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Blog

Fine-Tuning Cybersecurity with the ATT&CK Framework

Image This Thursday, March 7, 2019, I’ll be facilitating a Learning Lab titled Fine Tuning Your Cyber-Defense Technologies with the ATT&CK Framework at the 2019 RSA Conference in San Francisco, CA. This will be my fourth time speaking at RSA, and this will be my second time facilitating a learning lab, which I'm happy about. I really...
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5 Insights From the 2018 Verizon DBIR

Image The 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report digs deep into data-driven findings about the state of global cybersecurity across a number of industries that include manufacturing, healthcare, financial and public administration. Verizon’s 11th annual report revealed the trends behind 53,000 cybersecurity incidents and 2,216...
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'Hack the Marine Corps' Bug Bounty Program Announced by DoD

Image The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and HackerOne together announced the creation of a new bug bounty program called "Hack the Marine Corps." Image On 12 August, DoD kicked off its new vulnerability disclosure initiative at DEF CON 26 in Las Vegas, Nevada with a live hacking session....
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Preventing Azure Storage Breaches

Image In my previous post, I took deep dive into AWS S3 permissions to outline the myriad of ways someone could expose their AWS S3 buckets and objects to everyone on the Internet. As I discussed there, the complexity of the S3 permission system is very powerful and provides users with a lot of flexibility; however, it also makes it...
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Preventing Yet Another AWS S3 Storage Breach

Image It seems like everyday you see a new report about a massive data leak caused by someone accidentally exposing files stored in AWS S3 Buckets to everyone on the Internet. Many may remember Verizon’s infamous snafu that leaked data records for six million of their customers due to a misconfiguration in their S3 buckets. Since then...
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New "Triton" Attack Framework Targeting ICS Systems

Image A new attack framework known as "Triton" is targeting industrial control systems (ICS) in an attempt to cause operational disruption and/or physical consequences. FireEye recently detected an incident at a critical infrastructure organization in which an attacker gained access to a Distributed Control System (DCS) that allows...
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Blockchain 101: How This Emerging Technology Works

Image Unless you’ve been living in Slab City or off the grid for a while, you’ve probably heard this year’s omnipresent buzzword ‘blockchain.’ But perhaps you're a bit clueless as to what this newer technology entails. In a recent HSBC survey of 12,000 respondents in 11 countries, 80 percent of people could not explain how blockchain...
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VERT Research: A Security Review of Freelance Web Development

Image Back in June, Robert Hansen posted an interesting write-up[1] on his Smartphone Exec blog about outsourced web development that was returned with multiple embedded PHP backdoors. While this betrayal of trust by a freelance web developer shouldn’t have been surprising, it was, and it prompted Tripwire’s Vulnerability and Exposure...
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An InfoSec Intern Roadmap

Image The college year is rapidly coming to a close, and for many students who are in their early college years, an internship is usually part of the summer plans. With the growing interest in cyber security and infosec, as well as the increased availability of cyber security programs in many higher education establishments, some...
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Here's What You Missed at BSidesSF 2017

Image BSides is known for its collaborative and welcoming environment – something that truly sets it apart from the many other security conferences that are held these days. Today, the conference series has spread all across the world, yet its mission remains the same: to provide an open forum for infosec discussion and debate. Tony...
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Autofill FUD

Image Last week, while browsing various news feeds and websites, I took a scroll through Facebook and saw this video posted from our local morning show, Breakfast Television. They were talking about a Lifehacker post that referenced a github repository belonging to Viljami Kousmanen. The doom and gloom statements of the video are...
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Proactive vs. Reactive Compliance Management

Image Much of my time spent working is focused on performing technology assessments against some kind of baseline. Most of the time, these are specific government or industry standards like HIPAA, NIST, ISO and PCI. But when some of my clients reach out to me about evaluating their environment in light of these standards, it’s often...
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How and Why Small Businesses Are Investing in Cybersecurity

Image Businesses of all sizes are taking note that cyber threats are continually on the rise. No one is safe. In our digital world, you just can't be too cautious when it comes to protecting your data. This is true whether your company employs 200,000 or 10 employees. Cyber criminals have no bounds. They just want to profit off of...
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How & Why is Ransomware Becoming So Popular?

Image Organized cybercrime is a business just like any other legitimate business; they want to have low-risk and efficient operations in order to maximize their profits. The main caveat for criminals is that pesky problem of getting caught and spending the rest of your life in jail. Data is the currency of the 21st century –...