Federal investigators traced a malware infection at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to an employee's habit of viewing adult content. On 17 October, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) submitted a report in which it revealed its discovery of suspicious internet traffic during an IT security audit of the USGS computer network. The OIG specifically...

A New Jersey man received a court order to pay $8.6 million for launching a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Rutgers University. On October 26, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey announced the sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge Michael...

October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, an annual, national observance to raise awareness for online security. This is a relevant topic today, as every day it seems like a new data breach makes headlines. From government organizations to big-name corporations, everyone is a target of cybercrime. Most of us have probably been a victim or...

A dating app geared towards connecting supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump exposed members' personal and account information. On 15 October, security researcher Baptiste Robert (who also goes by the name "Elliot Alderson") discovered security weaknesses in the Donald Daters dating app that exposed several pieces of users' information. https:/...

The healthcare industry is one of the largest industries in the United States and potentially the most vulnerable. The healthcare sector is twice as likely to be the target of a cyberattack as other sectors, resulting in countless breaches and millions of compromised patients per year. Advancements in the techniques and technology of hackers and...

An effective container security strategy consists of many parts. Organizations should first secure the build environment using secure code control along with build tools and controllers. Next, they should secure the contents of their containers using container validation, code analysis and security unit tests. Finally, they should develop a plan to...

In a recent article about U.S federal policy concerning IoT security, Justin Sherman identified several gaps in both cybersecurity and privacy policies. As Sherman has highlighted: The United States federal government, like the rest of the world, is increasingly using IoT devices to improve or enhance its existing processes or to develop new...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s October 2018 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-800 on Wednesday, October 10th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2018-8453 This vulnerability, a privilege escalation in Win32k’s handling of objects in memory, has been exploited in the...

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) issued a fine of £120,000 to Heathrow Airport Limited (HAL) following a data security incident that occurred in 2017. On 8 October, ICO announced the penalty under section 55A of the 1998 Data Protection Act (DPA). Under that piece of legislation, the ICO...

The first article in this series examined configuration hardening, essentially looking at ports, processes and services as the “doors, gates and windows” into a network where security configuration management (SCM) becomes the job of determining which of these gateways should be open, closed, or locked at any given time. Now it’s time to look at...

Inspired by Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the State of California has set a new precedent with the passage of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The major data incidents last year have driven citizens into a frenzy about securing their data, and states have rushed to developing and passing policies and legislation....

The healthcare industry continues to be challenged with securing patient health information. According to the Verizon Protected Health Information Data Breach Report (PHIDBR), 58 percent of all security incidents involved insiders, ransomware accounts for 70 percent of all malicious code, and alarmingly, basic security hygiene is still lacking at...

As we have talked about in prior blogs, industrial cybersecurity is a journey. This is a journey that is never-ending, as control system technology advancements are adopting information technology (IT) and cloud-based solutions at a faster rate than ever before. At the same time, the threat landscape of malicious activity is constantly evolving. We...

DevOps is redefining the way organizations handle software development. But it’s also challenging security professionals in their efforts to manage digital risk. With that said, there are security teams need to be strategic about how they approach DevOps security. Here are some expert recommendations on what to do and what to avoid when implementing...

Tripwire's September 2018 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together the top vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Adobe. First on the patch priority list this month are patches for Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Edge and Scripting Engine. These patches resolve 18 vulnerabilities, including fixes for Elevation of Privilege, Information Disclosure,...

Cloud security is not as simple as it may seem. Businesses have a shared security responsibility with cloud service providers, but some lack the knowledge to keep up their share of the bargain. Poor configuration and data leaks are common problems that many businesses encounter in the cloud. These issues can lead to malware infecting your cloud...

Due to popular demand, my women in information security interview series is back for autumn! This marks the second anniversary since I started. Some of my subjects in this round have been waiting since last spring, so getting to chat with them has been long overdue. Let’s start with Sharka, a penetration tester who is full of enthusiasm. She wants...

It is a common trend now to see most of the organizations opting for the cloud. Growing business demands, competition and the growth of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) have helped propel this trend. While everything looks smart in the cloud, what about security? Does that look smart, too? Now that organizations use different kinds of cloud environments...

The ability to feed key security information onto a big screen dashboard opens up many new opportunities for managing the day-to-day security and maintenance workload as well as providing a useful method of highlighting new incidents faster than “just another email alert.” Most Security Operation Centres I’ve visited in recent years have embraced...