The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) improperly shared the personally identifiable information (PII) of 2.3 million hurricane and disaster survivors with a contractor. The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) detected FEMA's violation while auditing...

When Shelley published his famous poem in 1816, he was telling us that the only constant in life is change. This was not a new concept, even then. Heraclitus proposed the same concept around 500 BCE with ‘Panta rhei’ (Life is Flux or everything changes). Even though we all know and understand this ancient concept, people still have difficulty with...

Welcome to Tripwire Patch Insanity! Comprised of 26 vulnerabilities divided into two conferences and four divisions, the goal of this tournament is to declare which named vulnerability is king of Patch Insanity! The original list of named vulnerabilities was taken from Hanno Böck’s named vulnerabilities repo. Any entries that did not have published...

A county government in North Carolina has suffered a ransomware infection for the third time in the past six years. According to a statement published on its website, the Orange County government observed on 18 March that a virus had infected its network. It responded by shutting down all servers,...

Even the most tech savvy companies in the world can fall for business email compromise. A Lithuanian man has this week pleaded guilty to tricking Google and Facebook into transferring over $100 million into a bank account under his control after posing as a company that provided the internet giants with hardware for their data centers. Fifty-year...

A data breach remains a common headline in the news cycle. A different company, website or social network reports a security issue almost daily. If it feels like using the internet has become a risky endeavor, the feeling is accurate. But what exactly classifies an event as a data breach? The world wide web is littered with different security gaps...

It wasn’t a very long time ago when cloud computing was a niche field that only the most advanced organizations were dabbling with. Now the cloud is very much the mainstream, and it is rare to find a business that uses IT that doesn’t rely on it for a part of its infrastructure. But if you're going to add cloud services to your company, you will...

An ongoing phishing campaign code-named "Bad Tidings" has been targeting several Kingdom of Saudi Arabia government agencies for years. Researchers at Anomali Labs first detected the Bad Tidings campaign back in November 2016. Since then, the operation has targeted four government agencies in Saudi Arabia: the Ministry of Labor and Social...

Extortionists have launched a new sextortion scam campaign that leverages a fake Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) investigation to try to scare users. In an email I obtained from a wary user, the scammers pose as a fake CIA technical collection officer named Roxana Mackay. This character claims in the email that she's found the user's personal...

Return on investment: is it worth the money? That is the central question in deciding on any procurement. Demonstrating ROI on cybersecurity products is notoriously difficult and is one of the underlying reasons for the poor state of our nation’s cybersecurity posture. Ah, but here’s the rub: showing tangible ROI on cybersecurity products is...

I have been on the receiving end of many vendor security assessments from customers and prospects. Here are some tips to increase the likelihood that you’ll get a timely, usable response to the next vendor security assessment that you send out. Understand what data you will be providing One size doesn’t fit all. The level of attention and...

“The best defense is a good offense.” History credits Revolutionary War hero George Washington with being among the first to vocalize this concept, later famously echoed by heavyweight boxing champ Jack Dempsey and football god Vince Lombardi. And it’s easy to see what they mean. The idea is that being proactive—going on the offense instead of...

A spam campaign is using two recent crashes involving Boeing 737 Max aircraft to distribute malware to unsuspecting users. Discovered by 360 Threat Intelligence Center, a research division of 360 Enterprise Security Group, the campaign sends out attack emails that come from "[email protected]" with the subject line "Fwd: Airlines plane crash Boeing 737...

Digital attackers are targeting high-profile Instagram users with fake copyright infringement notifications in a bid to hijack their accounts. Detected by Kaspersky Lab, this scheme begins when an Instagram influencer receives an email notification informing them that their "account will be permanently deleted for copyright infringement." The email...

Caller ID spoofing has become a real nuisance with machines and scammers hiding behind a number that they are not authorized to use. This creates the need to prevent illegitimate calls from using random numbers. In the meantime, have you ever wondered how easy it is to spoof a caller ID? What software is needed? There are many online services that...

Digital attackers are sending out fake flu warnings that appear to come from the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) in order to distribute GandCrab ransomware. An attack begins when a user receives a fake CDC email. The sender field claims that the email came from "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." But a closer look reveals the sender...

Take a look at the security headlines, and you'll see report after report of businesses and large organisations being hacked. Sensitive databases are accessed, passwords are stolen, email archives are plundered, innocent people are put at risk and corporations get a kick up the backside that they need to take security more seriously. But what you...

Understanding vulnerability scoring can be a daunting task, but a good starting point is first understanding risk and being able to distinguish risk from a vulnerability. Both have been used interchangeably throughout the years. A vulnerability is some aspect of a systems functioning, configuration or architecture that makes the resource a target of...

Tripwire has been in the business of providing vulnerability management solutions with IP360 for about 20 years. With over 20,000 vulnerabilities discovered last year alone, vulnerability management continues to be an important part of most security plans. And most organizations agree. In a recent survey, 89 percent of respondents said that their...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s March 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-821 on Wednesday, March 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-0754 This CVE describes a Denial of Service vulnerability that could cause a target system to stop responding when code...