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Graduating in Information Security: Part One

There has been a lot of news recently about the cybersecurity skills shortage. While there is a lot to be concerned about with all of the news about insecure devices and unsecured networks, I am confident that the shortage alarms are more headline-grabbing sensationalism than actual fact. In this two-part article, I will explore the problem of the...
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A Hacker's Perspective on Cyber Security

Just like cyber security professionals are constantly looking for ways to develop better and more secure software programs, hackers are always staying on top of the newest updates to overcome the latest defenses. To understand the importance of cyber security and how to stay ahead of hackers, it can be helpful to look at things from the opposite...
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Reflecting on MIT’s Report for Keeping America Safe

Last week, MIT and its Center for International Studies along with its Internet Policy Research Initiative released a report titled Keeping America Safe: Toward More Secure Networks for Critical Sectors. The report is focused on strategic challenges that are needed to enhance cybersecurity for critical infrastructures and sectors. Moreover, the...
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U2F: Next Generation 2-Factor Authentication

Brute force attacks are mitigated by using 2-factor authentication, which comes in many forms, such as time-based tokens, SMS and push authentication using a cell phone. A new contender has emerged: Universal 2nd factor or U2F. U2F is an authentication standard sponsored by the FIDO Alliance, whose members include the technology industry’s top...
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VM: Protecting Known Assets against Known Vulnerabilities

Two security controls, file integrity monitoring (FIM) and security configuration management (SCM), help organizations manage change. The former monitors for unauthorized changes to a system's state, whereas the latter looks for configuration changes that introduce security risk. Both components are crucial to a company's strategy for defending...
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Moving Beyond Network Security to a Data-Centric Approach

In my last post, I briefly summarized the evolution of network security. I will now discuss how network security strategies are no longer meeting the needs of organizations' increasingly complex IT environments. A Different Strategy Technological innovation has changed the nature of the network itself. No longer are employees limited to their...
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Immutable Integrity? – Blockchain Beyond the Bluster

Sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that the incessant overuse of the word ‘disruptive’ these days could do with some, well, disrupting of its own. So much is written, presented and marketed around apparently ‘disruptive’ use of technologies like AI, IoT and of course blockchain, when much of it could perhaps be better described as...
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iCloud Hacking: The Cybersecurity Gift that Keeps on Giving

You probably remember the massive iCloud breach in 2014 that resulted in compromised celebrity photos spreading through the internet like wildfire. That egregious invasion of privacy caused great embarrassment and damage to the reputations of nearly 100 A-list stars. Fortunately, these bad deeds did not go unpunished. In 2016, two men were brought...
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Malspam Campaign Personalizes Emails with Recipient's Name and Address

A spam campaign is personalizing its emails with the recipient's name and address so that more people will feel inclined to open the malicious attachment. Sophos Labs has seen several versions of this scam pop up in recent weeks. But although the text differs across samples, all the emails generally follow the same format. The scam email includes...
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Five Scams That Won't Make You Laugh on April Fool's Day

If there's one day of the year when everyone has their guard up, it's April Fool's Day. After all, who can put their hand up and say that they have never been duped by an April Fool's trick? Some of the classic April Fool's stunts have gone down in history, such as the BBC's news report from 1957 showing the annual spaghetti harvest in Switzerland....
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Understanding the Evolution of Network Security

Network security has been around almost as long as we’ve had networks, and it is easy to trace the various elements of network security to the components of networking that they try to mitigate. Over the past 30-35 years or so, the expansion of networking, especially the increased reliance on the Internet both as an avenue for commerce and as the...
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The Six Commandments of the GDPR

Otherwise known as the measuring stick by which your GDPR compliance will be assessed, the six core principles of the GDPR are the basic foundations upon which the regulation was constructed. Unquestionable and pure in nature, they are rarely acknowledged for one simple reason: five of the six have no real application in helping you in peddling...
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5 Signs Your Cybersecurity Awareness Program Is Paying Off

Not too long ago, a client of ours who had just released a dynamic new cybersecurity awareness course told me how blown away he was with the response they were getting. His inbox was full of compliments, and his colleagues wanted to duplicate his training success in their own departments. He recounted how employees stopped him in the hallway to...
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Attackers Targeting FTP Servers to Access Patient Health Data, Warns FBI

The FBI issued an alert to the healthcare industry warning of criminal actors actively targeting anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers to access protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII). According to the FBI’s Cyber Division, attackers are compromising such information from medical and dental entities...
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Ultra Secret Chat Using Wi-Fi Covert Channel

"Covert Channel [Wikipedia]: a covert channel is a type of computer security attack that creates a capability to transfer information objects between processes that are not supposed to be allowed to communicate by the computer security policy." Today, in a world where the hacking techniques are getting more and more sophisticated and security...
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The Sackcloth & Ashes of WordPress Security

This is my first blog in an ongoing “It’s Not Rocket Science” series featuring articles on Information security. "Security is not an absolute, it's a continuous process and should be managed as such. Security is about risk reduction, not risk elimination, and risk will never be zero. It's about employing the appropriate security controls that best...