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What Is NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework Manufacturing Profile?

Executive Order 13636, “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity," directed the development of the voluntary Cybersecurity Framework that provides a prioritized, flexible, repeatable, performance-based and cost-effective approach to manage cybersecurity risk for those processes, information and systems directly involved in the delivery of...
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BlueKeep: What you Need to Know

What is BlueKeep? BlueKeep is the name that has been given to a security vulnerability that was discovered earlier this year in some versions of Microsoft Windows' implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). The vulnerability was described as "wormable" by Microsoft, and users were warned that BlueKeep might be exploited in a similar...
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Moving to the Cloud to Save Money? Think Again…

When I meet with customers, I always ask about their primary objective in moving to the cloud. The majority of these customers have the same response: “to save money.” I can’t blame customers for taking this position. Google “cloud deployment” and the headers are dominated by positive articles that offer up anecdotal evidence of how the cloud can...
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Texas HHS Commission Penalized $1.6M for HIPAA Violations

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission (TX HHS) must pay a civil penalty of $1.6 million for having violated HIPAA. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) imposed the penalty in response to HIPAA violations that took place between 2013 and...
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Thunder on the Horizon: 4 Security Threats for the Cloud

Security is both a benefit and a concern for enterprises when it comes to cloud computing. On the one hand, Datamation found in its State of the Cloud, 2019 survey that many organizations are moving to the cloud because they found that cloud-service providers (CSPs) offer better all-around security than they could achieve by themselves. Specifically...
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Escaping the Egregious Eleven - Part One

Helping to define and examine the top perceived cloud security threats of the day, the ‘Egregious Eleven’ is the most recent iteration in an evolving set of summary reports published by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). It follows on from the ‘Treacherous Twelve,’ which they defined for us in 2016, and the ‘Notorious Nine,’ which they presented in...
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New MegaCortex Ransomware Variant Changes Victims' Windows Passwords

Researchers discovered a new variant of the MegaCortex ransomware family that changes a victim's Windows password upon execution. Discovered by MalwareHunterTeam and reverse engineered by Vitali Kremez, the threat seized the attention of Bleeping Computer when its ransom note stated that "All of your user credentials have been changed and your files...
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Why PAM Should Be a CISO’s Top Priority

Privileged access management (PAM) consists of strategies and technologies for exerting control over the elevated (“privileged”) access and permissions for users, accounts, processes and systems across an IT environment. By implementing an appropriate level of privileged access controls, PAM helps organizations condense their organization’s attack surface and prevent, or at least mitigate, the...
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Harvesting Likes on Social Media or a Window for the Hacker to Climb Through?

So earlier this year, I wrote a piece about how we as humans are so quick to give away personal information to various companies in the quest for discounts or free stuff. As I gave it further thought, I realized that sometimes we give away our personal information in search of something even more abstract: likes. We post pictures of our food, our...
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Nunavut Government's IT System Struck by Ransomware Attack

Officials revealed that the IT system owned and operated by the government of Nunavut fell victim to a ransomware attack. Joe Savikataaq, premier of the most northerly region of Canada, disclosed the security incident in a tweet on November 2 and revealed that recovery efforts were ongoing. https://twitter.com/JSavikataaq/status/1190727062690115586...
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NIST's New Framework to Mitigate Privacy Risks

The Case for Privacy Risk Management Over the past few years, there has been a massive cultural and legal shift in the way consumers view and secure their personal data online that's in line with the rise of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence. Concerned by an increasing rate of incidents that range from the 2017 Equifax hack to the...
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Lacking Direction to Address your ICS Cybersecurity Issues? Here’s What You Can Do

With more and more automation systems and industrial devices being connected to networks, raw data from every device can be transformed into a treasure chest of valuable information. Granted, this data can help to optimize the process, but with connectivity comes new ICS cybersecurity concerns. Connectivity opens previously air-gapped or physically isolated control networks to the world of cyber...
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Fraudsters Use Salary Increase Scam to Steal Employees' Credentials

Digital fraudsters have launched a new phishing campaign that uses a salary increase scam to trick employees into handing over their credentials. Spotted by the Cofense Phishing Defense Center, the campaign used spoofing techniques to trick recipients into thinking that the attack emails came from their HR department. Those emails claimed that the...
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Men paid $100K by Uber to hush up hack plead guilty to extortion scheme

Two hackers face up to five years in prison after pleading guilty to their involvement in a scheme which saw them attempt to extort money from Uber and LinkedIn in exchange for the deletion of stolen data. Twenty-six-year-old Brandon Charles Glover and Vasile Meacre, 23, entered guilty pleas this week at a federal court in San Jose, California in...
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Tripwire Patch Priority Index for October 2019

Tripwire's October 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 add to Metasploit. CVE-2019-13272 is a Linux kernel vulnerability; proof-of-concept code...
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DNS Rebinding: A Frightening Attack Vector with Spooky Security Impacts

One of the greatest misconceptions about online safety is that home networks are somehow private. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been true since around the turn of the century when we started filling our home networks with Internet-connected boxes serving local web pages. The problem is that web browsers typically make little distinction between web...
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Leadership Through Security: The Changing Role of the CISO

The traditional career path for a chief information security officer (CISO) is fairly straightforward. An individual begins their career in IT but ultimately moves to security after demonstrating a security mindset. Once established within the ranks of information security, the professional receives promotion after promotion until they attain the...