A new report, which surveyed 1200 IT security professionals in 17 countries around the world, has shone a light on a dramatic rise in the number of organisations willing to pay ransoms to extortionists. The ninth annual Cyberthreat Defense Report (CDR), produced by CyberEdge Group, shows that not only has there been a substantial increase in the...

Tripwire's March 2022 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities for Microsoft, Google Chrome, and Spring Framework.First on the patch priority list this month is a remote code execution vulnerability in the Spring Framework (CVE-2022-22965). This vulnerability has been added to the Metasploit Exploit Framework and any...

In recent years, cyber espionage has been growing in magnitude and complexity. One of the most common targets is Industrial Control Systems (ICS) within critical infrastructure sectors. With many organizations relying more heavily on ICS networks, there has been an increase in threats and cyberattacks aimed at these systems. Not only do these...

What does the term “Legacy Systems” mean to you? What image does it conjure up?Well, the word “legacy” can mean “something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past.” For example, the “legacy of the ancient philosophers”, or perhaps “legacy of ancient IT professionals.” A legacy is something that is passed from one...

All of us at Tripwire’s Vulnerability Exposure and Research Team (VERT) are constantly looking out for interesting stories and developments in the infosec world. Here’s what cybersecurity news stood out to us during the week of March 28, 2022. I’ve also included some comments on these stories. Muhstik Botnet Targeting Redis Servers Using Recently...

Environmental sustainability has become a significant concern for businesses today. Yet, many are not seeing the connection between sustainability efforts and cybersecurity. Despite how different they may seem, these two topics are intertwined. If environmental services and infrastructure don’t embrace better security, the consequences could be...

To put the impact of cybercrime into perspective, let’s examine some important, and startling, numbers: Data breach costs increased from $3.86 million to $4.24 million in 2021. Every 39 seconds, there is an attack. About 90% of healthcare organizations have fallen victim to at least one breach within the past three years. The bottom line?...

Last week, I attended the NotSoSecure Advanced Web Hacking training. While there were plenty of interesting topics taught, one that caught my attention was Out-of-Band (OOB) Data Exfiltration using DNS. Back in 2018, NotSoSecure published an Out of Band Exploitation (OOB) CheatSheet. In that document, they cover methods by which you can exfiltrate...

A few months ago, a popular cybersecurity news organization posted an urgent notice on social media seeking help to recover their data after their blog was deleted. They announced that they had no backups and they were desperately trying to contact the site administrator to restore their blog collection. This was as maddening as it was...

Originally envisaged as a convenient way to store web data, cookies emerged as a powerful marketing tool in the 2000s. For many years, digital marketers relied on cookies for data collection. However, in recent history, new privacy laws, browser features, and plug-ins have changed the landscape of data collection. Marketers have had to develop...

Have you ever confused your acronyms? Perhaps you have laughed when someone has had to explain some of the acronyms used in text messages. Business, and especially technology acronyms are almost as plentiful as text acronyms. There are few things as embarrassing as being in a business meeting, and mistaking one acronym for another. This happened...

All of us at Tripwire’s Vulnerability Exposure and Research Team (VERT) are constantly looking out for interesting stories and developments in the infosec world. Here’s what cybersecurity news stood out to us during the week of March 21, 2022. I’ve also included some comments on these stories. Misconfigured Firebase Databases Exposing Data In...

Security isn’t a simple matter of caring or spending time reading manuals or being told what you can or can’t do. Security is understanding how to view the world from a different perspective: instead of functional does it work, viewing it as how can I break it. In our personal lives, it's how can someone misuse this? Be it our social media pictures,...

Cloud computing has emerged as the go-to organizational workload choice because of its innate scalability and flexibility. However, cloud computing still comes with some security risks. Examining cloud security is an important part of adopting this new technology. Presently, cloud-native security is experiencing changes and innovations that help...

Many UK business and technology executives aren’t hopeful about their digital security going into 2022. In a survey of 3,600 business and technology executives, of which 257 were from the UK, PwC learned that a majority (61%) of respondents expected to see an increase in reportable ransomware attacks next year. An even greater proportion (64%) of UK...

What is this AvosLocker thing I’ve heard about? AvosLocker is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gang that first appeared in mid-2021. It has since become notorious for its attacks targeting critical infrastructure in the United States, including the sectors of financial services, critical manufacturing, and government facilities. In March 2022, the...

What is EDoS? Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) is a cybersecurity threat targeting cloud environments. EDoS attacks exploit the elasticity of clouds, particularly auto-scaling capabilities, to inflate the billing of a cloud user until the account reaches bankruptcy or large-scale service withdrawal. EDoS attacks exploit the cloud’s...

Requirements for reporting cybersecurity incidents to some regulatory or government authority are not new, but there has always been a large amount of inconsistency, globally, in exactly what the requirements are. More recently, there’s been a growing trend across government and regulatory bodies in the United States towards shorter timeframes for...

All of us at Tripwire’s Vulnerability Exposure and Research Team (VERT) are constantly looking out for interesting stories and developments in the infosec world. Here’s what cybersecurity news stood out to us during the week of March 14, 2022. I’ve also included some comments on these stories. Most Orgs Would Take Security Bugs Over Ethical Hacking...

One of the main challenges of OT security is the problem of compatibility. OT components often differ significantly from each other in terms of age and sophistication as well as software and communication protocols.This complicates asset discovery and makes it difficult to establish a consistent cybersecurity governance approach. Combating asset...