How Is YARA used? Historically, common detection methods have used file hashes (MD5, SHA1, and SHA256)—unique signatures based on the entire contents of the file—to identify malware. Modern threat actors have increased in sophistication to a point where every instance of a given malware will have a different hash, and that hash will vary from...

Managing security incidents can be a stressful job. You are dealing with many questions all at once. What’s the scope? Who do I need to engage? How do I manage all of this? As an Incident Commander (IC), you have many responsibilities. You’re responsible for driving an incident to resolution as quickly as possible, creating the resources necessary...

Convenience store and gas station chain Rutter's disclosed a security incident that might have affected customers' payment card data. According to a notice posted on its website, Rutter's launched an investigation after receiving a report from a third-party of someone having gained unauthorized...

Post-exploitation can be one of the most time-consuming but worthwhile tasks that an offensive security professional engages in. Fundamentally, it is where you are able to demonstrate what an adversary may do if they compromise a business. A big component of this is trying to get as far as you can without alerting the defenders to what you’re doing....

As if Puerto Rico wasn't having a hard enough time as it attempts to recover from a recession, the damage caused by devastating hurricanes in recent years, and a damaging earthquake last month, it now finds itself being exploited by cybercriminals. According to media reports, the government of the US island territory has lost more than US $2.6...

Security researchers spotted a new ransomware strain called "Ransomwared" demanding explicit pictures from its victims as a means of payment. Upon successful infection, Ransomwared runs its encryption routine, appending the file extensions ".ransomwared" and ".iwanttits" to each file it encrypts. Given the names of the file extensions, it's not...

Having worked with many individuals responding to incidents where their digital private images were shared without consent, social media or email accounts had unauthorised access, and even physical safety was a concern, it is all too familiar how terrifying the unknown can be. As someone who has been on both the victim's and later the responder’s...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s February 2020 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-870 on Wednesday, February 12th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2020-0674 A vulnerability exists in the way that Internet Explorer’s scripting engine handles objects in memory. An...

Security researchers have spotted a new PayPal phishing email scam that tries to steal a victim's Social Security Number (SSN), among other sensitive data. The attack email informed a victim that their PayPal account was locked, and it instructed them to click a "Secure and update my account now !" button. Doing so directed a user to a bit.ly link...

Listen and subscribe to our new podcast! Tripwire’s cybersecurity podcast features 20-minute conversations with the people who protect people from cyber threats. Hosted by Tripwire’s VP of Product Management and Strategy, Tim Erlin, each episode brings on a new guest to explore the evolving threat landscape, technology trends, and cybersecurity best...

What is cyber resilience? If you search the definition within the Oxford Dictionary, resilience alone is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” If you narrow the definition down to cyber resilience, it shifts to maintaining vs recovery. As noted on Wikipedia, it becomes “the ability to provide and maintain an...

You’ve seen the high-level stats on the cybersecurity skills gap, but I’ll remind you of some of the main ones from the (ISC)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study: In the United States, the cybersecurity workforce gap is nearly 500,000. The cybersecurity workforce needs to grow by 62% in order to meet the demands of U.S. businesses today. The global...

Phishing Attack A few years ago, I myself was vished, or ‘phished,’ over the phone. The caller was someone, likely offshore in a call center, who had done a little bit of research online to find my name, my phone number, my wireless phone carrier and a few other details that they used to build rapport with me on the phone. Spoofing the customer...

Companies are facing increased and complex cybersecurity challenges in today’s interconnected digital economy. The cyber threats have become more sophisticated and may harm a company via innovative new forms of malware, through the compromise of global supply chains or by criminal and hostile state actors. The hard truth is that it is difficult to...

It may not be the most efficient way to steal data from an organisation, let alone the most practical, but researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have once again detailed an imaginative way to exfiltrate information from an air-gapped computer. And this time they haven't done it by listening to a PC's fan, or watching the blinking LED lights...

The University of Maastricht publicly revealed that it paid a ransom of 30 bitcoins to recover its computer systems following a ransomware attack. Nick Bos, vice president of the university, shared what officials knew about the digital attack at a press conference. Bos noted that the security...

Malware closed out 2019 on a strong note. According to AV-TEST, malware authors’ efforts throughout the year helped push the total number of known malware above one billion samples. This development wouldn’t have been possible without the vigor exhibited by malware authors in the fall of 2019. Indeed, after detecting 8.5 million new samples in June...

The FBI said that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack potentially targeted a state-level voter registration site. In a Private Industry Notification (PIN) released on February 4, the FBI said that a state-level voter registration and voter information website received a high volume of DNS requests over the period of a month. Those requests...

I think we all know what log management is. As discussed in a 2017 article for The State of Security, log management is about systematically orchestrating the system and network logs collected by the organization. That being said, there’s still some confusion surrounding why an enterprise would want to collect log data in the first place. There are...

A spam campaign leveraged malicious RTF documents to distribute notorious infostealers including Agent Tesla and Lokibot. While digging through a few other spam campaigns, Lastline observed unusual use of the C# compiler from the command line in some samples. Its researchers performed additional analysis and found that the samples belonged to the...