As if Puerto Rico wasn't having a hard enough time as it attempts to recover from a recession, the damage caused by devastating hurricanes in recent years, and a damaging earthquake last month, it now finds itself being exploited by cybercriminals. According to media reports, the government of the US island territory has lost more than US $2.6...

Security researchers spotted a new ransomware strain called "Ransomwared" demanding explicit pictures from its victims as a means of payment. Upon successful infection, Ransomwared runs its encryption routine, appending the file extensions ".ransomwared" and ".iwanttits" to each file it encrypts. Given the names of the file extensions, it's not...

Having worked with many individuals responding to incidents where their digital private images were shared without consent, social media or email accounts had unauthorised access, and even physical safety was a concern, it is all too familiar how terrifying the unknown can be. As someone who has been on both the victim's and later the responder’s...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s February 2020 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-870 on Wednesday, February 12th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2020-0674 A vulnerability exists in the way that Internet Explorer’s scripting engine handles objects in memory. An...

Security researchers have spotted a new PayPal phishing email scam that tries to steal a victim's Social Security Number (SSN), among other sensitive data. The attack email informed a victim that their PayPal account was locked, and it instructed them to click a "Secure and update my account now !" button. Doing so directed a user to a bit.ly link...

Listen and subscribe to our new podcast! Tripwire’s cybersecurity podcast features 20-minute conversations with the people who protect people from cyber threats. Hosted by Tripwire’s VP of Product Management and Strategy, Tim Erlin, each episode brings on a new guest to explore the evolving threat landscape, technology trends, and cybersecurity best...

What is cyber resilience? If you search the definition within the Oxford Dictionary, resilience alone is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” If you narrow the definition down to cyber resilience, it shifts to maintaining vs recovery. As noted on Wikipedia, it becomes “the ability to provide and maintain an...

You’ve seen the high-level stats on the cybersecurity skills gap, but I’ll remind you of some of the main ones from the (ISC)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study:In the United States, the cybersecurity workforce gap is nearly 500,000.The cybersecurity workforce needs to grow by 62% in order to meet the demands of U.S. businesses today.The global...

Phishing Attack A few years ago, I myself was vished, or ‘phished,’ over the phone. The caller was someone, likely offshore in a call center, who had done a little bit of research online to find my name, my phone number, my wireless phone carrier and a few other details that they used to build rapport with me on the phone. Spoofing the customer...

Companies are facing increased and complex cybersecurity challenges in today’s interconnected digital economy. The cyber threats have become more sophisticated and may harm a company via innovative new forms of malware, through the compromise of global supply chains or by criminal and hostile state actors. The hard truth is that it is difficult to...

It may not be the most efficient way to steal data from an organisation, let alone the most practical, but researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have once again detailed an imaginative way to exfiltrate information from an air-gapped computer. And this time they haven't done it by listening to a PC's fan, or watching the blinking LED lights...

The University of Maastricht publicly revealed that it paid a ransom of 30 bitcoins to recover its computer systems following a ransomware attack. Nick Bos, vice president of the university, shared what officials knew about the digital attack at a press conference. Bos noted that the security...

Malware closed out 2019 on a strong note. According to AV-TEST, malware authors’ efforts throughout the year helped push the total number of known malware above one billion samples. This development wouldn’t have been possible without the vigor exhibited by malware authors in the fall of 2019. Indeed, after detecting 8.5 million new samples in June...

The FBI said that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack potentially targeted a state-level voter registration site. In a Private Industry Notification (PIN) released on February 4, the FBI said that a state-level voter registration and voter information website received a high volume of DNS requests over the period of a month. Those requests...

I think we all know what log management is. As discussed in a 2017 article for The State of Security, log management is about systematically orchestrating the system and network logs collected by the organization. That being said, there’s still some confusion surrounding why an enterprise would want to collect log data in the first place. There are...

A spam campaign leveraged malicious RTF documents to distribute notorious infostealers including Agent Tesla and Lokibot. While digging through a few other spam campaigns, Lastline observed unusual use of the C# compiler from the command line in some samples. Its researchers performed additional analysis and found that the samples belonged to the...

Tripwire's January 2020 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft, Oracle, VMware and Linux. Exploit Alert: Metasploit Up first on the Patch Priority Index this month are vulnerabilities that have been recently added to Metasploit. Two vulnerabilities identified by CVE-2019-9213 and CVE-2018-5333 affect...

Security researchers observed email attackers abusing the coronavirus outbreak to infect concerned users with the Emotet trojan. IBM X-Force found that the attack emails appeared to originate from a Japanese disability welfare service provider. Those emails informed recipients that officials had learned of a developing coronavirus outbreak in Japan...

Cyberattacks in the healthcare industry show no signs of abating. In 2018, digital criminals breached 15 million healthcare records. Alarmingly, in the first half of 2019 alone, 32 million healthcare records were compromised as a result of multiple security incidents. Among those was the American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA) breach, an event which...

Threats against industrial environments are on the rise. Near the beginning of 2019, for example, Kaspersky Lab revealed that 47% of industrial control system (ICS) computers on which its software was installed suffered a malware infection in the past year. That was three percent higher than the previous year. These digital threats confronting ICS...