Federal investigators traced a malware infection at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to an employee's habit of viewing adult content. On 17 October, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) submitted a report in which it revealed its discovery of suspicious internet traffic during an IT security audit of the USGS computer network. The OIG specifically...

Last time, I had the opportunity to talk to Toronto’s own Jennifer Fernick. Somehow, she juggles graduate computer science studies with taking care of a bank’s cybersecurity. I couldn’t do that! This time, I had the honour of speaking with software tester Claire Reckless. Testing an application’s security and functionality is a vital cybersecurity...

Masquerading is a technique used in which a file name is maliciously named something similar to one which may be trusted. This specific technique is outlined in detail in the MITRE ATT&CK framework, as well. For example, a file named explorer.exe may seem more benign than one called explor3r.exe. However, file names may not be so easy to spot like...

A New Jersey man received a court order to pay $8.6 million for launching a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Rutgers University. On October 26, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey announced the sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge Michael...

The 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report digs deep into data-driven findings about the state of global cybersecurity across a number of industries that include manufacturing, healthcare, financial and public administration. Verizon’s 11th annual report revealed the trends behind 53,000 cybersecurity incidents and 2,216 confirmed data breaches. As...

Has there ever been a time in your life when you asked, “How does that work”? In the early days of computing, we learned that BIOS stood for “Basic Input Output (instruction) Set.” It is a set of nonvolatile instructions that dictate how a hardware system should function at startup. I remember my first experiences interacting with BIOS. I specifically...

One of the biggest concerns of any cybersecurity analyst is whether or not they will be able to stop an attack before it can do any damage. That said, making sense of the flood of alerts is, in itself, a time-consuming task. As networks become more complex and malicious attacks become more advanced, it can become difficult to hit your incident...

GandCrab has become one of the most devastating, and hence most successful, ransomware families of 2018. Alongside the Dharma cryptovirus family, GandCrab has enslaved the files of millions of users in a number of active campaigns via several iterations. This is the list of all the versions of the ransomware: GandCrab .GDCB GandCrab .CRAB (v2) ...

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued a fine of £500,000 to Facebook for the the data scandal involving Cambridge Analytica. On 25 October, the ICO confirmed it had issued the fine after notifying Facebook of its intention back in July. The United Kingdom's independent authority...

Most people in the world would describe it as a company "admitting they've been hacked." But if you're the breached company and want to apply the maximum amount of PR spin, you might instead issue a release saying you're "announcing a data security event affecting customer data." Read beyond the...

I had the opportunity to go to my local DevOps Days this year – DevOps PDX. If you've never been, and this was my first time attending, I highly recommend finding the next one closest to you and going. When I say closest to you, it's quite likely there will be one in a city nearby. Aside from the wonderful content, community and interactions, DevOps...

Online shopping has become so popular that it has contributed to the fall of once giant businesses like Sears. But beneath the convenience of ordering goods at home is a mammoth cybersecurity problem that affects millions of users every year. You may think shopping on sites like Amazon and eBay is completely safe – but it’s not. Hackers can get your...

October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, an annual, national observance to raise awareness for online security. This is a relevant topic today, as every day it seems like a new data breach makes headlines. From government organizations to big-name corporations, everyone is a target of cybercrime. Most of us have probably been a victim or...

Last time, I had the privilege of interviewing Fortalice Solutions founder Theresa Payton. Her combination of White House and private sector intelligence and cybersecurity experience gives her a truly one-of-a-kind perspective in this industry. This time, I got to speak to someone else I’ve met in person in Toronto’s cybersecurity community,...

One of the most accredited forms of validation for a citizen’s identity is a Social Security Number. A Social Security Number is a significant piece of government-issued identification in the United States. When this information is compromised, it can lead to serious problems where an individual to impersonate someone. A citizen may never know that...

On September 20, 2018, the White House released a new cybersecurity strategy with several important changes in direction meant to give government agencies and law enforcement partners a greater ability to respond to cybercrime and nation-state attacks. The new U.S. cyber strategy makes one message clear: America will not sit back and watch when...

A US court has sentenced a programmer to 30 months in a federal prison in connection with software that claimed to be a legitimate tool for Windows sysadmins to remotely manage computers, but was actually used by criminals to backdoor PCs and secretly spy on victims. 21-year-old Colton Grubbs, of Stanford, Kentucky, admitted earlier this year that...

During the last half of the 1990s, there was a concern for employees using their own home desktop computers to dial in to the corporate network from home. Thousands of articles and hundreds of conference sessions discussed the associated risks and then how to mitigate them through documented policies and the use of new tools. Soon after the year...

Weeks before the November midterm elections, roughly 35 million U.S. voter registration records from 19 states have appeared for sale on the dark web. Researchers from Anomali Labs and Intel 471 discovered the data for sale, which reportedly includes voters’ “full name, phone numbers, physical addresses, voting history, and other unspecified voting...

Last time, I had fun speaking with my friend, red team-minded student/teacher Alana Staszczyszyn. This time, I had the privilege of speaking with cybersecurity and intelligence industry veteran Theresa Payton. She’s always had tons of responsibility. She went from the White House to start her own private sector firm, Fortalice Solutions. Kim Crawley...