The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law that was established to transform the security landscape of the healthcare industry. Businesses that are found guilty of a breach or violation of HIPAA rules will have to face repercussions. Part of the HIPAA law includes the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule,...

There are two significant trends occurring right now that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone reading this post. First, businesses are gathering and leveraging more and more data to improve their core services. Second, more compliance and regulatory standards are popping up from governments and private organizations. As these businesses realize that...

A few weeks, ago, technology news site The Verge reported on a new Ring security camera that is in fact a drone that flies around inside your house. Available beginning next year, the ‘Always Home Cam’ is supposed to give its owners a total view of their home without the need for multiple cameras. Those worried about break-ins or other kinds of...

American bookselling giant Barnes & Noble is contacting customers via email, warning them that its network was breached by hackers, and that sensitive information about shoppers may have been accessed. In the email to customers, Barnes & Noble says that it became aware that it had fallen victim to a cybersecurity attack on Saturday October 10th. ...

For years, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has committed itself to adopting information technology (IT) and electronic communication. The UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) noted that this policy has made the state’s government agencies and organizations more efficient as well as has improved the ability for individuals to collaborate...

Vulnerability Description Tripwire VERT has identified a stack-based buffer overflow in SonicWall Network Security Appliance (NSA). The flaw can be triggered by an unauthenticated HTTP request involving a custom protocol handler. The vulnerability exists within the HTTP/HTTPS service used for product management as well as SSL VPN remote access. ...

Recovering CISO and Director of (TL)2 Security Thom Langford joins the show to debate Tripwire’s Paul Edon on facial recognition vs. security. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6fFEo0k55WgGqM6Yzi0Mbi?si=-Bkeyld4QtuTSeq6IKQseQ Spotify:...

Qatar is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Finances Online, Global Finance Magazine and others consider it to be the wealthiest nation. This is because the country has a small population of under 3 million but relies on oil for the majority of its exports and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). These two factors helped to push the country’s GDP...

“Doubt is an unpleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.” Whilst I claim no particular knowledge of the eighteenth-century philosopher Voltaire, the quote above (which I admit to randomly stumbling upon in a completely unrelated book) stuck in my mind as a fitting way to consider the shift from traditional, perimeter-focused ’network...

By now, we know a lot about secure configuration management (SCM). We know the way it works, the integral processes of which it consists, the areas of your IT infrastructure that it can help secure as well as the different types of best practice frameworks and regulatory compliance standards with which it can help you to maintain compliance. All we...

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...