Like every other industry, the healthcare sector is barely recognizable when compared to its state 20 years ago. It, too, has been transfigured by technology. While this has brought many impactful benefits, it has also introduced at least one major challenge: keeping sensitive patient information private. At the heart of this privacy challenge stands the venerable Health Insurance Portability and...

In the digital-first era, the internet is not simply a luxury; it's a fundamental part of our daily lives. From business growth to personal connections, its impact is profound. However, this interconnectedness comes with a price: the rise of cybercrime. Exploring the 2023 Global Cybercrime Report , we uncover which countries face the highest risk and how this pervasive issue affects us all, no...

A WordPress plugin used on over 300,000 websites has been found to contain vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to seize control. Security researchers Ulyses Saicha and Sean Murphy found two critical flaws in the POST SMTP Mailer plugin. The first flaw made it possible for attackers to reset the plugin's authentication API key and view sensitive logs (including password reset emails) on the...

Cloud providers are becoming a core part of IT infrastructure. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's biggest cloud provider, is used by millions of organizations worldwide and is commonly used to run sensitive and mission-critical workloads. This makes it critical for IT and security professionals to understand the basics of AWS security and take measures to protect their data and workloads. As a...

The shifting sands of IT make the adage "you never know it all" ever more true as time goes by. I recall days when it felt like you could click through every major directory of Yahoo and know a little something about everything. I was a young man with a voracious reading appetite and an active imagination – both of which were thoroughly outpaced by the growth of the internet and my own developing...

In the digital world, where countless users communicate, share data, and engage in diverse activities, determining the origin and actions behind these interactions can be quite challenging. This is where non-repudiation steps in. Coupling other security factors, such as delivery proof, identity verification, and a digital signature, creates non-repudiation. This guarantees that the parties...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s January 2024 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-1088 as soon as coverage is completed. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs There were no in-the-wild or disclosed CVEs included in the January Patch Tuesday drop. CVE Breakdown by Tag While historical Microsoft Security Bulletin groupings are...

Tripwire's December 2023 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities for Microsoft and Google. First on the patch priority are patches for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) that resolve elevation of privilege, remote code execution, and information disclosure vulnerabilities. Please note that CVE-2023-7024 for Chrome is on the CISA Known Exploited...

What is an Attack Surface? An attack surface is the total number of channels, pathways, or areas that threat actors can utilize to gain unauthorized access to networks. The result is that they can obtain private information or carry out a cyber-attack. An attack surface comprises the organizational assets a threat actor can exploit to gain unauthorized access. Attack surfaces include systems that...

The payment industry is bracing for the transition to Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) 4.0 , heralding significant changes in cybersecurity practices. As we approach the implementation of this revised standard, a critical focal point emerges: the role and new mandate of web application firewalls (WAFs) in ensuring compliance. The shift from a best practice to a prescribed...

Anyone can get scammed . If you think you're somehow immune to being scammed, then, in my opinion, you're a prime target for being scammed. No one is too big, too clever, too security-savvy to avoid being duped because it's only human to make a mistake and screw up. And that certainly seems to be the case with Bill Lou. Bill Lou is the CEO and co-founder of Nest Wallet, a cryptocurrency wallet...

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) security has become crucial to modern software development practices. As the speed of software development increases with DevOps and Agile methodologies, there is a growing need to ensure the integrity of software across the entire development pipeline. CI/CD security encompasses the practices, tools, and methodologies that protect the...

At the turn of the millennium, few people were worried about cybercrime. The Good Friday Agreement had just come into effect, the US expelled a Russian diplomat for spying, and the threat of the Y2K bug loomed. ILOVEYOU , the computer worm that catapulted cybercrime into the public consciousness, was still five months away. Today, things couldn't be more different. In 2001, six people fell victim...

One of the most critical aspects of cybersecurity is ensuring that all software is kept up to date with the latest patches. This is necessary to cover any vulnerabilities that cybercriminals could take advantage of in order to infiltrate an organization and launch an attack. With the volume of updates and the effort needed to install and configure them, it is good to know precisely when patches...

Most of the team that I work with on a daily basis is heavily invested in Python . As such, it was difficult to find people interested in reading The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition . In the end, two members of the team tackled the book, and it took them longer to complete the read than I would have expected. While I picked up the book, I just couldn’t get into it. That isn’t because of the...

Frankly stated, operational resilience is your ability to climb the mountain, no matter the weather. Businesses now need more than a good security structure to weather the storms of AI-driven threats, APTs, cloud-based risks, and hyper-distributed environments. And more importantly, operational resilience in 2024 requires a paradigm shift. Attackers aren’t out there doing the bare minimum . As the...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s December 2023 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-1086 on Wednesday, December 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2023-20588 AMD has released AMD-SB-7007 – Speculative Leaks Security Notice , which describes how some AMD processors can potentially return speculative data after a...

A malicious hacking group, thought to have been operating since at least 2013, may have suffered a significant blow after the arrest of a suspected leading member by Spanish police late last week. Spain's National Police arrested a Venezuelan man in Alicante on Thursday, in the belief that he is connected to the Kelvin Security gang. In an announcement posted on Telegram, Spanish police described...

What's going on? A cybercriminal group calling itself BlackSuit has claimed responsibility for a series of ransomware attacks, including breaches at schools in central Georgia . And earlier in the year, a zoo in Tampa Bay was targeted by the same hacking gang. Meanwhile, liberal arts college DePauw University in Indiana says that it was recently targeted, and a "limited amount of data on specific...

Identity theft is like a thief in the night; it can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time. It is a real threat to everyone. We live in a time where so much personal information is stored online, which allows cybercriminals to steal it and use it for their gain. A Federal Trade Commission report shows that over 1 million people fell victim to identity theft in 2022. The most common types of...