In September 2019, the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the release of a draft practice guide entitled, “NIST Special Publication (SP) 1800-23: Energy Sector Asset Management.” The NCCoE spent the next two months collecting comments from the public to improve...

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility Moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud offers a degree of flexibility and scalability that can be a boon to almost any organization. Having continuous software and asset availability in cloud environments with elastic, as-needed infrastructure is extremely valuable. Sharing security...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined app developer HyperBeard $150,000 for allegedly collecting children's data in an unlawful way. On June 4, the FTC announced that HyperBeard had agreed to pay a fine of $150,000 and to delete any information it had collected from children under the age of...

A 64-year-old man has pleaded guilty in a Texan court to charges of money laundering after a series of attacks that defrauded companies out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Kenenty Hwan Kim (who sometimes went by the name Myung Kim) took advantage of a simple trick that has proven highly effective to fraudsters in recent years. The method of...

Security researchers observed phishers leveraging a fake VPN configuration notification to target employees' Office 365 credentials. Abnormal Security found that the campaign attempted to capitalize on the trend of organizations implementing VPNs for the purpose of securing their remote employees during COVID-19. As quoted by the security platform: ...

Many governments in many countries around the world recognise that contact tracing plays a very important part to reduce the spread of the deadly disease, COVID-19. In this article, we take a look at the conventional method of contact tracking and comparing it against how technology helps contact tracing and its pro’s and con’s. Traditional contact...

Sometimes the best way to inform ourselves about how cybersecurity is dealing with a new threat, technology, or situation is to just ask. COVID-19, and the resulting lockdowns, quarantines and economic changes certainly counts as a ‘situation’ for cybersecurity. While it would be nice if cybersecurity could temporarily take a backseat while people...

A passenger railroad service announced that a data breach might have affected some passengers' personally identifiable information (PII). In a "Notice of Data Breach" letter sent to the Attorney General's Office of Vermont, Amtrak revealed that it had discovered the data breach on April 16 2020....

The coming of widespread 5G technology promises more than just faster everything, enhanced capacity and greater reliability. Leading proponents of the wonders of 5G, such as the theoretical physicist and author Michio Kaku, paint a picture of a true technological “paradigm shift, a game-changer.” The self-described futurist invites us to imagine a...

Tripwire's May 2020 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft, Adobe, SaltStack, and VMware. Up first on the patch priority list this month are patches for VMware vCenter Server and SaltStack Salt. The Metasploit exploit framework has recently integrated exploits for VMware vCenter Server (CVE-2020-3952) and...

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) warned that the Sandworm team is exploiting a vulnerability that affects Exim Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) software. In a cybersecurity advisory published on May 28, the NSA revealed that the Sandworm team has been exploiting the Exim MTA security flaw since August 2019. The vulnerability (CVE-2019-10149) first...

What is NetWalker? NetWalker (also known as Mailto) is the name given to a sophisticated family of Windows ransomware that has targeted corporate computer networks, encrypting the files it finds, and demanding that a cryptocurrency payment is made for the safe recovery of the encrypted data. ...

Security researchers witnessed the deployment of PonyFinal ransomware at the end of extended human-operated attack campaigns. In a series of tweets, Microsoft Security Intelligence revealed it had observed human-operated campaigns laying in wait for the right moment to deploy PonyFinal ransomware as their final payload. In their operations, the...

Over the last few weeks, most organisations have had to transition to enable their employees to work remotely. The key focus has been on business continuity during this trying time. Unfortunately, business continuity isn’t so easy. Keeping the day-to-day operations of the business running has been one of the hardest IT challenges that most...

A new ransomware family called "[F]Unicorn" masqueraded as a COVID-19 contact tracing app in order to target Italian users. On May 25, the the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) from the Agency for Digital Italy (AgID) revealed in an advisory that it had received a sample of [F]Unicorn from security researcher JamesWT_MHT. The sample analyzed...

Once an attacker has established access and pivoted around to the point of gathering the necessary data, they will work on exfiltration of that data. Not all malware will reach this stage. Ransomware, for example, usually has no interest in exfiltrating data. As with the Collection tactic, there’s little guidance on how to mitigate an attacker...

Big data is revolutionizing fleet management — specifically in the form of telematics. From engine diagnostics that track fuel efficiency and mileage to sensors that detect aggressive driving behavior and interior vehicle activity, this information is so valuable that we’re quickly approaching the point where connected technology will come standard...

Researchers found an updated version of AnarchyGrabber that steals victims' plaintext passwords and infects victims' friends on Discord. Detected as AnarchyGrabber3, the new trojan variant modified the Discord client's %AppData%\Discord\[version]\modules\discord_desktop_core\index.js file upon successful installation. This process gave the malware...

Only the truly committed ever reach the summit of anything. This sentiment holds true for vulnerability management. An organization cannot reach the summit without a serious commitment to fund and staff the program appropriately across the organization. Reaching ML:5 means tying the program to the business. Everyone must be aligned with the metrics...

Working remotely, either from home or from elsewhere, isn’t something new. It has been used by many companies worldwide over the past decade. That said, it was typically restricted to only a couple days a month or to specific IT-savvy departments. But as we have seen throughout time, adversity and crisis lead to change and sometimes revolutions in...