Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s September 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-849 on Wednesday, September 11th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-1214 An elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) driver can allow an...

A district within the Rockford Public Schools (RPS) system has confirmed it suffered a ransomware attack that affected parts of its network. On 6 September, District 205 of RPS posted a statement on Facebook in which it noted that its Internet, phones and information systems used to track attendance...

Changing consumer demands posed a serious challenge to the IT industry; it pushed firms to brainstorm about quick product delivery. This demand eventually gave rise to the demand for collaboration between Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams, welcoming the DevOps trend. As a result, everything started progressing with increased development,...

For years, ransomware actors have developed new families and attack campaigns in increasing frequency and numbers. Such activity peaked in 2017 but then fell in tandem with cryptocurrency miners’ rise. This development was short-lived, however. Between Q4 2018 and Q1 2019, Malwarebytes observed a 195 percent increase in ransomware detections...

Digital attackers created a fake PayPal website to distribute samples of a new variant of the Nemty crypto-ransomware family. Security researcher nao_sec uncovered the ransomware variant after they came across a fake PayPal website. This site promised users a return of 3-5 percent for making purchases through its payment system. But its primary...

Working as a cybersecurity analyst is incredibly challenging. It’s one of the only roles in IT that requires 24/7/365 availability. The constant stressors of the job can overload security analysts, which ultimately leads to burnout—affecting every factor of the job from performance to talent retention. Recently recognized by the World Health...

TechCrunch reports that a security researcher stumbled across an exposed server on the internet containing databases with a total of more than 419 million records related to Facebook users. According to TechCrunch's reporting, each database record contains a user's unique Facebook account ID (from which it's possible to determine a user name) and...

Digital criminals demanded $5.3 million in ransom from the City of New Bedford, Massachusetts following a ransomware attack. Jon Mitchell, Mayor of New Bedford, explained in a press briefing that the ransom demand came shortly after the City's Management Information Systems (MIS) staff detected a ransomware attack in the early morning hours of 5...

Containers have become a popular technology for enterprises that need to create agile, scalable and reliable applications. As they’re moving containerized workloads into production, many are adopting Kubernetes for container orchestration. While containerization enables DevOps to deploy software fast and efficiently, it also creates new security...

In early July, NIST released draft versions of two new publications: NIST SP 800-171 Revision 2: Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Systems and Organizations and NIST SP 800-171B: Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Systems and Organizations: Enhanced Security Requirements for Critical Programs and...

Tripwire's August 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important security vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Adobe. First on the Patch Priority Index are patches for Microsoft's Browser and Scripting Engine. These patches resolve 12 vulnerabilities including fixes for memory corruption, information disclosure and security feature bypass...

Security researchers spotted a phishing campaign that used SharePoint to bypass email gateway and other perimeter technologies. Cofense learned of the campaign after it analyzed an attack email sent from a compromised account @independentlegalassessors.co.uk. The email asked the recipient to review a proposed document by clicking on an embedded URL....

Payment services that operate electronically should adopt technologies that guarantees the safe authentication of the user and reduces, to the maximum extent possible, the risk of fraud. In order to achieve this, the European Union in 2007 passed the Payment Services Directive (PSD). The aim of this legislation is to regulate payment services and...

As the digital economy has grown and changed, cybersecurity has become an integral part of operating nearly any successful business. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is at the forefront of the modern cybersecurity organization, and CISOs have to adapt to the changing times in front of them. It used to be that the path to becoming a CISO...

Google has decided to expand the scope of one of its bug bounty programs as well as launch another security rewards initiative. On 29 August, Android Security & Privacy team members Adam Bacchus, Sebastian Porst, and Patrick Mutchler announced that the Google Play Security Reward Program (GPSRP) will...

Lumber Liquidators revealed that a malware infection on its systems compromised neither its employees' nor its consumers' sensitive data. On 27 August, the American hardwood flooring retailer said all but a very small number of stores had regained the ability to process transactions normally using...

A joint investigatory effort neutralized more than 850,000 unique infections of Retadup, a worm known for targeting Windows machines in Latin America. In March 2019, Avast came across an interesting cryptomining payload that arrived with a advanced stealthy process hollowing implementation. The security firm decided to look into what means of...

Security researchers have released a decryption tool which victims of Syrk ransomware can use to recover their files for free. Emsisoft found that Syrk arrived with its own decryptor, but the security firm decided to release its own utility for three reasons. First, it found that the crypto-malware was still in development, which could mean that...

The cloud is a tremendous convenience for enterprises. Running a data center is expensive – doing so not only requires buying a lot of servers, cable and networking appliances but also electricity, labor costs, cooling and physical space. Services like Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, Oracle’s Cloud and Google’s Cloud Platform give businesses the...