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Death, Taxes and Compliance Updates - An Addition to NIST 800-171

New updates and additions to compliance requirements are as regular as the rising and setting of the sun. Recently, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a companion publication to NIST 800-171 that provides guidance on how organizations can assess the CUI requirements in NIST 800-171, known as SP 800-171A. The purpose...
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Women in Information Security: Sharka

Due to popular demand, my women in information security interview series is back for autumn! This marks the second anniversary since I started. Some of my subjects in this round have been waiting since last spring, so getting to chat with them has been long overdue. Let’s start with Sharka, a penetration tester who is full of enthusiasm. She wants...
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5 Notable Security Incidents that Recently Affected Federal Entities

Digital attackers have a history of targeting public sector organizations. For its 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), Verizon Enterprise tracked 22,788 security incidents that affected the public sector. Data disclosure occurred in 304 of those events; digital espionage via phishing or the use of a backdoor served as the most common...
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Cloud Security: A Cloud Provider-User Partnership

It is a common trend now to see most of the organizations opting for the cloud. Growing business demands, competition and the growth of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) have helped propel this trend. While everything looks smart in the cloud, what about security? Does that look smart, too? Now that organizations use different kinds of cloud environments...
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Is Your Security Dashboard Ready for the Cloud?

The ability to feed key security information onto a big screen dashboard opens up many new opportunities for managing the day-to-day security and maintenance workload as well as providing a useful method of highlighting new incidents faster than “just another email alert.” Most Security Operation Centres I’ve visited in recent years have embraced...
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ICO to Fine Equifax £500,000 for 2017 Data Breach

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) of the United Kingdom announced it will fine Equifax £500,000 for a data breach that occurred in 2017. In a monetary penalty notice filed on 19 September, the ICO revealed its decision to impose the maximum fine specified in section 55A of the Data...
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The makers of the Mirai IoT-hijacking botnet are sentenced

Three men who operated and controlled the notorious Mirai botnet have been sentenced to five years of probation. The Mirai botnet notoriously launched a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on DNS service company Dyn in October 2016 and made it impossible for many users to reach popular sites such as Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, Twitter,...
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Guarding the Gate: Cybersecurity De-Mystified

With individuals, businesses and critical infrastructure increasingly becoming the target of cyber-attacks, cybersecurity today is a multifaceted challenge. As the saying goes, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” And if the cat equates to preventing, detecting or discovering disruptive data breaches and determining the root cause, the vendor...
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U.S. Federal IoT Policy: What You Need to Know

Over the past several months, increased attention has been paid to U.S. federal government policies surrounding internal use of IoT devices. In January 2018, researchers discovered they could track the movements of fitness tracker-wearing military personnel over the Internet. In July, a similar revelation occurred with fitness app Polar, which was...
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Ransomware Attack Takes Down Airport's Flight Information Screens

A ransomware attack prevented an English airport from using its flight information screens to assist passengers in their travels. On 13 September, Bristol Airport tweeted out that its flight information systems were experiencing technical difficulties. https://twitter.com/BristolAirport/status/1040427309306662912 For the two days that followed, the...
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The Challenges of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Organisations

Governments, businesses and societies as a whole benefit enormously from Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI assists organisations in reducing operational costs, boosting user experience, elevating efficiency and cultivating revenue. But it also creates a number of security challenges for personal data and forms many ethical dilemmas for organisations....
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OilRig Launching Attack Campaigns With Updated BONDUPDATER Trojan

The OilRig group conducted at least one attack campaign containing an updated variant of the BONDUPDATER trojan as its final payload. In August 2018, Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat research team detected an OilRig campaign targeting a high-ranking government organization in the Middle East. The email campaign leveraged spear-phishing, one of the...
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What is Vulnerability Management Anyway?

Vulnerability management (VM) programs are the meat and potatoes of every comprehensive information security program. They are not optional anymore. In fact, many information security compliance, audit and risk management frameworks require organizations to maintain a vulnerability management program. If you don’t have vulnerability management tools...
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Mastering Container Security: Docker, Kubernetes and More

Bolting on security after the fact. It’s been a common approach to software security for decades. We architect, build code, deploy it and then figure out how to secure it. From the parade of application-related breaches and data thefts over the last few years, we pretty much know this approach does not work. Fortunately, the evolution of continuous...
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What Cloud Migration Means for Your Security Posture

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone reading this article that there has been a major shift towards businesses hosting their critical applications in the cloud. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), as well as cloud-based servers from Amazon or Microsoft, have changed the way we build networked business systems for any size organization. Cloud-hosted...