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High-rolling hacker jailed after launching malware attacks via websites

A British man has been jailed for over six years after exploiting ad networks on pornographic websites to spread malware onto innocent users' computers. 24-year-old Zain Qaiser made massive profits from victims in over 20 countries around the world through a criminal scheme which involved malware and blackmail. According to the National Crime Agency...
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The Risk of Credential Stuffing to the Smart Home

As technology advances and the costs of connecting electronic components to the internet decreases, the lower the cost of having an internet connected smart home is. Sensors placed throughout a house and integrated into home appliances can provide homeowners the advantages of monitoring and managing functions of the home remotely. According to...
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How to Evade Detection: Hiding in the Registry

MITRE Corporation’s ATT&CK framework is a living, curated repository of adversarial tactics and techniques based on observations from actual attacks on enterprise networks. It’s a valuable trove of information for security analysts, threat hunters and incident response teams. Today, I’m going to look at a particular method for evading detection, often...
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Vulnerability Management: Myths, Misconceptions and Mitigating Risk

Vulnerability Management is a much-talked-about practice in the IT security industry. Whether it is the debate on vulnerability scoring, how to implement a suitable vulnerability management program based on your own resources or even trying to convince leadership a vulnerability management solution alone won't solve all your cybersecurity issues,...
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Unsecured databases found leaking half a billion resumes on the net

Barely a day goes by anymore without another report of sensitive data being left accessible to anyone on Elasticsearch servers or MongoDB databases that have not been properly configured. Today is no different. As ZDNet reports, researchers have discovered several exposed servers that belong to Chinese recruitment firms. Security experts Devin...
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If the Data Breach Doesn't Kill Your Business, the Fine Might

When you hear about a data breach in the news, it's usually related to a major company or social media network that has been targeted. The erroneous conclusion would be that the hackers only focus on exploiting security flaws in large organizations, but the opposite is true. The reality is that cybercrime is deadly to small businesses, with 60% closing operations within six months of an attack....
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TLS CBC Padding Oracles in 2019

*UPDATE: Padcheck source is now available on GitHub: https://github.com/Tripwire/padcheck* Since August, I’ve spent countless hours studying CBC padding oracle attacks toward the development of a new scan tool called padcheck. Using this tool, I was able to identify thousands of popular domains which could be targeted by an active network adversary ...
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When Is a Data Breach a Data Breach?

A data breach remains a common headline in the news cycle. A different company, website or social network reports a security issue almost daily. If it feels like using the internet has become a risky endeavor, the feeling is accurate. But what exactly classifies an event as a data breach? The world wide web is littered with different security gaps and...
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Is the Private or Public Cloud Right for Your Business?

It wasn’t a very long time ago when cloud computing was a niche field that only the most advanced organizations were dabbling with. Now the cloud is very much the mainstream, and it is rare to find a business that uses IT that doesn’t rely on it for a part of its infrastructure. But if you're going to add cloud services to your company, you will...
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New Sextortion Scam Tries to Scare Users with Fake CIA Investigation

Extortionists have launched a new sextortion scam campaign that leverages a fake Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) investigation to try to scare users. In an email I obtained from a wary user, the scammers pose as a fake CIA technical collection officer named Roxana Mackay. This character claims in the email that she's found the user's personal...
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Understanding Vulnerability Scoring to Help Measure Risk

Understanding vulnerability scoring can be a daunting task, but a good starting point is first understanding risk and being able to distinguish risk from a vulnerability. Both have been used interchangeably throughout the years. A vulnerability is some aspect of a systems functioning, configuration or architecture that makes the resource a target of...
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The Power of Vulnerability Management: Are You Maximizing Its Value?

Tripwire has been in the business of providing vulnerability management solutions with IP360 for about 20 years. With over 20,000 vulnerabilities discovered last year alone, vulnerability management continues to be an important part of most security plans. And most organizations agree. In a recent survey, 89 percent of respondents said that their...
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Why You Need to Align Your Cloud Strategy to Your Business Goals

Your company has decided to adopt the Cloud – or maybe it was among the first ones that decided to rely on virtualized environments before it was even a thing. In either case, cloud security has to be managed. How do you go about that? Before checking out vendor marketing materials in search of the perfect technology solution, let’s step back and...
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How to Pick the Right Solution for FISMA SI-7 Compliance

It can be hard to know how to best allocate your federal agency’s resources and talent to meet FISMA compliance, and a big part of that challenge is feeling confident that you’re choosing the right cybersecurity and compliance reporting solution. A Few FISMA SI-7 Basics So what sorts of specifications do you need to look for, and why? While the...
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Why Is Penetration Testing Critical to the Security of the Organization?

A complete security program involves many different facets working together to defend against digital threats. To create such a program, many organizations spend much of their resources on building up their defenses by investing in their security configuration management (SCM), file integrity monitoring (FIM), vulnerability management (VM) and log...
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Trends in Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity

With connectivity to the outside world growing, cyber attacks on industrial computers constitute an extremely dangerous threat, as these types of incidents can cause material losses and production downtime for a whole system. Moreover, industrial enterprises knocked out of service can seriously undermine a region’s social welfare, ecology and...
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Not All Sandboxes Are Created Equal

Sandbox environments are a common feature of many cybersecurity solutions in their fight against advanced malware. Firewalls, endpoint protection, and even next-generation machine learning systems use sandboxes as one of their lines of defense. However, not all sandboxes are created equal. Sandboxes can take different approaches towards malware...
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Report: Concerted Global Cyber Attack Could Disrupt Global Economy

According to a hypothetical cyber risk scenario prepared by the Cyber Risk Management (CyRiM) project for risk management purposes, a ransomware strain that can disrupt more than 600,000 businesses worldwide within 24 hours would potentially lead to damages in the amount of billions of dollars. Cyber Risk Management (CyRiM) project is a collaborative...
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AWS System Manager And The Dangers of Default Permissions

In September of 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the addition of the Session Manager to the AWS Systems Manager. The session manager enables shell or remote desktop level access to your AWS EC2 Windows and Linux instances, along with other benefits. This is a great new feature, but care should be taken when enabling this capability. While the...
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When it Comes to NIST 800-171 Compliance - There’s ‘On Time’ and There’s ‘Lombardi Time’

If you wait to become 800-171 compliant, you won’t win contracts. That was the message we wanted to make loud and clear to over 200 federal contractors during last week’s Washington Technology (WT) webcast, Inside NIST 800-171: Cyber Requirements and the Risk of Non-Compliance. Currently, all DoD contractors that handle, process or store sensitive types of government information must comply with...