Last time, I had the opportunity of speaking with Avi. Avi’s not a woman, but they’re a badass hacker with a natural intuition for cybersecurity that has been put to excellent use. This time, I had the pleasure of speaking with Susan Ballestero. She has unique experience with working in a security operations center and being an information security...

A French company has incurred a fine of 250,000 euros for a significant data leak that might have exposed customers' sensitive personal information. On 7 June, France's data privacy regulatory body Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) published a statement about a data leak of which it learned in July 2017. An English...

On 11 May 2017, President Trump issued the Executive Order, Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure. This directive, among other things, identified agency heads as those who are ultimately responsible for managing cybersecurity risk within executive departments. In service of that purpose, the White House...

South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail said it's cooperating with law enforcement after suffering a hacking attempt. In a statement posted to its website, Coinrail revealed it was working with police to investigate an incident that might have exposed 30 percent of the total number of coins traded on the exchange. It placed the remaining 70...

A ransomware attack targeting the city of Atlanta wiped out years of dashcam footage generated by the Atlanta Police Department. In an exclusive interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Channel 2 Action News, Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields revealed that a March ransomware attack against the city cost the Department years of dashcam...

I’m pleased to announce that next month, I will be offering the two-day training series A Guided Tour of Embedded Software Hacks at Shakacon X as well as at Black Hat USA in August. As a reminder, I will also be back at SecTor with reloaded material for a one-day Brainwashing Embedded Systems advanced class aimed at students who have already...

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...