As expected, the start of 2021 has seen unprecedented movement in the U.S. with 22 states introducing comprehensive privacy legislation and even more introducing specific-use legislation. To date, hundreds of privacy bills were introduced across the states; to give some perspective, more than 50 privacy bills were introduced in New York alone....

The White House is reportedly moving swiftly forward with a plan to harden the security of the US power grid against hacking attacks. According to Bloomberg, the Biden administration has a plan to dramatically improve how power utilities defend themselves against attacks from countries considered to be adversaries in cyberspace - such as Russia,...

On March 17, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Treasury Department announced the extension of the federal income tax filing due date from April 15, 2021 to May 17, 2021. This decision is designed “to help taxpayers navigate the unusual circumstances related to the pandemic,” IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig explained in a news release....

Where were you when you first heard about the SolarWinds breach? It’s not unusual for information security professionals to learn about a breach. Keeping track of the news is part of the job. The SolarWinds attack, however, was different for two primary reasons. First, it reached the level of mainstream news. The majority of breaches stay mostly...

After a year of lockdown, or nearly full lockdown, due to the ongoing health crisis, we learned a lot from how our organizations responded when we all had to change our work habits to a home-office setup. Many companies that had only a casual relationship with Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology had to quickly reach expert-level proficiency in...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s April 2021 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-939 on Wednesday, April 14th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-28310 Borin Larin of Kaspersky Lab discovered this vulnerability being actively used for exploitation and suspects that it...

In this blog series, I will be putting the spotlight on useful Ghidra features you may have missed. Each post will look at a different feature and show how it helps you save time and be more effective in your reverse engineering workflows. Ghidra is an incredibly powerful tool, but much of this power comes from knowing how to use it effectively. ...

Tripwire's March 2021 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from SaltStack, VWware, BIG-IP and Microsoft. First on the patch priority list this month are patches for vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange (CVE-2021-27065, CVE-2021-26855), SaltStack (CVE-2021-25282, CVE-2021-25281), BIG-IP (CVE-2021-22986) and VMware...

Digital attackers are increasingly launching sophisticated campaigns in an effort to target U.S. federal agencies and other organizations. Two recent examples demonstrate this reality. These are the SolarWinds supply chain attack and the HAFNIUM Exchange exploit campaign. The SolarWinds Supply Chain Attack In mid-December 2020, the security...

Hidden deep in Google’s release notes for the new version of Chrome that shipped on March 1 is a fix for an “object lifecycle issue.” Or, for the less technically inclined, a major bug. Bugs like these have been common in Chrome, leading some to wonder whether the world’s most popular web browser is as safe as it could be? Google created Chrome as...

Cybercriminal extortionists have adopted a new tactic to apply even more pressure on their corporate victims: contacting the victims' customers, and asking them to demand a ransom is paid to protect their own privacy. At the end of March, Bleeping Computer reported that the Clop ransomware gang had not stopped at threatening hacked companies and...

Asset management is a tricky subject. In many cases, organizations have no idea about how many assets they have, let alone where they are all located. Fortunately, there are tools that can assist with reaching your asset management goals. While Tripwire Enterprise (TE) is great for detecting unauthorized changes on your system and also for ensuring...

Organizations are increasingly turning to containers to fuel their digital transformations. According to BMC, a 2019 survey found that more than 87% of respondents were running containers—up from 55% just two years earlier. Additionally, 90% of survey participants that were running applications in containers were doing so in production. That was up...

When it comes to cybersecurity, industrial IT—consisting mainly of operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS)—has failed to keep up with development in the enterprise IT world. That’s mostly because industries’ adoption of internet technology has been slower when compared with enterprises. It would take some time to close the...

CISA, the US Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has told federal agencies that they have until 12:00pm EDT on Monday April 5 to scan their networks for evidence of intrusion by malicious actors, and report back the results. CISA is ordering agencies with on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers to...

The latest Honeywell USB Threat Report 2020 indicates that the number of threats specifically targeting Operational Technology systems has nearly doubled from 16% to 28%, while the number of threats capable of disrupting those systems rose from 26% to 59% over the same period. Let’s face it. Critical infrastructure operators in manufacturing,...

Encryption has been a hot topic of discussion during the implementation phase of most data privacy laws. In the age where organizations are dealing with large volumes of data each day, the protection of this sensitive data is critical. The data, which is seen as a business-critical asset for organizations, should be protected against malicious...

Organizations are increasingly introducing new Internet of Things (IoT) devices into their environments. According to Statista, the aggregate number of IoT devices deployed by organizations globally increased from 7.74 billion in 2019 to around 8.74 billion a year later. The market and consumer data firm reported that the next few years will see...

NIST’s timely new release of Special Publication (SP) 800-172 (formerly referred to in draft form as 800-171B) provides exactly what its title says, Enhanced Security Requirements for Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information: A Supplement to NIST SP 800-171. Yet it goes a step further to protect controlled unclassified information (CUI)...

Organisations hit by ransomware attacks are finding themselves paying out more than ever before, according to a new report from Palo Alto Networks. The Unit 42 threat intelligence team at Palo Alto Networks teamed up with the incident response team at Crypsis to produce their latest threat report which looks at the latest trends in ransomware, and...