Tripwire recently hosted a webcast entitled, “ PCI Breach Scenarios and the Cyber Threat Landscape with Brian Honan: Real World Cyber Attacks and Protecting Credit Card Data .” For our presentation, Brian Honan (CISM, CGEIT, CRISC), an information systems and cybersecurity specialist and a member of the Advisory Group on Internet Security to Europol’s Cyber Crime Centre (EC3) on breach...

Uber credentials of thousands of users were spotted for sale on an underground marketplace for as low as $1 per stolen username and password. According to a report by Ars Technica , the logins are being offered by two separate vendors on AlphaBay – an online black market operating on the Tor network. Source: Ars Technica One seller reported more than 100 Uber accounts had already been purchased...

I know that I am not the target demographic for CSI: Cyber. Just as I assume anyone who does anything remotely related to law enforcement isn't interested in watching a cop procedural, I don't generally watch shows that feature “hackers” – not just because my perspective might make the viewing experience frustrating, but because “hacking” is incredibly boring to watch and I'm probably not going to...

The popular coding website GitHub was hit with a massive denial-of-service (DDoS) attack late Thursday night, with some users experiencing intermittent service outages. According to security researcher and blogger Anthr@x, the ongoing attack, which intensified on and off for more than 24 hours, appeared to originate from the Chinese web services company Baidu: “A certain device at the border of...

When I was about 10 years old, I read a book about Kevin Mitnick, Pengo and Robert Morris. While their exploits seemed very interesting, each story ended in jail time or at the very least, derailment of career goals. My unsophisticated Internet searching circa the early 2000s led me to the same conclusion. Hacking was a neat skill to have but the price was too high. It was many years later when I...

A new type of ransomware is encrypting victims’ video game files in addition to targeting other documents stored on their computers. According to Bleeping Computer , the ransomware strain, dubbed “TeslaCrypt,” was first discovered by Fabian Wosar of Emsisoft earlier this year. TeslaCrypt mimics other ransomware, including CryptoLocker, in that it uses AES encryption to lock victims’ files, at...

If you've recently found your web browsing plagued by pornographic pop-ups and irritating adverts, there might be a simple - but dangerous - explanation. Maybe hackers have hijacked your internet router ? Security researchers at Ara Labs have warned of an active campaign which has seen attackers changing DNS settings on routers, causing unauthorised ads and adult content to appear on virtually all...

Banks regularly undergo mandatory stress tests. These tests are clearly defined , and the results are used to determine how well each bank can maneuver through an economic calamity. If we apply the basic blueprint of a financial stress test to an IT infrastructure, we can loosely define it as: “An analysis conducted under unfavorable scenarios which are designed to determine whether an IT...

While I work in security, when it’s quitting time, I’m a gamer through and through. My home is littered with consoles from Sega Genesis and NES to PS3 and Xbox One. My last two PC purchases have been strictly gaming machines, and I even bought a game pad for my iPhone because I enjoy playing (and streaming) Asphalt 8. This year, I’ve casually streamed a few times because I took part in Extra Life...

Ransomware has disabled a New Jersey school district’s computer systems, with the attackers demanding hundreds of Bitcoins as ransom to restore access to files seized in the attack. In a post published to the district’s website , officials at Swedesboro-Woolwich School District explain that the incident, which occurred on March 22 nd , thus far indicates no signs of a data breach. “The files...

Over the past decade, the role of the Internet has moved beyond just email and websites viewable from a small window on a heavy desktop to something we now carry with us in our bags, pockets and strapped to our wrists. It is now a driving force of the world economy and is creeping its way into every aspect of our lives. For better or worse, we are now all connected. Individuals, as well as...

One could argue that cybersecurity is by far the most important Homeland Security, National Security and Public safety issue of our time. In the age of terror specifically, groups like ISIS, Al Shabaab and AQAP have managed to use the Internet to recruit and successfully spread their message with little to no counter narrative of merit. Cybersecurity has been rightfully picked up and vocalized as...

A vulnerability in Cisco IP phones could allow unauthenticated attackers to remotely listen in on the phones’ audio streams. According to an advisory Cisco published on its website, the vulnerability (CVE-2015-0670) results from improper authentication in the default configuration of certain Cisco IP phones. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted XML request to the...

Earlier this month, Tripwire announced Computer Criminals Brought to Justice , a continuation of its 10 Notorious Computer Criminals Brought to Justice series, by investigating the story of a young man who was recently arrested in connection with the 2014 hack of the U.S. Department of Defense. This week, we continue our series with Aleksei Shushliannikov, a hacker who is responsible for having...

The printf() family of functions (printf(), fprintf(), sprintf(), etc.) are surprisingly powerful and, if not properly used, can expose a class of vulnerabilities called format string attacks. These attacks can be very bad because with a well-crafted format string, an attacker could write an arbitrary value into an arbitrary memory location. This could allow the attacker to do things like hijack...

Last week, the Internet fell over itself to report on a botnet allegedly comprised of 100,000 smart devices. Things. The Internet of Things had finally attacked! While it's inarguable that, at some point, these devices will be compromised, corrupted and otherwise made to serve the pernicious purposes of attackers, deeper technical analysis points out that there's plenty of reason to be skeptical...

Another serious privacy vulnerability has been found on Facebook, which could have put at risk the private photos of millions of users. The problem lies in Facebook Photo Sync, an opt-in feature that the social network introduced in late 2012, which meant any photos you took on your iPhone or Android device would automatically sync up with your Facebook account. The good news is that the feature...

A recent study found that more than 2,000 apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store are still vulnerable to FREAK – a widespread security flaw discovered earlier this month. Attackers exploiting the vulnerability can intercept HTTPS connections between vulnerable users and servers, thus forcing them to use weakened encryption, which can then be broken or manipulated to steal sensitive data...

Vulnerability Description The CVE-2015-0291 vulnerability introduces the possibility of a denial of service attack against a system running OpenSSL 1.0.2. If a malicious client connects to an OpenSSL server and the server requests a certificate from the malicious client, the malicious client can return a malformed cert that may trigger a NULL pointer dereference causing software reliability...

On Monday, the OpenSSL project team announced new releases that would be available today to fix security issues in OpenSSL that have been discovered as part of a major security audit and code refactoring project. When this announcement hit on Monday, there was a general panic in the IT and security community as it was mentioned vulnerabilities with a high severity were being patched, leading many...