On January 12, 2018, GSA (General Services Administration) posted a request for public comment regarding updates to the General Services Administration Acquisition Regulation that will include new cybersecurity compliance and reporting requirements for federal contractors that access data on unclassified systems. Two regulations in particular will...

It's confirmed that some locations of the Applebee's restaurant chain suffered a point-of-sale (POS) breach involving customers' payment card data. On 2 March, RMH Franchise Holdings (RMH) issued a notice of data incident on its website. The statement explains how RMH, a franchisee of Applebee's...

Two significant ransomware attacks occurred in the first half of 2017. The first outbreak took place on May 12, 2017, when WannaCry leveraged a known Windows exploit to infect hundreds of thousands of vulnerable computers around the world, including 34 percent of UK National Health Service (NHS) trusts. Less than two months later, NotPetya abused...

This article is part 2 of 3 in the “Insider Enterprise Threats” series, outlining effective policies and practices for combating insider cyber security threats to the modern enterprise. In the first part of this series, we examined the seriously-overlooked threat posed by malicious insiders – employees, contractors, and more – and discussed user...

Colorado's Department of Transportation (CDOT) has suffered an infection from another variant of the same ransomware family that attacked it just days earlier. On 1 March, a variant of SamSam ransomware targeted employees at CDOT. The attack didn't hamper the Department's Traffic Operations Center,...

A massive data breach at the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Reserve has leaked the personal information of more than 20,000 Marines and civilians. According to reports, the compromised data included highly sensitive information, such as truncated Social Security numbers; bank electronic funds transfer and bank routing numbers; truncated credit card...

Data exposure reports have reached a dizzying pace in the past few months, and the security community has been focused on the risk from multiple angles. Now, a new study from HTTPCS gives us new insight into rates of vulnerable S3 configurations. HTTPCS scanned s3.amazonaws.com addresses looking for storage “buckets” and logged data on those that...

German officials are blaming Russian-linked black-hat hackers for breaching several federal agencies and stealing sensitive information. On 28 February, sources told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) that the Russian digital espionage group APT28 used malware to target the German government's secure computer network. ...

Tripwire's February 2018 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together the top vulnerabilities from Microsoft, Adobe and Oracle. BULLETIN CVE Adobe Flash APSB18-03 CVE-2018-4878, CVE-2018-4877 Microsoft Browser CVE-2018-0763, CVE-2018-0839, CVE-2018-0771 Microsoft Scripting Engine CVE-2018-0840, CVE...

Many of us in the cybersecurity world have followed this general mantra: protect the data, protect the data, protect the data. It’s a good mantra to follow, and ultimately that is what we are all trying to do. But there are different ways to protect data. The obvious method is to make sure it doesn’t get ripped off, but as we have noted in previous...

Many people view the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 as unnecessary and burdensome, but its introduction has had a dramatic impact on reducing accidents in the workplace, particularly within industrial settings. Today, it controls the safety of equipment used on process plants, the time professional drivers may spend behind the wheel, and even...

A new family of mobile malware called RedDrop exfiltrates victims' sensitive data including ambient audio recordings and sends it to cloud storage services. Wandera, a mobile security firm which spotted weaknesses in the CBS Sports app and mobile site back in 2016, uncovered the malware when a user clicked on an ad for the Chinese search engine...

BEC, or Business Email Compromise, is a contemporary twist on a staple scam. Often in the shadow of the more extravagant, media-friendly super-hacks or ransomware compromises, BEC is leading the line on both the number of attack victims and the direct losses encountered by businesses. Although not as en vogue as other ‘nouveau’ cybersecurity threats...

To distinguish the size of merchant companies and appropriately determine the level of testing required, the founding credit card companies created four different brackets ranging from Tier 1 to 4. Each tier is based on the number of transactions processed per year by the merchant and also dictates the testing a merchant must undertake. While...

Everyone in Silicon Valley and the tech industry, in general, is talking about “The Cloud.” “The Cloud” is something that’s not only trendy but also very useful for business. Why deal with the burden of running your own datacenters when companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft offer third-party cloud services that will be less expensive for your...

A relatively new ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) platform keeps victims guessing by not using a special file extension with the files it encrypts. On 22 February, security researchers began seeing reports from users claiming that Data Keeper ransomware had affected their computers. Victims found out about the infections by coming across the "!!! ####...

What would you say if I told you that now a hacker doesn’t even have to trick you into installing malicious files on your computer in order to steal sensitive data? Let’s take a look at how this form of (non-) malware works and, more importantly, how to protect yourself against it. How does this fileless malware attack occur? The big picture...

This article is part 1 of 3 in the “Insider Enterprise Threats” series, outlining effective policies and practices for combating insider cyber security threats to the modern enterprise. Insider cyber security threats are much more prevalent than most of us realize. IBM estimates that 60 percent of all cyberattacks are perpetrated by those with...

The Council of Economic Advisers recently released a report that examines the cost of malicious cyber activity to the U.S. economy. The report cites many of the usual findings from the Verizon DBIR and Ponemon reports—nothing new to those of us who live and breathe cybersecurity. However, the report caught my eye because it offers some very...

A security researcher has released an updated list of 500 million breached passwords so that organizations can use it to protect their systems. On 22 February, Australian web security expert Troy Hunt published the second version of "Pwned Passwords." The feature enables users to check a new or used password against a list of 501,636,842...