming an increasing necessity for businesses and could easily become a requirement similar to E&O insurance not just for large corporations, but also small- to medium-sized businesses. The challenge, however, is understanding how much coverage, as well as the scope of the coverage organizations...
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Over 21 Million New Types of Malware Created in Q2 2015, Report Finds

Image A recent report by Panda Security revealed a record high in the creation of new malware samples, reaching more than 21 million new threats over the course of just three months. In the second quarter of 2015, the Spanish security firm saw an average of 230,000 new types of malware each day – an increase of 43 percent compared to...
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Russian Hacker Pleads Guilty to Stealing 160M Credit Cards

Image A Russian hacker has pleaded guilty to stealing 160 million credit cards numbers and to attacking several large American companies. On Tuesday, Vladmir Drinkman, 34, admitted in federal court in Camden, New Jersey that he and four other individuals conspired to steal credit card numbers from Heartland Payment Systems Inc., 7...
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Smart Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

Image All too often, I find that vendors discount the risks associated with attack vectors involving cross-site request forgery (CSRF). Naturally, remediation of vulnerabilities involving user-interaction should generally take a back seat to those that are exposed to completely remote/unauthenticated exploitation, but that doesn’t...
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Will Quantum Computers Threaten Modern Cryptography?

Image Modern cryptography, including elliptic curve cryptography, is being used extensively for securing our internet payments, banking transactions, emails and even phone conversations. The majority of today's cryptographic algorithms are based on public-key encryption, which is considered to be secure against attacks from modern...