Resources

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Why We Should Care About STIX & TAXII

I started getting involved in learning about the STIX (more here) and TAXII standards in earnest last year. These emerging standards enable effective sharing of cyber threat data in automated ways between different products, people and organizations. In many ways, that makes me a newcomer to these emerging standards; by that point in time The MITRE...
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VERT Vuln School: XSS versus XSRF

Cross-site scripting, commonly referred to as XSS, is listed third in the OWASP Top 10 for 2013 Web Application Security risks. Unlike SQL injection attacks, which target data on the server, XSS provides a vector for attacking the users of a vulnerable web site. At a general level, XSS is when an attacker can cause a web site to render with...
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Hacker Halted... What Is It?

Hacker Halted is an IT security conference with the intention of educating the attendees in security and ethics. Last year, the conference was held in Atlanta on October 16-17. What VERT Presented at Hacker Halted VERT presented an implementation of a protocol independent fuzzer, which was built using python. We developed a fuzzer because we...
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Wingstop Restaurant Investigating Possible Point-of-Sale Systems Breach

The Dallas-based restaurant chain Wingstop has reported its currently investigating a possible “data security attack” at four of its franchise locations, with one incident suspected of dating back to 2012. The company announced over the weekend that the potential breach may have allowed attackers to steal payment card information, such as account...
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ComRAT Spyware Still Evolving, Confirm Researchers

Security researchers have found that the developers of ComRAT, a complex remote administration tool, are still hard at work. Per an article published on its blog, G Data Software was able to successfully identify 46 different samples of the spyware and trace it to as far back as 2007. Some believe that the malware, otherwise known as ‘Turla’ and ...
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Dark Technology: Are You (Unknowingly) Putting Your Organization At Risk?

Within the last 10 years, our communities have become dependent on technology to support their homes and their business relationships. It may even arrive at the assertion that 99.99% of the population in any developed society will be utilising technology in both direct and indirect ways, say by association with the use of online banking, ATMs, on...
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10 Notorious Cyber Criminals Brought to Justice – No. 6

Last week, Tripwire published the story of Albert Gonzalez, a notorious hacker who was arrested in 2010 for his colorful record of cybercrime, including the 2009 breach against Heartland Payment Systems, Inc. that compromised 134 million credit cards. Tripwire now continues its series of some of the most notorious cyber criminals brought to justice...
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Buying Illegal Goods on the Digital Underground

Recently, Tripwire reported on the launch of ‘Silk Road Reloaded,’ the newest iteration of the Silk Road underground market where users can purchase drugs and fake IDs. The fact that Silk Road has returned is a testament to users’ ongoing ability to purchase illegal goods online, not to mention merchants’ ability to sell these products. After all,...
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Executive Cyber Intelligence Report: January 16, 2015

This report was prepared by The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and The Cyber Security Forum Initiative (CSFI) to create better cyber situational awareness (Cyber SA) of the nature and scope of threats and hazards to national security worldwide in the domains of cyberspace and open source intelligence. It is provided to Federal, State...
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US and UK Set to Increase Cyber Security Cooperation Via 'Cyber War Games'

The United States and the UK have announced that they will be creating “cyber cells,” intelligence units which will share information and conduct simulated cyber attacks in an effort to enhance the security cooperation between the two countries. “We have got hugely capable cyber defences,” UK Prime Minister David Cameron said about the agreement. ...
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Criminals Are After Your LinkedIn Account - Here is How to Protect it

Regularly in the news we hear about organisations having their Twitter or Facebook accounts compromised by cybercriminals - but they're not the only social media outlets which hackers and fraudsters have an interest in hijacking. Researchers at Symantec have warned this week of an increasing number of phishing emails being spammed out, claiming to...
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Vulnerability Scoring 102

In my last post, I talked about the basics of vulnerability scoring in vulnerability management and the disparity that can exist when you score the subjective elements of a vulnerability. We looked at the variance that can exist within CVSSv2 and how a properly developed score can show a clear difference between two unique issues. This time, I want...
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British Hacker Suspected of Defacing CENTCOM Social Media Sites

A Birmingham hacker who is believed to be fighting for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, better known as ‘ISIS,’ is suspected of having orchestrated the defacement of U.S. CENTCOM social media accounts earlier this week. Investigators believe that 20-year-old Junaid Hussain helped administrate a Twitter account that operated under the pseudonym ...
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A Request To Threat Intelligence Providers

At Tripwire, we have recently seen increasing interest from our customers in being able to match up file changes found by our products with threat intelligence that comes from a variety of external sources. We have run into a common issue here when we have gotten down to the implementation details, and so I write this post as a plea to all the new,...
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VERT Alert: January 2015 Patch Tuesday Analysis

Today’s VERT Alert addresses 8 new Microsoft Security Bulletins. VERT is actively working on coverage for these bulletins in order to meet our 24-hour SLA and expects to ship ASPL-597 on Wednesday, January 14th. MS15-001 Microsoft Application Compatibility Infrastructure Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2015-0002 ...
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The Voice of the CISO: Interview with Thom Langford

Last year, we announced The Voice of the CISO, a new series in which we interview prominent individuals in the field to gain detailed insight into the mind of a CISO and to better understand their role within an organization. Our latest interview features Thom Langford, an information security professional who is the Director of Sapient’s Global...
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‘Silk Road Reloaded’ Adopts I2P Anonymous Network and Darkcoins

‘Silk Road Reloaded,’ a new anonymous online drug market, draws upon a host of new anonymizing features, including I2P connectivity and the use of cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin. By embracing I2P, the administrators of the new Silk Road iteration now welcome a service that, as opposed to Tor, is friendly to peer-to-peer connections and uses a...
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10 Notorious Cyber Criminals Brought to Justice - #7

It’s 2015—another year for law enforcement agencies to find and arrest some of the most dangerous hackers. With this optimism for the New Year at heart, we now focus in on the story of yet another notorious cyber criminal brought to justice: Albert Gonzalez. Gonzalez, who is known as “Segvec,” “Soupnazi” and “J4guar” among Internet circles, is an...