Resources

Blog

Joint Effort Neutralized Over 850K Infections of Retadup Worm

A joint investigatory effort neutralized more than 850,000 unique infections of Retadup, a worm known for targeting Windows machines in Latin America. In March 2019, Avast came across an interesting cryptomining payload that arrived with a advanced stealthy process hollowing implementation. The security firm decided to look into what means of...
Blog

Free Decryption Tool Released for Syrk Ransomware

Security researchers have released a decryption tool which victims of Syrk ransomware can use to recover their files for free. Emsisoft found that Syrk arrived with its own decryptor, but the security firm decided to release its own utility for three reasons. First, it found that the crypto-malware was still in development, which could mean that...
Blog

Who Is Responsible for Your Cloud Security?

The cloud is a tremendous convenience for enterprises. Running a data center is expensive – doing so not only requires buying a lot of servers, cable and networking appliances but also electricity, labor costs, cooling and physical space. Services like Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, Oracle’s Cloud and Google’s Cloud Platform give businesses the...
Blog

Disruption: The True Cost of an Industrial Cyber Security Incident

Industrial control systems are essential to the smooth operation of various national critical infrastructure. While once segmented from the web, these systems are now becoming increasingly more networked and remotely accessible as organizations transform to meet the digital age. This development potentially exposes industrial control systems to...
Blog

IBM Study Shows Data Breach Costs on the Rise

For the 14th consecutive year, IBM Security released its annual Data Breach Report that examines the financial impact of data breaches on organizations. According to the report, the cost of a data breach has risen 12% over the past 5 years to $3.92 million per incident on average. These rising expenses are representative of the multi-year financial...
Blog

Massachusetts General Hospital Warns of Privacy Incident

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) announced that it learned of a privacy incident involving its Department of Neurology. MGH said that it learned on 24 June 2019 of an instance where someone gained unauthorized access to databases related to two computer applications used by its Neurology...
Blog

Survey: 84% of Security Pros Said Their Organizations Struggled to Maintain Security Configurations in the Cloud

Headlines continue to suggest that organizations’ cloud environments make for tantalizing targets for digital attackers. Illustrating this point, the 2019 SANS State of Cloud Security survey found "a significant increase in unauthorized access by outsiders into cloud environments or to cloud assets" between 2017 (12 percent) and 2018 (19 percent)....
Blog

Embrace the Chaos: An Emerging Trend in Software Engineering?

What if your job was to break things repeatedly in order to make them work better? Sounds like the dream of every curious six-year old, but it's actually an emerging software engineering trend based in the transition from devops to devsecops. It's designed to test systematic limitations with the goal of improving security and performance under any...
Blog

Forensics in the Cloud: What You Need to Know

Cloud computing has transformed the IT industry, as services can now be deployed in a fraction of the time that it used to take. Scalable computing solutions have spawned large cloud computing companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. With a click of a button, personnel can create or reset entire infrastructure...
Blog

Being a CISO Isn't Just About Information Security - It's About Building a Stronger Business Strategy

Gone are the days when being a CISO (or even just ‘the security guy’) was about actual information security or IT security. Even the term IT security is outdated now, as it emphasizes a one-dimensional view of what security is really about. However, I digress… The information security element of CISO is correct, but for a variety of reasons, the CISO’s role is very different from what it was a...
Blog

Climbing the Vulnerability Management Mountain: Taking the First Steps Towards Enlightenment

Just as you would map a hike or climb by creating waypoints you plan to hit each day, you must plan your vulnerability management process by creating similar goals. We call these goals Maturity Levels, from ML0 to ML5, as we defined them in the last blog. You have your asset inventory from an open-source tool, asset tracking database or maybe your...
Blog

Protecting Modern IoMT Against Cybersecurity Challenges

Even though the healthcare industry has been slower to adopt Internet of Things technologies than other industries, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is destined to transform how we keep people safe and healthy, especially as the demand for lowering healthcare costs increases. The Internet of Medical Things refers to the connected system of...
Blog

Psychological Tricks of the Malware Trade

As a Professional Services Consultant, I have the pleasure of traveling all around the globe meeting clients and talking to a wide variety of IT security professionals who form the front line of defence against malware. One of my favorite topics is how people got their start in their careers in IT, but when I start discussing my own early years and...
Blog

IoT Devices — Why Risk Assessment is Critical to Cybersecurity

The IoT Threat LandscapeAs technology continues to pervade modern-day society, security and trust have become significant concerns. This is particularly due to the plethora of cyber attacks that target organizations, governments and society. The traditional approach to address such challenges has been to conduct cybersecurity risk assessments that...
Blog

New "Norman" Malware Took Part in Large-Scale Cryptominer Infection

Researchers identified a large-scale cryptocurrency miner infection in which a new malware family called "Norman" took part. The Varonis Security Research team made the discovery while investigating a cryptominer infection at a mid-sized company. Here's what they found through this effort: Almost every server and workstation was infected with...
Blog

MITRE ATT&CK July 2019 Update

On the last day of July, MITRE released its most recent update to the ATT&CK framework. The ATT&CK framework is a curated knowledge base of tactics, techniques, software, that adversarial groups have leveraged when compromising enterprise systems. The July 2019 update is relatively minor compared to the April 2019 update, which saw a new tactic with...