Information security, cybersecurity, IT security, and computer security are all terms that we often use interchangeably. I know that I do. I've written a lot about those areas for the past several years. I notice that sometimes I switch between the terms in an article simply to avoid repeating the same phrases over and over again in my prose. Very...

NextGEN Gallery is an extraordinarily popular plugin for self-hosted WordPress websites, having been downloaded over 16.5 million times. The software's widespread popularity (it claims to have been "the industry's standard WordPress gallery plugin" since 2007) makes it an seemingly obvious choice for website owners looking to add image galleries to...

Near the bleeding edge of technology, there’s a lot of talk (and work) around DevOps and the use of containers for delivering services. This is a fast-paced environment where services are spun up and down to meet demand in an elastic cloud and code is shipped to production multiple times a day. It’s also an area where security is far from ‘figured out...

File Integrity Monitoring solutions have been around for a few decades now, with one purpose in mind: to monitor changes to files on the endpoint. However, there is more to integrity monitoring than just looking at files. Over the past year or so, whilst working with Tripwire, I have met a large number of people who define FIM (File Integrity...

In the modern world, it isn’t bank robbers we’re worried about – it’s cyber criminals. They can steal consumer information, alter data so that it gives false insights or remains corrupted for months or even years without notice, and even sell valuable intellectual property to the highest bidder, putting companies under. However, while many...

In part 1 and part 2 of this series, I reviewed some of the administrative and technical evolution of the cybersecurity legislation that has been proposed for all financial entities in New York State. As I started to write this, the final regulation was adopted. The good news is that most of the changes that were proposed in the first revision have...

Most security folks are familiar with the threats posed by the Internet of Things (IoT). Indeed, one need only look to what happened to Dyn in October 2016 to grasp the devastating potential of insecure IoT devices. Given this new wave of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, as well as the Mirai-infected bots that power them, it's no wonder...

Boeing has notified 36,000 employees of a security breach involving an email that inadvertently disclosed their personal information. On 8 February 2017, the American aerospace company sent a letter to Bob Ferguson, Attorney General for Washington State. In it, Boeing says a security incident might have exposed the personal information of 7,288...

Two weeks ago, while visiting the yearly security gathering at the RSA Conference in San Francisco’s Moscone center complex (and adjacent hotels – it’s growing like mad), I was walking across the North and South Expo halls to check out some vendors (several I had appointments with, some by curiosity, and a few that were really new kids on the block)...

In part 1 of this series about the proposed regulation promulgated by the New York State Department of Financial Services, the evolution of some of the administrative requirements were explored. The exemptions, appointment of a CISO and the utilization of cyber security personnel all changed from the originally proposed regulation. In this part,...

One of the key challenges with what we now call cyber is the shortage of relevant technical cyber skills. This is directly linked to what would seem to be an inability to recognise or accept the real scale of the cyber threat, which is, of course, playing into the hands of the criminals and hackers who are harvesting millions in revenue as a result of...

A new report reveals that 68 percent of oil and gas organizations have experienced at least one digital attack. In the Siemens-sponsored The State of Cybersecurity in the Oil & Gas Industry: United States (PDF), Ponemeon Institute surveyed 377 individuals based in the United States who are responsible for overseeing digital risk to their organization...

The annual RSA Conference is a lot of things to a lot of people (43,000 this year!). For me, it’s become an annual opportunity to step out of the stream and to look back at what has happened in the last year and peer forward at what’s to come. This year, I think we have reached an inflection point around the way we as a profession treat the “human...

The New York State Department of Financial Services has proposed a cyber security regulation that is unique in its breadth. The original proposed regulation underwent a 45-day review period, after which it was changed. It is currently under another 45-day review period pending further changes and should be published in the next few weeks. The...

Attackers have lots of ways of gaining access to a target's information. One of their preferred attack vectors is exploiting careless end user behavior. This is especially true when it comes to users who don't adequately protect their web accounts. For instance, bad actors targeted users of TeamViewer, software which allows IT professionals to gain...

UPDATE 2/24/17, 4:30 PM PST: Researcher Hanno Böck (@hanno) has confirmed that leaked CloudFlare data was not entirely purged from multiple search engine caches ahead of the public disclosure. In April 2014, the security community was shocked with the revelation that a poorly implemented TLS extension in OpenSSL could allow attackers to easily...

A lack of skilled information security professionals poses a threat to most organizations. In Tripwire's 2016 Security Challenge Survey – Skills Gap, 75 percent of IT security professionals said they don't have enough skilled personnel to detect and respond to a breach. Almost the same percentage (66 percent) of respondents reported a dearth of...

Nearly one million user accounts for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival website have been found for sale on the underground marketplace. According to a recent report by Motherboard, the data available for purchase includes email addresses, usernames and hashed passwords. The data trader, who identifies as ‘Berkut,’ wrote on the Tochka...

In their ever-increasing aggressiveness to wring even more money out of victims, it's perhaps no surprise to see some online extortionists creating ransomware targeted against affluent Mac users. The latest example of Mac ransomware, OSX/Filecoder.E, has been discovered by malware analysts at ESET after it was distributed via BitTorrent distribution...

A malicious Google Chrome extension punishes users who search for certain keywords by redirecting them to a tech support scam. Attackers introduce users to the rogue extension via a malvertising campaign. Most of the time, malicious adverts redirect users to an exploit kit that installs ransomware or other baddies. In this case, the advertisement...