The holiday season is upon us, and nearly every day, my wife asks me what I want for Christmas. As a pop culture geek with interests in most fandoms, I have dozens of items that I could ask for, but the ultimate question is what do I really want to ask her to spend money on. In a perfect and very geeky world, I would likely come up with a method of...

I recently introduced a three-part series about injecting security hygiene into the container environment. For the first installment, I provided some background information on what containers are and how the container pipeline works. Let's now discuss how we can incorporate security into the pipeline. Assessing s Before Production To secure the...

Looking for a scalable solution and not sure what to ask? The best way to start off is to get an understanding of what scalability means because it can vary depending on the problem(s) that are trying to be solved, the company, and who you are talking to. According to Merriam-Webster, scalability is “capable of being easily expanded or upgraded on...

On September 24, 2017, two men pulled up alongside a home in Elmdon in the county of West Midlands, England. One of the men walked up to the house while the other approached a Mercedes parked outside. The former waved a box in front of the victim's house. Seconds later, the latter opened the driver's door of the victim's car, got in, and drove away...

BULLETIN CVE Microsoft Browser - IE and Edge CVE-2017-11848, CVE-2017-11856, CVE-2017-11855, CVE-2017-11827, CVE-2017-11833, CVE-2017-11803, CVE-2017-11844, CVE-2017-11845, CVE-2017-11874, CVE-2017-11872, CVE-2017-11863 Microsoft Browser - Scripting engine CVE-2017-11834, CVE-2017-11791, CVE...

With the cloud rapidly becoming the principal source of computing and data storage resources for organizations of all sizes, new types of exposures and attack paths have emerged. Earlier in the year, security researchers made a series of discoveries around organizations misconfiguring their AWS S3 buckets that allowed public access to the data...

A backdoor known as Tizi installs spyware onto Android devices in an effort to steal data from their owners' social media profiles. The Google Play Protect security team first detected the digital threat in September 2017 when they found an app with rooting capabilities. Since then, they've come across other apps that exhibit the same malicious...

As we introduced in part 1 of this “word crimes” series, cybersecurity terminology is important. Cybersecurity, IT professionals and legal professionals routinely abuse the terms “policy” and “standard” as if these words were synonymous. In reality, these terms have quite different implications, and those differences should be kept in mind since the...

Last time, I had fun speaking with Beth Cornils. She has a pretty cool job that involves testing IoT cars. This time, I spoke with Claudia Johnson. A cyber attack got her into the industry, and now she helps answer people's questions about cybersecurity. Kim Crawley: Please tell me about what you do. Claudia Johnson: In my current, as well as,...

An elite club in the United Kingdom has announced a data security incident where someone stole data pertaining to 5,000 of its members. Oxford and Cambridge Club. (Source: Wikipedia) The theft occurred when someone stole a backup computer drive for the Oxford and Cambridge Club out of a locked room...

In recent years, there has been a huge movement from storing data the traditional way, as the cloud has grown and become the better answer and option for companies and organizations alike. However, this has also led to a growth in cyber criminals and data breaches now that someone can access sensitive documents from their living room couch. As such,...

Black Friday is a big day for shoppers. In 2016, 154 million consumers shopped over Thanksgiving weekend and spent $9.36 billion, constituting a year-over-year increase of 16.4 percent. More than half of that money spent ($5.27 billion) occurred online. Building on those figures, Black Friday 2017 looks like it will be even bigger than in previous...

As the Internet continues to be an important part of our lives, it also becomes a more dangerous avenue for cybercrime. The risk increases as the massive online community’s use of the Internet becomes more rampant. And despite the public being aware of cybersecurity issues, anonymous online criminals are able find more victims and creative ways to...

Federal and local authorities have arrested eight individuals in connection with a credit card skimming scheme that caused losses in excess of $3.5 million. On 17 November, representatives of the United States Attorney Western District of Kentucky's office, Kentucky FBI division, Secret Service, and the Louisville Metro Police Department announced...

For as long as I can remember, members of the public have been losing money to scammers, as they've been tricked into sending their hard-earned cash via Western Union. Scammers prey on the vulnerable and gullible, tricking them into wiring money via Western Union with the promise that it will help with medical bills, pay for for a new internet...

Criminals demanded a ransom of approximately $8,000 after they attacked the Sacramento Regional Transit's (SacRT) computer system. The attack occurred on 18 November, reports The Sacramento Bee, when unknown attackers defaced the public transportation agency's main website with the following message: I’m sorry to modify the home page, i’m good...

Recently, my nine-year-old son informed me that he had observed over time how I always seem to help other people and how others always depend on me. I said to him that, in a way, he is much the same, as he is always saying 'yes' to doing little jobs. Together, we defined ourselves as being 'yes persons.' However, as our conversation evolved, I said to...

With the rise in popularity of containers, development and DevOps paradigms are experiencing a massive shift while security admins are left struggling to figure out how to secure this new class of assets and the environments they reside in. While containers do increase the complexity of the ecosystem that security admins are responsible for securing...

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) leaked sensitive data online through a publicly accessibly Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 bucket. Public search engine Censys indexed the misconfigured asset on 14 November during a regular security audit of the S3 environment. Researchers at the Kromtech security center don't know who might have accessed...