China has been accused of conducting a "massive" hack against a supercomputer owned by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). Source: Security Affairs The BoM supercomputer is the largest of its kind in Australia and passes information to several different agencies, including the Department of...

The NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection standards are the most effective tools for securing the electrical supply today. If you think that's a controversial statement, let me explain why I make it. Cybersecurity in the context of the electrical supply is synonymous with reliability. The cyber-risks to electric utilities are ultimately risks to...

With so many disparate offerings and so much pressure to be ‘conducting’ threat intelligence, companies today risk investing a lot of time and money with little positive effect on security. Threat intelligence is the process of moving topics from ‘unknown’ to ‘known unknowns’ by discovering the existence of threats within your environment and moving...

The scope of the FBI's national security letters (NSL) has been revealed by a lifted gag order on a man who fought against compliance for 11 years. On Monday, the United States District Court - Southern District of New York permitted the filing of a NSL received by Nicholas Merrill, founder of Calyx Internet Access, back in 2004. He has refused to...

I recently attended a conference for security professionals at which a number of experienced (sounds better than seasoned) CISOs and SOs were presenting their insights into the challenges of cyber attacks and cyber crime faced by their organisations. Almost without exclusion, each presenter used the term CIA when discussing methodologies and...

I have been in the field of security for over two decades. During this time, I have seen solution providers deliver increasingly feature-rich and sophisticated products, solutions and services, enabling organizations to be more secure. Furthermore, I’ve seen many companies change their entire approach to cyber security – companies that, for the most...

Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, has seized nearly 1,000 websites illegally selling counterfeit merchandise to online consumers, authorities reported. In a press release, the agency said its international operation – known as In-Our-Sites (IOS) VI – tackled the sale of counterfeit...

A Swedish court has ruled that copyright holders cannot force internet service providers (ISPs) into blocking their customers from accessing the popular torrent website The Pirate Bay. According to a report by TheLocal.se, a Swedish newspaper, the District Court of Stockholm has ruled that Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget's operations do not constitute...

A transformative event is occurring where countless industrial devices, both old and new, are beginning to use Internet Protocol communication technologies. We refer to these collections of IP-enabled industrial devices and associated networks as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The Industrial IoT is at the very core of disruptive visions,...

In the spring of 2014, researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies identified a powerful strain of banking malware whose code functions similarly to that of ZeuS. The malicious software, now formally known as Dyreza, hooks into Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox, at which point in time it harvests sensitive data whenever...

This open source, crowdfunded router boasts a unique set of features, including the ability to update its own security and analyze the traffic between the Internet and the host network. Based on the Latin word for "tower", the Turris Omnia router is open source and runs OpenWrt, a free operating system that not only provides Omnia's users with the...

Cyber Monday is the heaviest online shopping day in the United States, with last year’s sales exceeding $2 billion within 24 hours. Unfortunately, for bargain-hungry consumers, the holiday shopping season is also a bonanza for cyber criminals. The huge uptick in website traffic means more potential targets, making the holiday season the perfect time...

A security researcher has developed a device called MagSpoof that can emulate any magnetic stripe or credit card wirelessly. Hacker Samy Kamkar first came up with the idea shortly after he lost his American Express card last August. At that time, he noticed a pattern in his replacement card's last four digits when compared to those of his previous...

*Updated 12/7/2015 – NOTE: The WeMo attack vector described in this article was resolved with WeMo firmware release 2.00.8643. Customers are encouraged to install the latest update immediately. There were many activities hosted at SecTor 2015. My favorite activity was the Internet of Things Hack Lab sponsored by Tripwire. The term Internet of...

You know that cybersecurity risks exist for your company; so does your board. They know cybersecurity is a business issue, and they also know they need to be concerned about what it means to their business. But more often than not, the board doesn’t have a concrete understanding of how they can actually help. In a recent paper, Top 5 Tips for...

Dell Inc., a computer technology company, has provided instructions to customers on how they can remove a recently discovered root Certificate Authority (CA) from their laptops and PCs. On Monday, a Reddit user by the name of rotorcowboy posted a thread in which they explained how they had discovered a self-signed root CA called "eDellRoot" while...

The actual origination of the above phrase (worth reading in full) is Ecclesiastes 1:9, the Old Testament. With respect to whatever religion you worship, the point is simply to highlight the naivety in assuming something to be new or original without paying due attention to available mavens. Every “new” idea has some sort of precedent or echo from...

One of the world’s largest hotel and leisure companies announced late last week that point-of-sale (PoS) systems at more than 50 of its hotels located across North America have been compromised. Starwood Hotels & Resorts – which owns and operates a number of international brands, including St. Regis,...

Researchers have discovered two new utilities that are closely associated with the wiper malware used to disrupt the computer networks of Sony Pictures Entertainment last year. After phishing for employees' login information, the attackers responsible for the breach used a strain of wiper malware known as "Destover" to wipe the files off of company...

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, cybercriminals have developed a destructive new form of ransomware that targets the websites of online retailers. According to independent security journalist Brian Krebs, fraudsters have been leveraging the malware – dubbed ‘Linux.Encoder.1’ – to essentially hold a site’s files, pages and images for...