In May 2017, the Equifax data breach compromised critical credit and identity data for 56 percent of American adults, 15 million UK citizens and 20,000 Canadians. The Ponemon Institute estimates that the total cost to Equifax could approach $600M in direct expenses and fines. That doesn’t include the cost of the security upgrades required to bring...

If you’ve been online recently, you may have read the news about hackers demanding a ransom from Dublin’s tram system. Visitors to the Luas website were greeted by the hackers’ message threatening to publish the stolen information unless they were paid one Bitcoin (approximately 3,300 Euros or US $3,800). While the message itself appeared to be...

A short-lived malvertising campaign leveraged a steganography-based payload to target Mac users with the Shlayer trojan. Named for its use of veryield-malyst[dot]com as one of its ad-serving domains, the "VeryMal" threat actor conducted its malvertising campaign between 11 January 2019 and 13 January 2019. That's not a long time period to remain...

Security researchers are warning of a new wave of phishing emails which are using an unusual disguise in their attempt to both bypass scanners at email gateways and dupe unsuspecting users. The attack arrives in users' inboxes in the form of an email purporting to be a notification about a voice message using subject lines such as "PBX Message," ...

When he issued Executive Order 13800 (EO 13800) on Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure, President Trump’s goal was to highlight that security and public accountability of government officials are foundational pillars while emphasizing the importance of reducing cybersecurity risks to the Nation. In...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued an emergency directive that requires federal agencies to mitigate the threat of Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure tampering. In "Emergency Directive 19-01," DHS explains that it's been working with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure...

If you have ever heard of the Federal Information Security Management Act, then you are aware of the work done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The goal of the Act, not to mention the subsequent documents that resulted from strategies designed around implementing it, led NIST to create works designed to bolster security on the...

STOP ransomware is using adware installers disguised as cracks as a new method of distributing itself to unsuspecting users. According to Bleeping Computer creator and owner Lawrence Abrams, websites known for distributing software cracks, or software which has been modified to remove or disable certain features, commonly use adware bundles to...

A new strain of ransomware known as "Phobos" is using the same ransom note employed by Dharma to demand payment from its victims. Ransomware incident response provider Coveware found that Phobos' ransom message differs from Dharma's only in the branding used for its header and footer. Otherwise, the notes are exactly the same. ...

The Internet of Things (IoT) broadly refers to devices and equipment that are readable, recognizable, locatable, addressable and/or controllable via the internet. This includes everything from edge computing devices to home appliances, from wearable technology to cars. IoT represents the melding of the physical world and the digital worked, as...

Amazon GovCloud is an isolated Amazon Web Service (AWS) designed to allow customers and the U.S government agencies to move their confidential data into the cloud to address their compliance and specific regulatory requirements. It runs under ITAR, the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations. With this cloud service, US citizens can run...

A criminal Magecart gang successfully compromised hundreds of e-commerce websites via a malicious script that silently harvested personal data and payment card information as customers bought goods and services online. Rather than specifically target individual websites, the hackers audaciously hacked a third-party Javascript library from French...

A data breach known as "Collection #1" exposed approximately 800 million email addresses as well as tens of millions of passwords. In the beginning of January, multiple people reached out to Australian web security expert Troy Hunt about a sizable collection of files hosted on cloud service MEGA. This collection, which is no longer available on MEGA...

Hopefully, the title of this blog has gotten your attention. In one of my prior blogs, ICS Cybersecurity: Visibility, Protective Controls, Continuous Monitoring – Wash, Rinse, Repeat, we talked about how the malicious threat landscape for industrial controls systems is constantly evolving and getting more sophisticated, thereby raising the need to...

The cybersecurity space is in dire straits. Hackers are getting smarter and more sophisticated...and the availability of skilled men and women to combat them has never been lower. It’s an issue that’s been slowly growing worse year over year, yet there’s no clear solution in sight. What’s a business leader to do? The good news is that there’s never...

Mozilla has announced that it will disable support for the Adobe Flash Player plugin by default in version 69 of its Firefox web browser. On 11 January, Mozilla senior software engineer Jim Mathies opened a Bugzilla ticket announcing his employer's plan to "disable Flash by default in Nightly 69 and...

With the majority of people using smartphones these days, texting is all but a given when trying to communicate with your friends or family. But what about your doctor? A recent study determined that 96 percent of physicians use text messaging for coordinating patient care. This can raise eyebrows and red flags. Anyone with a cheap scanner, which...

A researcher has created a free decryption tool which victims of the PyLocky ransomware family can use to recover their affected files. Mike Bautista, a security researcher at the Cisco Talos Intelligence Group, is responsible for developing the tool. Cisco Talos has made this utility freely available for download on GitHub. First reported on by...