A new wave of attacks involving PCASTLE malware are targeting systems located in China with the XMRig cryptocurrency miner. On 17 May, Trend Micro first observed a series of attacks that use PCASTLE, an obfuscated PowerShell script, to target mainly China-based systems with XMRig, cryptomining malware was involved in numerous attacks in 2018. The...

DevOps is revolutionizing the way enterprises deliver apps to the market by blending software development and information technology operations. This convergence creates an assembly line for the cloud, as Tim Erlin wrote for The State of Security, by increasing the rate at which companies can develop apps and deliver them to users. 11 Common Tools...

The move to the cloud—in many ways—is a return to the early days of computing. When I took my first computer class in 1978, we used an IBM system/360 system time share. We rented out time on a remote system, sent our jobs over a modem to a computer at a university and got back the results of the program run. Today, we’re using the cloud, which is just...

So, you have 2,000 network devices in your environment and everyone is telling you that you have to rotate all 2,000 device passwords every 30, 60 or 90 days (at a minimum). How are you going to manage this? The task seems monumental and time-consuming! If nothing is done, then your security/compliance posture will worsen due to reusing passwords that...

In May 2019, Verizon Enterprise released the 12th edition of its Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). Researchers analyzed a total of 41,686 security incidents, of which there were 2,013 data breaches, for the publication. More than half (52 percent) of those reported breaches involved some form of hacking. The report listed the most prominent...

Eurofins Scientific, an international group of laboratories headquartered in Brussels, revealed that a ransomware attack disrupted some of its IT systems. On 3 June, the food, pharmaceutical and environmental laboratory testing provider revealed that its IT security monitoring teams had discovered a...

Tripwire's May 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Adobe. First and most importantly this month are the patches available to resolve the BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) Remote Desktop Services remote code execution vulnerability. As noted by Microsoft: [This] remote code execution vulnerability...

It doesn’t seem very long ago that I was writing about the newly released Risk Management Framework (RMF) and explaining the value of NIST SP 800-37 to our clients. With RMF Revision 2 just recently published in December of 2018, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the RMF and to highlight some of its key updates. Overall, the new version...

Although DNS rebinding attacks have been known for over a decade now, they are only recently receiving attention as a practical attack surface. In the last year, quite a few popular products have been shown to lack DNS rebinding protections, and as a result, someone could operate them remotely using a malicious web site. Manufacturers have made a...

Security researchers have discovered a new strain of malware called "HiddenWasp" that they believe is being used in targeted attacks to seize control of Linux systems and open backdoors for remote hackers. According to a blog post by researchers at Intezer, the malware borrows from existing malware code publicly available on the internet including...

"OSCP is not about clearing the exam. It’s all about working deeply on labs." --Ramkisan Mohan (Check out his detailed guide to OSCP Preparation) I began my OSCP journey in the late fall of 2018. So far, I've rooted 23+ machines in the PWK labs, and I am still plugging away, hoping to get as many as possible, learn as much as possible and, of course...

News and social media aggregator Flipboard reset all users' passwords after discovering a security incident that might have affected some of their data. On 28 May, the company revealed that its engineering team had recently detected suspicious activity in the network environment where its databases...

The 2017 Deep Root Analytics incident that exposed the sensitive data of 198 million Americans, or almost all registered voters at the time, should remind us of the risks associated with storing information in the cloud. Perhaps the most alarming part is that this leak of 1.1 terabytes of personal data was avoidable. It was simple negligence. The...

Digital criminals have begun abusing a secure tunneling service to deliver samples of the Lokibot banking malware family. My Online Security came across an instance of this campaign when they received an email pretending to originate come from BBVA Banco Continental, a Spanish bank. The email leveraged the lure of a fake payment transfer to trick...

It seems like only yesterday that we were packing up the Tripwire stand after another fantastic year at Infosec and here I am (literally) counting down the days until the doors open for Infosecurity Europe 2019! The Tripwire team is always excited to get on the show floor and have great conversations with clients and partners, meet new people and of...

With data breaches regularly marking the headlines, it is no surprise that digital threats constitute an increasingly significant concern for the C-Suite and cyber security experts. What is surprising, however, is that these two groups don’t seem to share the same view of information security. They have different opinions when it comes to the digital...

Google found that users who add a recovery phone number to their accounts effectively block 100 percent of automated bot attacks by doing so. The tech giant arrived at this finding after teaming up with New York University and the University of California, San Diego to investigate the efficacy of basic account hygiene in preventing account hijacking...

Security researchers have released a tool that enables victims of GetCrypt ransomware to recover their affected files for free. On 23 May, web security and antivirus software provider Emsisoft announced the release of its GetCrypt decrypter. This utility asks victims of the ransomware to supply both an encrypted copy and the original version of a...