Another National Cyber Security Awareness Month is upon us, and although I have recently wished for its demise through better automated protections, there are some things that cannot be automated. One such area of manual interaction is all the social networks that we use. Unless you are a celebrity with a public relations team behind your every post...

A new sextortionist scam is using spoofing techniques to trick users into thinking that digital attackers have compromised their email accounts. As reported by Bleeping Computer, an attack email belonging to this ploy attempts to lure in a user with the subject line "[email address] + 48 hours to pay," where [email address] is their actual email...

Identity theft is on the rise. According to a report from Javelin Strategies, 16.7 million Americans fell victim to identity fraud schemes in 2017 – that’s up eight percent over the previous year. Thieves made off with $16.8 billion from US consumers. Residents of some states are at higher risk of becoming identity theft victims, according to...

The healthcare industry is one of the largest industries in the United States and potentially the most vulnerable. The healthcare sector is twice as likely to be the target of a cyberattack as other sectors, resulting in countless breaches and millions of compromised patients per year. Advancements in the techniques and technology of hackers and...

An effective container security strategy consists of many parts. Organizations should first secure the build environment using secure code control along with build tools and controllers. Next, they should secure the contents of their containers using container validation, code analysis and security unit tests. Finally, they should develop a plan to...

A Chinese intelligence officer has been extradited to the United States after being charged with conspiracy to commit economic espionage against certain U.S. firms. Logo of the Ministry of State Security. (Source: Wikipedia) On 10 October, the U.S. government unsealed an indictment filed by a federal...

In a recent article about U.S federal policy concerning IoT security, Justin Sherman identified several gaps in both cybersecurity and privacy policies. As Sherman has highlighted: The United States federal government, like the rest of the world, is increasingly using IoT devices to improve or enhance its existing processes or to develop new...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s October 2018 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-800 on Wednesday, October 10th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2018-8453 This vulnerability, a privilege escalation in Win32k’s handling of objects in memory, has been exploited in the...

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) issued a fine of £120,000 to Heathrow Airport Limited (HAL) following a data security incident that occurred in 2017. On 8 October, ICO announced the penalty under section 55A of the 1998 Data Protection Act (DPA). Under that piece of legislation, the ICO...

A recent report found that data breaches compromised a total of more than 4.5 billion records in the first half of 2018. In its report "2018: Data Privacy and New Regulations Take Center Stage," Gemalto wrote that its Breach Level Index (BLI) system tracked 4,553,172,708 breached data records during...

Last time, I had the privilege of speaking with web security specialist Pam Armstrong. This time I got to chat with Alana Staszczyszyn, someone whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in person. She’s very active in Toronto’s cybersecurity scene. She’s currently a student, but she has so much to teach people in our industry about evolving cyber...

The first article in this series examined configuration hardening, essentially looking at ports, processes and services as the “doors, gates and windows” into a network where security configuration management (SCM) becomes the job of determining which of these gateways should be open, closed, or locked at any given time. Now it’s time to look at...

If you’re in your 40s or 50s, you probably remember a TV series called The Twilight Zone. (Millennials, think Netflix’s Black Mirror). Every show was its own stand-alone story that took viewers into an alternate reality where things got weird in a hurry followed by twists and turns culminating in a surprise ending. These types of winding plots aren...

Everyone responsible for securing organisations today recognises the significant growth in BEC (Business Email Compromise) attacks, also sometimes known as "Whaling" or "CEO fraud". BEC scammers trick accounting and finance departments into wiring considerable amounts of money into bank accounts under their control, posing as genuine suppliers...

The debate over the degree of regulation of broadband Internet providers in the U.S. has been going on almost as long as broadband Internet service has been available. In 2004, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) first described a set of non-discrimination principles to ensure that users had access to content on an equal basis. In 2008, the FCC...

Criminals are hijacking Instagram influencers' accounts and demanding that victims pay a ransom in bitcoin to regain access. Kevin Kreider, a Los Angeles-based Instagrammer who's known for his following around fitness-related topics, told Motherboard that extortionists first targeted him when someone named Lana reached out with a fake business...

Inspired by Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the State of California has set a new precedent with the passage of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The major data incidents last year have driven citizens into a frenzy about securing their data, and states have rushed to developing and passing policies and legislation....

A malware outbreak was responsible for a network outage that affected a limited number of Recipe Unlimited restaurant locations. On 1 October, Recipe Unlimited announced a malware attack of which it learned at the end of September. The Canadian restaurant chain owner and food distributor said in a statement that it responded by taking certain...

The healthcare industry continues to be challenged with securing patient health information. According to the Verizon Protected Health Information Data Breach Report (PHIDBR), 58 percent of all security incidents involved insiders, ransomware accounts for 70 percent of all malicious code, and alarmingly, basic security hygiene is still lacking at...