Today’s VERT Alert addresses the Microsoft January 2018 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-759 on Friday, January 5th. We are not yet certain if this release contains all January updates or if Tuesday will see a second set of updates released. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs ...

If this first week is any indication, 2018 could mark a significant paradigm shift in trusted computing and open source hardware. Chip makers have been very effective in making enhancements to greatly improve application performance, but the revelation of Spectre and Meltdown makes it clear that more attention needs to be paid to hardware level...

Android users would be wise to remember that just because an app appears in the official Google Play store doesn't mean that it should be considered entirely trustworthy. Researchers at Trend Micro have described how they recently uncovered a total of 36 apps in the official Android app marketplace that secretly harvested the details of users,...

A data breach involving the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) might have exposed more than 240,000 current and former federal employees' personally identifiable information (PII). On 3 January, DHS published a statement about the security incident. In it, Chief Privacy Officer Phillip S....

A school district in North Carolina intends to spend $314,000 on rebuilding more than a dozen servers affected by a malware attack. On 27 December 2017, the board for Rockingham County School District held an emergency meeting and voted 7-1 to approve a 12-month, $314,000 service contract with Georgia-based technology solutions provider ProLogic ITS...

Among organizations today, there's not enough focus on where digital security matters, that is, setting up the challenge/risk. Let’s come right out and say it: if you haven’t been hacked yet, you soon will be. This is not a surprise to you. You know this. We know this. Other companies know this. And yet, we saw WannaCry spread to hundreds of...

We are heading into an era which embraces the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial Intelligence (AI), and machine learning (MI) that have immensely overturned the tech world. With particular reference to IoT, it has profoundly impacted global commerce and lifestyle. If this existing pace remains consistent, then it wouldn’t be onerous to predict the...

Last time, I had the honor of speaking with Tiffany Gerstmar. Her work with the US Navy led to her become a cybersecurity policy professional. In this final interview of the current series, I got to speak with Roselle Safran. Not unlike Tiffany, work in US government agencies also helped her to get where she is today. Now she's the president of...

A data breach at a payment processor might have compromised the personal and financial information of some Tallahassee utility customers. Tallahassee Treasurer Clerk Jim Cooke is warning that a breach at TIO Networks, a company used by Florida's capital to help people pay their bills, might have affected an untold number of utility customers in the...

A data breach has exposed the login credentials belonging to 300,000 users of RootsWeb, a service owned and sponsored by Ancestry.com. On 4 December 2017, someone posted a file containing the usernames and plaintext passwords of 300,000 users to a hacker forum. An analysis of the dump, which was...

The main challenge for industrial control systems is that the processes that control those systems are connected to critical infrastructure such as power, water, gas, and transport. This means they require high availability, and it is not easy to interrupt those systems to apply security updates. Effects of any downtime means that it can affect...

With 2017 coming to a close, we wanted to give our readers an overview of some of the most interesting, educational, and standout blogs from the year to help fill the time between Christmas and the New Year. My favourite State of Security blogs from 2017 Pentest Toolbox Additions 2017 It´s becoming a yearly tradition, but one our readers and I...

Canada has proposed to pay $17.5 million to settle a privacy breach involving hundreds of thousands of individuals who applied for student loans. Under the proposed settlement, Canada would pay $60 to Canada Student Loan borrowers affected by the breach. The federal government could reduce that individual payment, however, in the event the total...

Ransomware is a problem on the rise, a simple threat with some very large business implications. Statistics show it has reached new levels of menace, and it's growing at a remarkable rate: 6000% in 2016, an IBM study found, and a triple-digit increase into 2018. Although a very real and present danger (as shown by some very high profile infections...

As organizations' IT environments become increasingly more complex, so too does the software they install on their systems. Software developers and managers have embraced microservices written in node.js and Spring Boot, for example. These new types of dynamic applications challenge organizations to establish appropriate trust chains and secure old...

Last time, I spoke with Stephanie Vanroelen. She's an OWASP contributor who specializes in web penetration testing. She also organizes BruCON, Belgium's largest cybersecurity convention, and volunteers at CyberSKool, an information security camp for kids. This time, I have the pleasure of speaking with Tiffany Gerstmar. Working with the US Navy...

We all know what a great year distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks had in 2016. In the last four months, the web registered two significant DDoS campaigns. The first targeted Brian Krebs at a peak size of 620 Gbps. The second struck Dyn and, in so doing, took down Twitter, Amazon, Spotify and other clients of the DNS provider's critical...