Digital attackers targeted the computer servers of a golfers' association with ransomware and encrypted files stored on those assets. Staff at the Professional Golfers' Association of America (PGA) discovered the attack on 7 August. When they attempted to access certain work files that morning, those...

Poor security measures have reportedly put the personal details of Comcast Xfinity customers at risk, a researcher has revealed. According to a BuzzFeed News report, security researcher Ryan Stevenson found a vulnerability in the high-speed ISP's online customer portal that could allow unauthorised parties to determine the partial home address of...

The Center for Internet Security’s Critical Security Controls (“the CIS Controls”) are incredibly useful in helping organizations defend themselves against digital threats. By adopting the first five controls alone, it’s possible for companies to prevent 85 percent of attacks. Adopting all 20 controls can prevent as much as 97 percent of attacks....

What does the chairman of MIT’s board of trustees and a Supreme Court judge for New York State have in common with the Weintraubs of Lebanon, Oregon? They were all victims of real-estate spoofing scams, a form of cyber-security fraud that has grown from $19 million in 2016 to over $1B in 2017. Thieves have learned that large sums of money change...

The landmark NYS DFS cybersecurity regulation that took effect in New York State in March 2017 is approaching its third of four milestones. This was the first regulation of its kind that included prescriptive direction for the protection of personally identifiable information handled by all financial institutions that conduct business in the State....

Cyber crime is a serious and growing problem. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime damages will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015. And as seen in recent high-profile hacks and data breaches involving U.S. government agencies (the NSA, the Office of Personnel Management, the Securities and Exchange...

In early August, I will be leading a couple of sessions at the Community College Cyber Summit about cyber security fundamentals. I've also been spending time working with my amazing colleagues thinking about DevOps. Spending so much time going back and forth from "back to basics" and "the future of development" had me thinking that securing DevOps...

When concepts like DevOps and Cloud computing come together, this powerful combination propels organizational growth at a rapid speed. Some trends in today’s industry have helped bring about the collaboration of these two most important change agents. Let’s take a look at them here: The world is witnessing an industry-wide shift wherein we are...

A semiconductor foundry notified its customers of a computer virus incident that at least partly disrupted its shipping schedule. On 5 August, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Limited (TSMC) published an update about a computer virus infection that occurred on the evening of 3 August. TSMC...

It’s hardly a controversial statement to say that DevOps is changing the way that organizations build and deploy applications. There’s plenty of material, stories, whitepapers and whole companies that demonstrate this trend. There are, however, a couple of things that make a discussion about security and DevOps important. First, while there are a...

Compliance with version 3.2 of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a must for organizations that handle, process, transmit and store payment card data. But compliance isn’t always easy to establish or maintain. Indeed, there are certain challenges along the way that can make organizations’ compliance with PCI DSS 3.2...

Tripwire's July 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 22 vulnerabilities, including fixes for security feature bypass, information disclosure, and...

I’m an executive-level security headhunter. That means I spend a lot of my week doing two things: talking to CISOs or those people ready to be CISOs and consulting with companies that are in the market for a security leader. My experience is that companies looking for a security leader fall into three categories. The first category consists of...

European Union data protection law restricts the transfer of EU-origin personal data to countries outside the European Economic Area unless there is a mechanism in place to ensure an adequate level of protection of the personal data. In 2000, the European Commission approved the EU-SU Safe Harbor Privacy Principles that allowed many U.S. companies...

The instant a device is connected to the internet, it gets scanned and interrogated for open ports, software versions, and default passwords. Who conducts these scans and why? When you connect to the internet, what kind of attacks will you immediately see? The days of mass exploitation are upon us and encouraged, in part, by the rise of the Internet...

Reddit said that a digital attacker infiltrated some of its systems and accessed user data during a recent security incident. On 1 August, the social news aggregation website revealed that an attacker had compromised a few of its employees' accounts with its cloud and source code hosting providers...

These days, it’s not a matter of if your password will be breached but when. Major websites experience massive data breaches at an alarming rate. Have I Been Pwned currently has records from 295 sites comprising 5.3 billion accounts. This includes well-known names like LinkedIn, Adobe, and MySpace. Password breaches are a cause for embarrassment;...

A data security incident at a pediatric hospital affected more than 100,000 individuals including patients and employees. On 20 July, the Boys Town National Research Hospital published a "Notice of Data Security Incident" on its website. According to this statement, the Omaha-based medical...

2017 saw many data leaks and breaches that stemmed from poorly configured Amazon AWS configurations, or more specifically, configurations of AWS S3 buckets. These weren’t small leaks, either. As a result, Verizon, Dow Jones & Co and the WWE found themselves in the media for the wrong reasons. And they’re not the only ones. A quick Google search...

A shipping company suffered a ransomware attack that affected certain network systems in one of its regions of operation. On 25 July, COSCO Shipping Lines disclosed on Facebook that it had suffered a "local network breakdown" in the Americas. The company, which is owned and operated by the Chinese government, said that the incident degraded local...