By now, everyone should have heard about the telephone scams involving a caller claiming to be from the CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) or the IRS (Internal Revenue Service). These tax agency scams generally receive the most coverage, but some don’t get much attention. Recently, people have also received calls from individuals claiming to be from their ...

Sandbox environments are a common feature of many cybersecurity solutions in their fight against advanced malware. Firewalls, endpoint protection, and even next-generation machine learning systems use sandboxes as one of their lines of defense. However, not all sandboxes are created equal. Sandboxes can take different approaches towards malware...

A new bill would strengthen California's data breach notification law by expanding businesses' obligations to inform their customers in the event of a security incident. On 21 February, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Assembly Member Marc Levine (D-San Rafael) revealed AB 1130. This...

Car maker Toyota admitted earlier today that it had suffered what appears to have been a malware attack at its facilities in Melbourne, Australia that knocked out its website and other communications. The first public sign of a problem appeared on Toyota Australia's website, which was offline for a period of time in the aftermath of the attack. The...

Web-based hosting service GitHub has decided to increase both the potential reward amounts and scope of its bug bounty program. On 19 February, GitHub announced its decision to raise its reward amounts. Security researchers can now expect to earn a minimum of $617 for reporting a low-severity vulnerability in the service's products. On the other end...

According to a hypothetical cyber risk scenario prepared by the Cyber Risk Management (CyRiM) project for risk management purposes, a ransomware strain that can disrupt more than 600,000 businesses worldwide within 24 hours would potentially lead to damages in the amount of billions of dollars. Cyber Risk Management (CyRiM) project is a...

The Separ infostealer is using what's known as "Living off the Land" tactics to target businesses as part of an ongoing attack campaign. Digital security company Deep Instinct detected the campaign and observed that an infection begins when an employee at a business organization receives a phishing email. The email comes with an attached PDF...

On 25 January 2019, the longest U.S. government shutdown in history came to an end. It’s unclear exactly what impact this closure had on the government’s digital security. A SecurityScorecard report found that the shutdown coincided with a rise of expired SSL certificates protecting .gov domains, thereby producing a slight dip in overall network...

In September of 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the addition of the Session Manager to the AWS Systems Manager. The session manager enables shell or remote desktop level access to your AWS EC2 Windows and Linux instances, along with other benefits. This is a great new feature, but care should be taken when enabling this capability. While...

In the original Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles,” an unscrupulous merchant, Cyrano Jones, gives a small furry animal called a Tribble to communications officer Uhura. Uhura takes the Tribble aboard the Starship Enterprise where the animal begins to quickly reproduce, thereby threatening to overrun the ship and cause significant damage....

Some customers of Optus said they saw incorrect information when they attempted to log into their profiles using the My Account website. On 13 February, customers of Australia's second-largest telecommunications company took to Twitter to explain that they were having issues accessing their accounts. One such user explained that the My Account...

FBI agents have arrested a 20-year-old man alleged to have been part of a hacking gang that not only launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks but also launched a wave of bomb and shooting threats against thousands of schools in the United States and United Kingdom. Timothy Dalton Vaughn of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is alleged to be...

With all the Russian election hacking scandals in the news during and after the 2016 Presidential election, curiosity consumed me to architect and run an experiment to see if I could monitor changes in the threat landscape in either Moscow, Russia or Washington D.C. during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. I have worked in four Security Operations...

With the evolution of technology comes new approaches to solving problems. Sometimes a new approach fixes the problem; sometimes it creates new ones. The good thing is as folks who work in fast-paced, high-tech environment, we information security professionals are great at quickly analyzing the new technologies and applying them to our daily lives....

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s February 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-817 on Wednesday, February 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-0676 The first vulnerability in the list today is an Internet Explorer vulnerability that is already seeing active...

Often claimed as a worst-case scenario, a container breakout vulnerability has been discovered in RunC, the universal container runtime used by Docker, Kubernetes and other containerization systems. Further research has discovered that a similar version of the same vulnerability affects the LXC and Apache Mesos packages. Identified as CVE-2019-5736,...

Dunkin' Brands Inc. ("Dunkin'") said that bad actors recently used credential stuffing attacks to target some DD Perks accounts. Kari McHugh, senior director of customer relations at Dunkin', wrote in a sample letter sent to the Office of the Vermont Attorney General that the company detected a wave of credential stuffing attacks near the beginning...

Two U.S. Senators expressed their concern that federal government employees could be undermining the United States' national security by using VPNs made by foreign companies. In a letter dated 7 February 2019, U.S. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) brought up the issue of VPN usage in...