During the late 1990s, security professionals were using information assurance tools in concert with vulnerability scanners to detect and remove vulnerabilities from the systems for which they are responsible. There’s just one problem – each security vendor has its own database with little to no crossover. Each vendor’s tool generates its own alert...

Security culture matters to executives, but these individuals are struggling to implement it. In a November 2019 study commissioned by KnowBe4, 94% of individuals with managerial duties or higher in security or risk management said that security culture was important for their organization’s success. Even so, Security Magazine shared that 92% of...

The 2020 Cost of Data Breach report from IBM and the Ponemon is out. It provides a detailed analysis of causes, costs and controls that appeared in their sampling of data breaches. The report is full of data, and the website allows you to interact with its information so that you can do your own analysis and/or dig into aspects relevant to you and...

Security configuration management (SCM) can help organizations do much more than just harden their attack surfaces against intrusions. This fundamental control also has the ability to make your audits flow more smoothly. Indeed, it allows organizations to pull reports from any point in time and demonstrate how their configuration changes and...

The U.S. Department of Defense released the first version of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) back on January 31, 2020. Since that time, there has been a flurry of different industry experts working towards helping clients understand and prepare for getting certified under CMMC. But what is it? The Cybersecurity Maturity Model...

Running the IoT Hack Lab at SecTor has been a highlight of my year since 2015. Although we won’t be back this year to fill our corner of the MTCC, I’m happy to be teaching A Beginner’s Guide to Reversing with Ghidra as part of the SecTor 2020 virtual conference October 19-20. Ghidra is an advanced software reverse engineering suite developed by NSA...

So far, there has not been a perfect solution to ridding the world of software and hardware weaknesses. Keeping up-to-date with which weaknesses have are most common and impactful can be a daunting task. Thankfully, a list has been made to do just that the Common Weakness Enumeration Top 25 (CWE). The CWE Top 25 is a community-developed list of the...

Security configuration management (SCM) involves maintaining a secure baseline configuration for an organization’s systems and monitoring those assets for deviations from that baseline. This fundamental control pairs well with other elements of an organization’s security strategy. As such, SCM enables security teams to harden their organization’s...

During the previous weeks, we provided a thorough overview of the EU NIS Directive, focusing on the Operators of Essential Systems (OES), the Digital Service Providers (DSP) and the compliance frameworks. Our review of the EU cybersecurity policy and strategy would be incomplete without mentioning the EU Cybersecurity Act. On 27 June, the European...

North Korea's BeagleBoyz team resumed its efforts to target banks worldwide with fraudulent money transfers and ATM cash outs. On August 26, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published Alert (AA20-239A) in coordination with the Department of the Treasury (Treasury), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Cyber...

There is a story from years ago about a warehouse network of computers that was separated from the main network. Those machines were running older OSes. But since they weren't connected to the company network, didn't hold company data, and only ran the warehouse machines, they were deemed secure. One day, the sysadmin noticed that all of those...

Gone are the days when security teams could focus all of their efforts on keeping attackers out of the network. There’s no inside or outside anymore. The modern network is porous; it allows greater numbers and types of devices to connect to it from all over the world. This characteristic might serve organizations’ evolving business needs as they...

Accidents or mistakes are bound to happen. Even if healthcare providers and business associates are compliant to HIPAA Standards, there is always a possibility of unintentional or accidental disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI). Accidental disclosure of PHI includes sending an email to the wrong recipient and an employee accidentally...

A friend of mine received an interesting piece of snail mail the other day. It was one of those inheritance scam letters that usually arrive in E-Mail. An image of the letter is shown below: In summary, the author, a high-ranking bank official, has an unclaimed inheritance that he is willing to split...

Digital attackers can compromise a system in a matter of minutes. But it generally takes organizations much longer to figure out that anything has happened. In its 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), for instance, Verizon Enterprise found that more than half of large organizations took days or even months to detect a security incident....

Information security should be at the heart of every system launched. In accordance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), an information technology system is granted an Authority to Operate (ATO) after passing a risk-based cybersecurity assessment.The ATO ProblemHowever, the ATO process can pose several challenges to the modern...

Technology and cyber systems have become essential components of modern society. Despite the benefit of cyber technologies, insecurities arise. These could affect all systems and infrastructures. More than that, the threat of a cyberattack could very well have a transnational component and effect as worldwide systems become increasingly...

In its Vision 2030 development plan, Saudi Arabia included a National Transformation Program whose purpose is to diversify the Kingdom’s income away from the oil industry. One of the core tenets of that program is to enable the growth of the private sector by developing the digital economy. Specifically, Saudi Arabia set out its intention to increase...

COVID-19 forced organizations all over the world to transition their employees to a work-from-home policy. That change came at a time when organizations’ connected infrastructure is more complex than ever. Such complexity doesn’t just extend across IT environments, either. Indeed, machines and production processes are also becoming increasingly...