A cyber attack on the United States power grid, causing outages and damage to infrastructure, could have a major impact on the country’s economy, costing up to $1 trillion in the most extreme scenario. A recent report, produced by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Risk Studies and Lloyd’s of London insurance, outlines the potential implications...

Earlier this year, the PCI Security Standards Council officially released PCI DSS 3.1 only months after its predecessor (version 3.0) came into effect. With a typical three-year period between standard revisions, the out-of-band update caught many off guard, especially organizations still in the process of complying with the changes from the...

OpenSSL has released an advisory urging users to update their systems in the wake of a high-severity alternative chains certificate forgery bug. "During certificate verification, OpenSSL (starting from version 1.0.1n and 1.0.2b) will attempt to find an alternative certificate chain if the first attempt to build such a chain fails," the advisory...

Cisco has released a patch for a password vulnerability that was recently discovered in its Unified Communications Domain Manager (Unified CDM) Platform Software. According to a security advisory released by the company, "A vulnerability in the Cisco Unified Communications Domain Manager Platform Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote...

Commercial Virtual Private Network (VPN) services, claiming to provide users enhanced privacy and anonymity, may not be as secure as users think. A group of researchers from Queen Mary University of London and the University of Rome disclosed their findings today, revealing that many of the most widely used VPN services are susceptible to DNS...

The Magnitude exploit kit (EK) is leveraging a recently patched zero-day vulnerability found in Adobe Flash Player to drop CryptoWall ransomware. Early last week, Adobe released a security update for the critical vulnerability CVE-2015-3113, which affects Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. If unpatched, the flaw allows for an attacker to take control of...

Cisco has released patches for SSH keys vulnerabilities affecting several of its virtual appliances. The vulnerabilities were discovered during internal security testing and have been found to affect Cisco Web Security Virtual Appliance (WSAv), Cisco Email Security Virtual Appliance (ESAv), and Cisco Security Management Virtual Appliance (SMAv). ...

If you read my previous post about Microsoft ending extended support for Windows Server 2003 (WS2003) on July 14, 2015, you’re familiar with what that means - Microsoft will not be providing further security patches, hot fixes, or software updates without a costly extended support agreement. “Many IT teams are very comfortable using Windows Server...

Tripwire is pleased to announce the release of its newest infographic, “Where Are Your Cyberattacks Coming From?” Created in response to the release of Verizon’s 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR 2015) back in April, the infographic explains the five most common attack patterns behind today’s data breaches. In this article, I will review...

Gift cards have caused quite a headache for retailers in the last month, exposing another way that fraudulent activity can eat into razor-thin profit margins. Gift card fraud can range from physical theft to cloning to exploiting programming errors on the merchant side. The methods of attack are very similar to what is seen with credit card fraud,...

The issue of cybersecurity has finally gained the attention of top company decision-makers in light of the ongoing large-scale breaches that continue to jeopardize company assets and customers’ privacy. However, as executives and board members become more aware of the impact of cyber attacks on the business, is awareness enough to allow them to...

eBay has patched three vulnerabilities found in its Magento shopping platform that could have allowed for hijacking sessions and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. Hadji Samir, a penetration tester with Vulnerability Labs, released technical descriptions of a persistent input validation web vulnerabiility, a cross-site scripting (XSS) hole, and a...

The type of coverage a vulnerability receives on social media often correlates to that threat’s level of risk, reveals a recent report. This is just one of the findings of the 2015 State of Vulnerability Risk Management, a study issued earlier this month by NopSec Labs, a data science and research company that specializes in analyzing malware,...

A website used by Microsoft to challenge the U.S. federal government's policies on matters of privacy and surveillance has allegedly been hacked. According to ZDNet, Digital Constitution appears to have been modified at 9:15 pm EDT on Wednesday, with casino-related text -- including keywords used to garner greater search engine hits, such as "casino...

The mammoth rise in cybercrime has made organizations revise their application security strategy and implement new techniques to safeguard their software. This is largely because traditional security methodologies, such as Manual Testing and Web Application Firewalls (WAF), have been rendered irrelevant due to evolving hacking techniques. Unlike old...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses 8 new Microsoft Security Bulletins. VERT is actively working on coverage for these bulletins in order to meet our 24-hour SLA and expect to ship ASPL-618 on Wednesday, June 10th. MS15-056 Internet Explorer Information Disclosure Vulnerability CVE-2015-1765 Multiple Elevation of...

According to a report issued by Intel Security Group's McAfee Labs, ransomware has experienced a 165% increase in the first quarter of 2015. McAfee Labs Threats Report: May 2015 reveals that this increase has been fueled in part by the impression of underground criminals that victims in rich countries seem to be the most willing to make ransom...

Ever looked at the messages in the Oracle listener logs generated by Tripwire IP360 scans and wondered what was going on? The most common one you see probably looks something like this: 01-JUN-2015 12:39:37 * (CONNECT_DATA=(COMMAND=VERSION)) * version * 1189 TNS-01189: The listener could not authenticate the user TNS-01169: The listener has not...

With a reported 17,000 people flocking to Europe's largest security conference this week, there is no doubt that the industry is expanding vastly. Here, you’ll find hundreds of vendors, a variety of workshops and a range of sessions for professionals in the field, no matter what level. From technical insights to business risks, the events is a great...

The recent ‘Logjam’ attack shows that a well-funded intelligence agency might be able to crack 1024-bit Diffie Hellman keys (at least if the same group is used by many systems). When using RSA, cracking 1024-bit keys may not be beyond the most powerful adversaries either. There are two solutions to this problem. The first is to simply use longer...