In part one of this two-part series, I described what we know about the September 14 attack against the drug sites on the Tor network. To review: The attack simultaneously took down 11 drug sites on the dark web, yet traffic patterns were unaffected. The site administrators indicated a problem on a public forum; and There was no discernible...

Last time, I spoke with Nitha Suresh. She's written IEEE papers and knows her stuff when it comes to pentesting and aircraft data networks. This time, I had the pleasure of interviewing Victoria Walberg. She has a lot of ideas when it comes to IoT and the cloud. Kimberly Crawley: Please tell me about what you do, Victoria. Victoria Walberg: I'm a...

A group of Muslim activists hacked a 'secure' mailing list used by the ISIS terrorist group and published 2,000 of its email subscribers online. On 10 November, a spokesperson for Amaq, one of the Islamic State's key outlets for communicating with its supporters and members, sent out an email written in Arabic to its subscribers. The update...

Think of all the recent DDoS attacks. They all seem to share the common trait of bad guys disrupting the normal flow of data against a legitimate business. Sometimes, these attacks are used for revenge, and other times, they are used for ransom. Sometimes, however, the bad guys become the targets. This is the story of an odd caper that played out on...

It's always encouraging to see Tripwire's products hold its own in an independent review. It's even better when the solutions excel. Indeed, those positive assessments confirm what everyone at Tripwire already knows about the strength of the company's offerings. The folks at SC Magazine recently published one such evaluation of Tripwire Enterprise....

Soft skills are a hot topic in information security. You’ll see a lot of articles, blogs and talks on the subject. I’d like to go a little deeper – beyond the basics of soft skills and talk about a concept from communication theory that can be used to achieve behavior change – efficacy. Efficacy is the ability to achieve a desired effect. In risk...

Hackers have been found exploiting a freshly-uncovered vulnerability in Microsoft's software to install malware on business computers. According to security researchers, since last month a Russia-linked hacking group known as APT28 have been using a Microsoft protocol called Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) to run malicious code through a poisoned Word...

Hackers have done the unthinkable by making off with a charity's funds right before the start of the 2017 Christmas season. The Utah Association for Intellectual Disabilities (UAID) first noticed something was wrong when it had not received any new email applications for help since 22 October. Typically, the charity gets numerous applications in...

While data center consolidation has been trending in government and commercial spaces since the 1970s, new government initiatives and directives released recently have created a new sense of urgency: those who haven’t yet consolidated are now required to. Many organizations are now looking to the cloud to meet the requirements. Whether they know it...

I’ve been involved in information technology and infosec since the mid-1990s. Until recently, I had not been actively attending infosec or hacker conferences. I started attending DEF CON in 2013 when the conference was held at the Rio Hotel. DEF CON was the first hacker conference I ever attended. I did not know many in the community and certainly...

Fraudsters are increasingly targeting potential home buyers and real estate professionals with wire fraud schemes and phishing scams. In May 2017, the FBI revealed that the identified exposed losses resulting from business email compromise (BEC) scams increased by 2,370 percent between January 2015 and December 2016. Those scams preyed on...

Last time, I talked with Glenda Snodgrass. She's a founder and the president of The Net Effect, a cybersecurity services company. This time, I had a fascinating discussion with Nitha Suresh. She taught me a bit about penetration testing and aircraft data networks. Kimberly Crawley: Hi, Nitha! Tell me a bit about what you do. Nitha Suresh: I am...

Over one million Android users unknowingly downloaded a fake version of the popular WhatsApp messaging service from the Google Play Store. Disguised as an “update,” the app was designed to look nearly identical to the official version, and claimed to be developed by “WhatsApp Inc.” Over the weekend, however, several users on Reddit flagged the...

Ransomware activity didn’t skyrocket last month, but there was definitely a substantial increase compared to September. Perhaps the most serious wake-up call was the onset of BadRabbit, a Petya-like culprit going on a rampage in Eastern Europe. A likely successor of the Cerber ransomware dubbed Magniber started making the rounds via the Magnitude...

Certain users of the Tor Browser should implement a temporary fix for a vulnerability that can potentially leak their real IP addresses. On 3 November, Tor Browser 7.0.9 rolled out to macOS and Linux users. Included in the updated version is a fix for an issue that affects Tor Browser 7.0.8 on those two operating systems. Windows users aren't...

What do your policies look like? If your organization is like most, then your policies are probably voluminous and all-encompassing. This is a good thing – or is it? Probably one of the most painful aspects of being an infosec professional is having to author or review policies. (Audit is the other painful aspect.) When you first entered the field,...

Security patches and updates leave companies at risk when they're running systems designated as end of life (EOL), such as .Net systems, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP. When Microsoft releases an update or patch after the operating system (OS) is no longer supported, cybercriminals and malicious software develops dissect the update and reverse...

We've been hearing a lot about IoT security recently. The news is overwhelming us with stories about baby dolls and baby monitors that can listen in on conversations at home, not to mention surveillance cameras that provide video streams to unauthorized individuals. To better understand these events, let’s start by looking at what is IoT. According...