At least half a million routers and storage devices in dozens of countries around the world have been infected by a sophisticated botnet, in preparation for an alleged planned cyber attack on Ukraine. The botnet, which has been given the rather unglamorous name of VPNFilter, is believed to be likely to be controlled by a state-sponsored hacking...

If breaches to electronic health record systems continue at their current pace, each and every American can expect their private medical data to be compromised at least once by 2024. Once adversaries obtain a patient’s health information (PHI), they can sell it to the highest bidder—leaving targets vulnerable to all manner of fraud and theft....

Amidst the volatility, uncertainty and noise of the cybersecurity field, few best practice frameworks have emerged as consistently reliable and useful as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Security Controls. Recently updated as version 7.0, the CIS Controls represent the most important security controls that an organization must implement to...

A software vulnerability is suspected of being to blame for a hack through which criminals transfer more than 300 million pesos (over US $15 million) out of Mexican banks. Officials from Mexico's central bank confirmed to Reuters that a series of "irregular" and unauthorised interbank money transfers involving large sums of money were detected late...

A federal jury convicted one of the digital criminals responsible for operating the notorious "Scan4You" counter antivirus (CAV) service. On 16 May, the Department of Justice released a press release announcing a Virginia federal jury's conviction of Ruslans Bondars, 37, on one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to...

Cryptojacking attacks affected a quarter of organizations in their cloud environments, found a recent cloud security report. In RedLock's Cloud Security Trends, researchers with the security firm's Cloud Security Intelligence (CSI) team discovered that 25 percent of organizations had suffered cryptojacking incidents in the cloud. This rate marked a...

One of the most dangerous threats to your business in 2018 is a data leak. Hackers can sell your information on the black market or simply destroy it. This could ruin your business overnight if you are not careful. So, you should use the best practices below to ensure you avoid leaks in 2018. Phishing If you haven't trained your people on phishing...

Scammers designed a phishing website and encrypted it with the Advanced Encrypted Standard (AES) in their attempts to steal unsuspecting users' Apple IDs. Researchers at Trend Micro came across the phishing campaign on 30 April. It all began when they received an email designed to look like it came from Apple. The email warned recipients that Apple...

With the advent of increased cyber security related threats, the majority of attacks point to one target, and that is the human element. Examine any survey relating to cyber security threats faced by organizations from ransomware to phishing, and these attacks all have one target in common: the human element is necessary to trigger the attack....

I am very proud to contribute to both Tripwire’s the State of Security and to be a regular Peerlyst poster. Peerlyst is a very important online platform for cybersecurity professionals. It’s my pleasure to speak with Limor Elbaz, Peerlyst’s CEO and founder. She shared with me some excellent insight about what inspired her to start Peerlyst and what...

Joomla arrived on the scene in 2005 as a fork of the Mambo content management system (CMS). Downloaded over 91 million times, it has since eclipsed Mambo to become a ubiquitous platform for websites of all sizes. According to last year's Hacked Website Report from Sucuri, which used insights from over 36,000 compromised sites, Joomla is the second...

Phishers are using scam emails that leverage the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a theme in an attempt to steal users' information, a security firm found. Researchers at managed threat detection solutions provider RedScan came across one such phishing message that appeared to originate from Airbnb. The scam email, which...

A 20-year-old man has pleaded guilty to targeting more than a thousand members of streaming video platform Twitch with an army of spambots. On 1 May, Brandan Lukas Apple confessed to a charge of "mischief in relation to computer data" before a Port Coquitlam provincial court judge. The court responded by handing down a four-month conditional...

A lending website ceased all operations over concerns with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Chris Beach, the founder of Streetlend.com, decided to shut down the service after five years of operation due to uncertainty and risk created by the GDPR. He explained in a message posted to the site that the penalties...

Organizations face a number of security challenges when migrating to the cloud from on-premise data centers. Their work isn't done once they've completed the move, either. At that stage, enterprises must decide on the best approach to fulfill their end of the Shared Responsibility Model and ensure "security in the cloud" with respect to protecting...

The government of Canada has unveiled new regulations that specify how organizations must report and respond to a data breach. The Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, Canada. (Source: Wikipedia) On 18 April, the Governor General of Canada released the Breach of Security Safeguards Regulations (SOR/2018-64...

Blockchain and other emerging distributed ledger technologies offer the promise of increased security, transparency and resilience based on the use of distributed, immutable records. At the same time, the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which takes effect May 25, 2018, governs the use and protection of personal data...

Defense Evasion has the most techniques of any of the other tactics discussed in the MITRE ATT&CK Framework so far. What I find interesting about these techniques is that they expose the tradecraft of the various threat actors behind malware attacks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDT2qnpvKTk Another interesting piece of this tactic is some malware,...

The MITRE ATT&CK Framework is an excellent resource when it comes to defining threat intelligence. The hundreds of techniques mapped across various tactics help define an adversary’s behaviors in enterprise networks. What’s better is that it provides prescriptive level guidance on how to both mitigate and detect the techniques. While it is not...

When the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force on May 25, 2018, what will happen to currently-available domain registration data in WHOIS? The GDPR restricts how personal data about natural persons residing in the European Union can be collected, used and transferred, and it defines “personal data” very broadly....