On Tuesday, March 24, Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed into the French Alps. All 150 people onboard were killed. After studying one of the aircraft’s black boxes recovered in the crash, investigators determined that Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of Flight 9525, deliberately locked the pilot out of the cockpit and altered the aircraft’s trajectory to...

The first step towards creating a successful security awareness program is to recognize that this is not a project with a defined timeline and an expected completion date, but is instead a development of organizational culture. Akin to “safety first” cultures that develop in manufacturing and other heavy industries, there are large economic and...

A new Trojan-based campaign is targeting energy companies around the world in an effort to gain access to sensitive information. The majority of companies experiencing attacks are distinctly linked to the petroleum, gas and helium industries located in the Middle East – including UAE, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. However, businesses in the US...

When I was about 10 years old, I read a book about Kevin Mitnick, Pengo and Robert Morris. While their exploits seemed very interesting, each story ended in jail time or at the very least, derailment of career goals. My unsophisticated Internet searching circa the early 2000s led me to the same conclusion. Hacking was a neat skill to have but the...

If you've recently found your web browsing plagued by pornographic pop-ups and irritating adverts, there might be a simple - but dangerous - explanation. Maybe hackers have hijacked your internet router? Security researchers at Ara Labs have warned of an active campaign which has seen attackers changing DNS settings on routers, causing unauthorised...

Banks regularly undergo mandatory stress tests. These tests are clearly defined, and the results are used to determine how well each bank can maneuver through an economic calamity. If we apply the basic blueprint of a financial stress test to an IT infrastructure, we can loosely define it as: “An analysis conducted under unfavorable scenarios which...

A vulnerability in Cisco IP phones could allow unauthenticated attackers to remotely listen in on the phones’ audio streams. According to an advisory Cisco published on its website, the vulnerability (CVE-2015-0670) results from improper authentication in the default configuration of certain Cisco IP phones. “An attacker could exploit this...

The printf() family of functions (printf(), fprintf(), sprintf(), etc.) are surprisingly powerful and, if not properly used, can expose a class of vulnerabilities called format string attacks. These attacks can be very bad because with a well-crafted format string, an attacker could write an arbitrary value into an arbitrary memory location. This...

Vulnerability Description The CVE-2015-0291 vulnerability introduces the possibility of a denial of service attack against a system running OpenSSL 1.0.2. If a malicious client connects to an OpenSSL server and the server requests a certificate from the malicious client, the malicious client can return a malformed cert that may trigger a NULL...

On Monday, the OpenSSL project team announced new releases that would be available today to fix security issues in OpenSSL that have been discovered as part of a major security audit and code refactoring project. When this announcement hit on Monday, there was a general panic in the IT and security community as it was mentioned vulnerabilities with...

Information security professionals are all too familiar with the work of black hat hackers. These individuals seek to gain unauthorized access to enterprises’ computer networks by exploiting security vulnerabilities – malicious activity which frequently threatens the personal and/or financial information of millions of customers. But what...

The OpenSSL Project, a collaborative effort designed to develop an open source toolkit that implements SSL and TLS, has announced that it will be fixing a number of security flaws on Thursday, one of which it has labeled “high” severity. The initiative made the announcement in a message circulated yesterday. “The OpenSSL project team would like to...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses 14 new Microsoft Security Bulletins. VERT is actively working on coverage for these bulletins in order to meet our 24-hour SLA and expects to ship ASPL-605 on Wednesday, March 11.MS15-018Multiple Memory Corruption Vulnerabilities in Internet ExplorerMULTIPLEVBScript Memory Corruption VulnerabilityCVE-2015-0032Internet...

The term APT (Advanced Persistent Threat), like many other acronyms in the world of IT/Information/Cyber Security entered our vocabulary some years ago, along with other partnering phrases, such as Advanced Evasion Techniques (AET), which at the time took the headlines as something new. Whilst these new outlined logical dangers do serve up a very...

Imagine coming into the office one day, and finding that visitors to your website are not only seeing messages and images posted by hackers, but that the attackers are also posting screenshots of private emails sent to your company on Twitter. That's the scenario Lenovo faces today—although there is no evidence that the PC manufacturer's own servers...

For the past several months, the major threats to mobile security, especially within large enterprises, have relied on exploiting one thing—iOS Enterprise Certificates. With this part of Apple’s framework seemingly a significant source of danger, we’re taking a look at iOS Enterprise certificates from a mobile security perspective. By examining...

According to a recent report, companies are failing to properly patch and update their systems despite the disclosure of threatening vulnerabilities. The 2015 Cyber Risk Report (PDF) produced by HP analyzing last year’s threat landscape found that as many as 44 percent of breaches were the result of attackers leveraging a patched two- to four-year...

Updated Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2015, 2:11 PM: Added content for Tripwire Enterprise customers to find Samba in their environment. A major vulnerability (CVE-2015-0240) has been discovered in Samba, which is a widely used and distributed SMB/CIFS Linux/Unix application for interoperability with Microsoft Windows. Samba provides integration of Linux...

Have you ever had your identity stolen? Or perhaps an identity crisis? I hope for your sake the answer is "no." However, if it's yes, you are in good company. Computing devices, which I'll loosely refer to as "assets," often change their identity, and at times even have it stolen (as a side note, NIST has a much broader definition of asset more...

Last summer, security researchers Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell developed a malware program, dubbed ‘BadUSB,’ to prove the insecure development of USB devices. The pair of security researchers revealed how they managed to reprogram the firmware on removable USB drives to include malicious code, giving potential attackers the ability to take over PCs...