Last time, I had the opportunity of speaking with Avi. Avi’s not a woman, but they’re a badass hacker with a natural intuition for cybersecurity that has been put to excellent use. This time, I had the pleasure of speaking with Susan Ballestero. She has unique experience with working in a security operations center and being an information security...

A disgruntled employee at Tesla has caused “extensive and damaging sabotage,” according to the company’s CEO Elon Musk. In an email sent to employees late Sunday night, Musk revealed an employee had broken into the company’s computer systems in an effort to disrupt operations. The message, as first reported by CNBC, stated the employee made direct...

A cancer center received an order to pay $4.3 million in a settlement for HIPAA violations that involved multiple data breaches. (Source: Houston Chronicle) On 18 June, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced in a press release that one of its Administrative Law...

Industrial control systems (ICS) first proliferated at a time when cybersecurity didn’t weigh heavily on organizations’ minds. Since then, there have been two significant developments in the industry. First, cybersecurity has become a mission-critical concern for businesses everywhere. Second, there’s been a shift to new network technologies that...

The commoditization of personal data in recent years has created huge opportunities for anyone with the skills to collect, catalogue and correlate every aspect of our lives. For many years now, there has been a war between browser vendors and unscrupulous advertisers looking for tricks to uniquely identify users and track their movements across...

Chilean bank and financial services company Banco de Chile said that a virus infiltrated its computer systems and stole $10 million. On 9 June, Banco de Chile's general manager Eduardo Ebensperger provided some insight about the attack to La Tercera. A translation by Google is provided below: We found some strange transactions in the SWIFT system ...

Recently, researchers from The New York Institute of Technology and the Stevens Institute of Technology computer science department released a paper about using a relatively new machine learning technique to make computers 18-24 percent better at guessing your passwords than ever before. In this article, we’ll covert: The historical context in...

Mobile platforms and the internet have brought about massive potential and real value to many companies. This evolution has made mobile enterprise systems an essential business function, becoming a top priority for any company serious about its growth. The ability of mobile technology to improve productivity and efficiency and drive greater ROI is...

Organizations stand to gain a lot from transitioning to a DevOps software development model. Switching to DevOps leads to quicker problem solving, increased employee engagement, and more time for innovation. That's assuming a transition is successful, however. Enterprises can run into various problems along the way, including inadequately measured...

Yes, Apple is toughening up the security of iPhones with iOS 12. Yes, the steps Apple is taking will make it harder for law enforcement agencies to thwart iPhone security. But no, that's not the reason Apple is doing it. To understand better, let's take a little history lesson. Back in 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook opposed court requests that his company...

Creating a thorough and effective security program is difficult enough when your data is stored on-premises. But most organizations and agencies straddle hybridized on-prem and cloud environments—or they’re cloud-native entirely. This complicates the role of cybersecurity teams who now need tools that can traverse multiple environments without...

Network security is an issue that is increasingly important as businesses and even households shift more workflow processes and key tasks to the network and into the cloud. While some users may find it a challenge to protect even a single digital device, keeping an entire network secure can be a tall order for even the most tech-savvy users. From...

Federal authorities have arrested dozens of alleged fraudsters in an international takedown of Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes. According to the Department of Justice, a total of 74 individuals were arrested, including 43 in the US, 29 in Nigeria, and three in Canada, Mauritius and Poland. The operation – dubbed Operation Wire Wire – was...

If you’ve been in information security for a while, you’ve likely had some experience with file integrity monitoring (FIM). It’s a capability with a long history, going back to the original open-source Tripwire tool for monitoring file hashes. And FIM has staying power. It’s still around, and there are still new deployments. There aren’t a lot of...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s June 2018 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-782 on Wednesday, June 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2018-8267 This code execution vulnerability exists in Internet Explorer’s scripting engine and relates to the handling of objects...

A French company has incurred a fine of 250,000 euros for a significant data leak that might have exposed customers' sensitive personal information. On 7 June, France's data privacy regulatory body Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) published a statement about a data leak of which it learned in July 2017. An English...

On 11 May 2017, President Trump issued the Executive Order, Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure. This directive, among other things, identified agency heads as those who are ultimately responsible for managing cybersecurity risk within executive departments. In service of that purpose, the White House...

Last time, I got the opportunity to speak with Diana Initiative founder Virginia Robbins, otherwise known as fl3uryz. She deserves all the kudos for her hard work in promoting women in our industry. This time, I had the pleasure of speaking with Avi. They’re not a woman, but they certainly know what it’s like to be a gender minority in tech. Avi has...

South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail said it's cooperating with law enforcement after suffering a hacking attempt. In a statement posted to its website, Coinrail revealed it was working with police to investigate an incident that might have exposed 30 percent of the total number of coins traded on the exchange. It placed the remaining 70...

For the better part of a decade, I have spent a good amount of time analyzing security and compliance frameworks. There is beauty to be found in every one of them. Some are very high level and leave the organization to interpret how to implement the various controls, such as the CIS Critical Security Controls. Others are incredibly prescriptive and...