A New Jersey hospital said that it was forced to cancel some surgeries and other medical procedures after falling victim to a ransomware attack. Hackensack Meridian Health, a non-profit health care center based in Edison, New Jersey, revealed to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that the attack began on...

I have wanted to do a series like this for some time. I frequently watch movies and point out social engineering and OSINT techniques or inaccuracies as well as OPSEC blunders. These blunders, in addition to the matrix style waterfall screens, are equally bad as the "hacking" you see in movies. So, let's level the playing field about the specific...

Researchers discovered a phishing campaign which attackers designed to harvest login credentials from government procurement services. According to Anomali Labs, malicious actors crafted their campaign to target various services used by public and private entities to match buyers and sellers of government services. They did so by directing...

The City of Waco has warned residents that their online payments for water services may have been intercepted by hackers who stole credit card details. The heart of the problem lies in the third-party online payment software that Waco and several other cities and municipalities use to let residents pay their bills, pay parking fines, as well as make...

Finding a security vendor that is the best fit for your company’s business objectives, culture, risk profile, and budget is challenging today. The purpose of this blog is to suggest that working with a “vendor partner” is more than working with a standard technology vendor in that a partner aligns not only with “Technology” concerns but also with ...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s December 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-863 on Wednesday, December 11th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-1458 A vulnerability in Win32k is currently seeing active exploitation that could give an attacker the ability to...

Attackers provided victims who paid with an updated Ryuk ransomware decryptor that could potentially damage their larger files. Emsisoft found that malicious actors had added numerous new features to Ryuk ransomware over the past year. In a lesser-known case, attackers gave Ryuk the ability to partially encrypt files that exceeded 54.4 MB in size....

As we begin our new decade of the 2020s, we can look back at the last 30 odd years and examine the collaboration between technology and our daily lives. If you think of your day-to-day, it’s easy to see how much our society relies on technology. Consider our smart devices such as mobile phones, watches, even homes. However, what about the technology...

A new Spotify-themed phishing campaign informed recipients that the music streaming service had frozen their subscriptions. On 5 December, MailGuard discovered an email that appeared to come from Spotify. The email itself used the display name "Spotify" along with the music streaming service's logo to lull recipients into a false sense of security....

Consider how many times a day you check your mobile phone, smartwatch, smart TV, and/or other connected devices. How normal does it seem to be reaching out to an external source, not actually sure where this information is stored, or even coming from, but that it’s there, accessible and ready to be taken in? Organizations wishing to migrate to a...

In the not-too-distant future, I can clearly see how ISO 27001, SOC 2 and other [redacted] certifications could become a diminished, legacy activity, viewed as a rarity left over from marketing efforts to distinguish an organization’s security posture from its competition. Absurd? Unrealistic? Actually, it is a very pragmatic understanding of what...

The shopping season is upon us, and like it or not there are lots of individuals who would love to replace your happiness with their sadness. Thus, at this festive time of the year, it is imperative to give some thought and prep time to you and your family’s shopping habits and the security that surrounds those habits. If you’re like most people,...

CyrusOne, a major provider of enterprise data center services, is reported to have suffered a ransomware attack. The Dallas-headquartered company, which operates more than 30 data centers across the United States, China, London, and Singapore, is reported by ZDnet to have had some of its systems infected by the REvil (Sodinokibi) ransomware....

Docker is an awesome technology, and it’s prevalent in nearly every software developer’s workflow. It is useful for creating identical environments and sharing them between development, testing, production, and others. It’s a great way to ship a reliable software environment between systems or even to customers. However, like with any technology,...

Tripwire’s November 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft, Oracle, Linux Kernel and Adobe. Exploit Alert: Metasploit First, on the patch priority list, this month are vulnerabilities that have been recently added to Metasploit. Two vulnerabilities, identified by CVE-2019-11539 and CVE-2019-11510...

Many of the current telephone scams use caller ID spoofing to mask the identity of the caller. A few of those telephone scams spoof caller IDs that don’t match the North American standard for legitimate numbers. These blatantly obvious spoofed caller IDs are the target of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). Last...

The online store for American gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson fell victim to a Magecart attack that's designed to steal customers' payment data. Willem de Groot of Sanguine Security learned that a particular Magecart group had been impersonating his employer and abusing his name as a contact to register domain names. While investigating this group,...

The path is starting to get steeper now as we climb to ML2. It is time to start defining a vulnerability management program with objectives and goals. This program is expected to grow and evolve over time as the organization grows and evolves. Document the requirements Start by documenting what is in place now and what objections the organization...

In this, the final post in my series on considerations for managing your security with cloud services, we will be looking at Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). If you haven’t yet read the previous blog entries about SaaS and PaaS, it’s worth going back to read these first, as much of the thinking associated with these services is also true for IaaS...