2020 was dominated by news of the pandemic and anchored by reality that we all found ourselves in – entire families logging in remotely, trying to keep school and work feeling “normal.” While we tested the limits of what a home office could sustain, the privacy and security of a fully remote world was put front and center. In this piece, we take a...

Unfamiliar territory As a security analyst, engineer, or CISO, there are so many aspects of the field that require immediate attention that one cannot possibly know everything. Some of the common areas of security knowledge include topics such as where to place a firewall, configuration and patch management, physical and logical security, and...

If high-tech gadgets are on your holiday shopping list, it is worth taking a moment to think about the particular risks they may bring. Under the wrong circumstances, even an innocuous gift may introduce unexpected vulnerabilities. In this blog series, VERT will be looking at some of the Internet’s best-selling holiday gifts with an eye toward their...

As I had mentioned previously, this year, I’m going back to school. Not to take classes, but to teach a course at my alma mater, Fanshawe College. I did this about a decade ago and thought it was interesting, so I was excited to give it another go. Additionally, after a friend mentioned that their kid wanted to learn Python, I developed an Intro to...

As the retail world’s center of gravity shifts to the cloud, payment card fraud has followed suit. According to Verizon’s retail vulnerabilities study, attacks against e-commerce applications are by far the leading cause of retail data breaches. This trend mirrors similar outcomes in other industries, like food service. A complimentary Verizon study...

Last week, the United States Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) advised on initial steps to take in response to the SolarWinds software that was compromised by advanced persistent threat actors. While federal agencies were under a deadline to complete certain actions, this issue will require continued clean-up and longer-term...

We’ve previously discussed best practices for securing Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services but, this time, we are going to turn our attention to Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is growing at an impressive 83 percent year over year but generally receives less focus than AWS and Azure. We can use some of our best practice cloud...

It’s been a little while since we last reviewed a book, but a lot of my team has been spending time with Ghidra this year. Craig Young taught a course on the subject, and I’ve used it with my students at Fanshawe College in their Malware Analysis course. Given our fascination with Ghidra, reviewing The Ghidra Book: The Definitive Guide by Chris...

Vulnerability Description The United States Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has advised that an advanced persistent threat (APT) actor was able to insert sophisticated malware into officially signed and released updates to the SolarWinds network management software. The attacks have been ongoing since at least March 2020 and...

Life for university students has changed massively during the coronavirus pandemic, as it has for all of us. While some in-person lectures and seminars are still taking place, there has been a big shift to remote learning. This has, perhaps understandably, led to concerns about how well students are engaging with this way of studying. Many...

Digital threats confronting Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) are on the rise. That’s because attackers are increasingly going after the Operational Technology (OT) and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) that shareholders use to protect these assets. In their report “Caught in the Crosshairs: Are Utilities Keeping Up with the Industrial Cyber...

For the longest time, or as far as I can remember, the holy grail of all networking platforms has been the need for a single pane of glass, that single source of all information that you would need to be most effective. So, what is a single pane of glass? If you take it at face value, it simply means a window that consists of a single square...

Digital attackers launched a new ransomware campaign dubbed "PLEASE_READ_ME" in an effort to target MySQL servers. Guardicore first spotted the attack back in January 2020. After that, it witnessed a total of 92 attacks emanate from 11 IP addresses, with most based in Ireland and the United Kingdom at the time of analysis. The security firm found...

Aside from managing Tripwire's security research team, Tyler Reguly also teaches a college course on cybersecurity. On this episode, Tyler shares his experience teaching the next generation of cybersecurity practitioners who are about to graduate and enter the workforce. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4vHeutSHKSmIN7ofHJDfCB ...

2020 has been a very interesting year for the global workforce, with the vast majority of organizations having to rapidly transition to a remote workforce with little to no prior notice thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 (ISC)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study looks at the effect of this transition to remote work and how organizations have...

Moving to the cloud means a lot more than just moving your servers and applications to the cloud; it’s also about the data – and data always has a target on it. A lot of IT departments are finding that it’s easier to meet the “five nines” (99.999%) of uptime and availability by going outside their organization and letting AWS, Microsoft, or Google...

It's time to say a final "Goodbye" to Flash. (Or should that be "Good riddance"?) With earlier this week seeing the final scheduled release of Flash Player, Adobe has confirmed that it will no longer be supporting the software after December 31 2020, and will actively block Flash content from running inside Flash Player from January 12 2021. In...

Security researchers detected a new spear-phishing attack that's using an exact domain spoofing tactic in order to impersonate Microsoft. On December 7, IRONSCALES revealed that it had spotted the campaign targeting Office 365 users. Those users primarily worked in the financial services, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, utilities and telecom...

The Phorpiex botnet earned the notorious designation of "most wanted malware" for the month of November 2020. In its Global Threat Index for November 2020, Check Point Research revealed that it had observed a surge in new Phorpiex botnet infections that had affected four percent of organizations globally. This threat activity enabled Phorpiex to...

As I had mentioned previously, this year, I’m going back to school. Not to take classes, but to teach a course at my alma mater, Fanshawe College. I did this about a decade ago and thought it was interesting, so I was excited to give it another go. Additionally, after a friend mentioned that their kid wanted to learn Python, I developed an Intro to...