The traditional career path for a chief information security officer (CISO) is fairly straightforward. An individual begins their career in IT but ultimately moves to security after demonstrating a security mindset. Once established within the ranks of information security, the professional receives promotion after promotion until they attain the...

Trend analysis is an important topic within threat intelligence. It lets us forecast where things are headed; whether they’re getting better, worse or different; and where we should be focusing our precious budgets. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recently released the Incident trends report (October 2018 – April 2019). This highlights...

A ransomware incident at TrialWorks forced at least two law firms to request deadline extensions for some of their court cases. JML Law, APLC requested an extension of 18 days to submit documents pertaining to one of its cases. According to court files, the Woodland Hills-based law firm attributed its request to a "hosting outage" at TrialWorks, its...

Sometimes your best intentions are thwarted by technology. That was the case when Thom Langford and I attempted to do a Q&A session after our webinar “Modern Skills for Modern CISOs.” Unfortunately, the session ended before we got the chance to answer the questions that the audience had submitted. The silver lining is that we had the chance to write...

A scammer stole a little more than $500,000 from the City of Ocala, Florida as the result of a successful spear phishing attack. According to Ocala.com, an Ocala employee fell for a spear-phishing attack, one of the most common variants of phishing campaigns, near the end of October. They opened an...

A Texas man has been sentenced to over 12 years in prison after being found guilty of hacking into the computer system of the Los Angeles Superior Court and then using it to send two million phishing emails. Thirty-three-year-old Oriyomi Sadiq Aloba, of Katy, Texas, received a 145 month federal prison sentence for an attack which ultimately saw...

Jackson Health System (JHS) paid a civil money penalty of $2.15 million after having violated some of HIPAA's provisions. The case dates back to August 2013 when JHS submitted a breach report to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In its report, the...

Reports from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Siemens highlight both the increasing cyber threats faced by the electric utility companies and the lack of adequate readiness to respond to these threats. According to these reports, a cyber-attack on the electric grid could cause “severe” damage. The electric grid delivers the...

Kalispell Regional Healthcare (KPH) revealed that a phishing attack might have exposed patients' personally identifiable information (PII). Over the summer of 2019, KPH learned that several employees unknowingly handed their business email account credentials over to malicious actors after falling...

Unsurprisingly, cyber attacks are growing in the business sector and not just in the United States but world-wide. Cyber-attacks represent the greatest risk in six out of ten of the top economies in the world. The report presented by the World Economic Forum discusses formjacking, cryptojacking, ransomware like LockerGoga and other cyber-attacks of...

Ah, the wonders of technology. In the innovation-rich Information Age, we are the beneficiaries of a nonstop wave of new advancements, each offering the ability to execute vital tasks faster and more efficiently than ever before. However, along with each breakthrough comes potential security vulnerabilities. Such is the case with containerization....

Researchers spotted a malspam campaign that targeted German organizations with samples of the Buran crypto-ransomware family. In early October, Bromium observed a malspam campaign whose emails impersonated online fax service eFax. The emails contained hyperlinks to a PHP page that served up malicious Word documents. This technique helped the Word...

To protect the integrity and safety of their business-critical assets, cybersecurity must be a top priority for the oil and gas industry. Although they operate some of the nation’s most critical systems, securing these complex infrastructures can be a huge challenge. In recent years, the oil and gas industry has undergone a complete digital overhaul...

Over the course of the past 10 years, traditional application development methodology (waterfall) has given way in favor of the more agile DevOps-centric methodologies focused on continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This trend was turbocharged in 2013 when Docker containers came onto the scene and ushered in the proverbial crossing of the...

Researchers have detected a new phishing campaign that uses some clever tricks in order to steal users' Stripe credentials. Cofense discovered the campaign when it came across an attack email that pretended to originate from "Stripe Support." The message informed recipients that their account contained invalid details and that it was therefore...

Industrial organizations face a growing list of digital threats these days. Back in April 2019, for instance, FireEye revealed that it had observed an additional intrusion by the threat group behind the destructive TRITON malware at another critical infrastructure. This discovery came less than two years after the security firm discovered an attack...

Researchers discovered a new cryptojacking worm called "Graboid" that has spread to more than 2,000 unsecured Docker hosts. In its research, Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 team noted that it's the first time it's discovered a cryptojacking worm specifically using containers in the Docker Engine for distribution. (It's not the first time that...

You can’t go a week without seeing a story about a data breach or ransomware hitting organizations. These breaches can be very costly, but they still continue to show up. Are the good guys not winning the cybersecurity war? Organizations invest millions of dollars in security products and services, but they keep getting breached. We definitely have...

The calculus for disaster recovery and risk management is changing. Most small businesses within the past decade would often keep many of their critical technology assets locally, perhaps in a server closet, or a centralized data center for multiple offices. They built their own “vault” of applications, databases, email, files, etc., often on a few...

Digital fraudsters are using compromised servers and bogus links in an ongoing effort to target LinkedIn members with scams. The scam began when a Sophos employee received what it appeared to be an unexceptional email from someone they know in real life and with whom they keep in touch on LinkedIn. The body of the LinkedIn message informed the...