Jackson Health System (JHS) paid a civil money penalty of $2.15 million after having violated some of HIPAA's provisions. The case dates back to August 2013 when JHS submitted a breach report to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In its report, the...

Reports from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Siemens highlight both the increasing cyber threats faced by the electric utility companies and the lack of adequate readiness to respond to these threats. According to these reports, a cyber-attack on the electric grid could cause “severe” damage. The electric grid delivers the...

Kalispell Regional Healthcare (KPH) revealed that a phishing attack might have exposed patients' personally identifiable information (PII). Over the summer of 2019, KPH learned that several employees unknowingly handed their business email account credentials over to malicious actors after falling...

Unsurprisingly, cyber attacks are growing in the business sector and not just in the United States but world-wide. Cyber-attacks represent the greatest risk in six out of ten of the top economies in the world. The report presented by the World Economic Forum discusses formjacking, cryptojacking, ransomware like LockerGoga and other cyber-attacks of...

Ah, the wonders of technology. In the innovation-rich Information Age, we are the beneficiaries of a nonstop wave of new advancements, each offering the ability to execute vital tasks faster and more efficiently than ever before. However, along with each breakthrough comes potential security vulnerabilities. Such is the case with containerization....

Researchers spotted a malspam campaign that targeted German organizations with samples of the Buran crypto-ransomware family. In early October, Bromium observed a malspam campaign whose emails impersonated online fax service eFax. The emails contained hyperlinks to a PHP page that served up malicious Word documents. This technique helped the Word...

To protect the integrity and safety of their business-critical assets, cybersecurity must be a top priority for the oil and gas industry. Although they operate some of the nation’s most critical systems, securing these complex infrastructures can be a huge challenge. In recent years, the oil and gas industry has undergone a complete digital overhaul...

Over the course of the past 10 years, traditional application development methodology (waterfall) has given way in favor of the more agile DevOps-centric methodologies focused on continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This trend was turbocharged in 2013 when Docker containers came onto the scene and ushered in the proverbial crossing of the...

Researchers have detected a new phishing campaign that uses some clever tricks in order to steal users' Stripe credentials. Cofense discovered the campaign when it came across an attack email that pretended to originate from "Stripe Support." The message informed recipients that their account contained invalid details and that it was therefore...

Industrial organizations face a growing list of digital threats these days. Back in April 2019, for instance, FireEye revealed that it had observed an additional intrusion by the threat group behind the destructive TRITON malware at another critical infrastructure. This discovery came less than two years after the security firm discovered an attack...

Researchers discovered a new cryptojacking worm called "Graboid" that has spread to more than 2,000 unsecured Docker hosts. In its research, Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 team noted that it's the first time it's discovered a cryptojacking worm specifically using containers in the Docker Engine for distribution. (It's not the first time that...

You can’t go a week without seeing a story about a data breach or ransomware hitting organizations. These breaches can be very costly, but they still continue to show up. Are the good guys not winning the cybersecurity war? Organizations invest millions of dollars in security products and services, but they keep getting breached. We definitely have...

The calculus for disaster recovery and risk management is changing. Most small businesses within the past decade would often keep many of their critical technology assets locally, perhaps in a server closet, or a centralized data center for multiple offices. They built their own “vault” of applications, databases, email, files, etc., often on a few...

Digital fraudsters are using compromised servers and bogus links in an ongoing effort to target LinkedIn members with scams. The scam began when a Sophos employee received what it appeared to be an unexceptional email from someone they know in real life and with whom they keep in touch on LinkedIn. The body of the LinkedIn message informed the...

Most organizations with industrial control systems (ICS) fall into one of two categories: regulated and non-regulated. For those subject to government imposed regulatory requirements, the selection of a cybersecurity framework is obviously compelling. Such is the case with the nuclear energy industry and NEI 08-09. The nuclear energy industry is one...

October is national cybersecurity awareness month, and with the recent hacks at Door Dash, the discovery of a large-scale iOS hacking campaign, and a database containing 419 million phone numbers associated with Facebook accounts, we’re all likely feeling a little dirty. So, I decided to share my perspectives on cyber hygiene. The dictionary defines...

As a system administrator during the early days of the “cloud revolution” I found the “cloud” metaphor an interesting choice to frame the technology stack. Clouds, in my mind, were “woolly” and hard to pin down as opposed to the omnipresent, always-available things that IT marketers were suggesting cloud services would be. But whilst I wasn’t a fan...

The time at ML:0 can be eye-opening form many organizations. There are generally a lot of assets discovered that are new or had been forgotten about. Almost every organization discovers their own Methuselah; this is the system that has been around forever and performs some important tasks but has not...

Diligent taxpayers are being increasingly targeted by con artists who are well-versed in manipulating the revenue system. The crooks usually impersonate IRS (U.S. Internal Revenue Service) officials, sending fake emails or messages on social media in an attempt to defraud the targeted individuals of their money. Unfortunately, lots of people fall...

In my previous post, I spoke about all of the different DEFCON villages where attendees can learn about and purchase all sorts of fun hacking/counter hacking tools. Even so, I covered only a small fraction of the activities at the conference. For example, attendees have the opportunity to participate in a lot of contests run over the weekend,...