Why leveraging live environment simulations and putting ICS tools to the test is the best way to evaluate their fitness. Track and field was one of my favorite sports growing up. I didn’t begin competitively participating until I was a teenager, but I was instantly hooked once I started. Why? Because the clock didn’t lie. The tape measure didn’t lie...

A survey revealed that approximately half of employees didn't know how to respond in the event their organization suffered a ransomware infection. In its survey of North American business employees, Kaspersky found that 45% of respondents overall did not know the proper steps they should take in response to a ransomware attack. Respondents whose...

What's happened? Well, Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) happened. Okay, smart alec. I know about that. What else is going on? Well, because so many people are (wisely) staying at home, they're using videoconferencing and chat technology like Zoom to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues. In fact, Zoom says that daily usage has soared from...

An attack campaign leveraged the Excel VelvetSweatshop encryption technique to deliver samples of the LimeRAT malware family. According to Mimecast, those responsible for this attack campaign turned to VelvetSweatshop to enhance the efficacy of their efforts. Nefarious individuals have a history of using a password to encrypt malicious Excel...

Of all the tactics that an adversary will take on in their campaign, none will be more widely abused than Execution (https://attack.mitre.org/wiki/Execution). When taking into consideration off-the-shelf malware, traditional ransomware, or state-of-the-art advanced persistent threat actors, all of them have execution in common. There’s a great quote...

Many in the digital security community are coming together to combat malicious actors during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global outbreak. One of the most visible of these new efforts is the COVID-19 CTI League. Made up of approximately 400 volunteers living in approximately 40 countries, the COVID-19 CTI League is working to block...

With so many of us frantically learning to juggle our roles as parents, workers and most recently teachers; is it just my wife and I who feel it necessary to monitor the online activity of our teenagers during this lockdown? Sure, there’s rich educational content out there, but it sits amongst social networks, streaming services, gaming consoles and...

At the beginning of March 2020, Fifth Domain reported that Colorado-based aerospace, automotive and industrial parts manufacturer Visser Precision LLC had suffered a DoppelPaymer ransomware infection. Those behind this attack ultimately published information stolen from some of Visser’s customers. Those organizations included defense contractors...

Digital attackers compromised the website of kitchen and household products manufacturer Tupperware with a credit card skimmer. On March 20, researchers at Malwarebytes observed that attackers had compromised tupperware[.]com by hiding malicious code within an image file. This code activated when a user attempted to check out and complete their...

Past and present employees of General Electric (GE) are learning that their sensitive information has been exposed by a data breach at a third-party service provider. Fortune 500 company GE says it was recently informed of a security breach at one of its partners, Canon Business Process Services. According to GE, between approximately February 3 -...

By now, many organizations have adopted the cloud in some way. We saw organizations moving whole servers over to the cloud at the beginning, but now we see small parts of a system being moved to the cloud and new cloud native offerings. We’ll use the analogies of Lincoln Logs and Legos to describe these deployment models. Infrastructure-as-a...

Whether you are reading this from somewhere in the United States or overseas, chances are you are doing it from the comfort of your home. Not because you chose to but because you were asked to do so in order to prevent Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) from spreading any further. If you are a parent, working remotely with your kids at home, you...

Malicious actors are increasingly leveraging COVID-19 as a theme for new digital fraud attacks. In February 2020, for instance, Action Fraud received 21 reports of fraud relating to the coronavirus. This number of reports more than doubled to 46 between March 1 and March 13, 2020. Between March 14 and March 18, 2020, the United Kingdom's national...

Although ATT&CK is not laid out in any linear order, Initial Access will be the point at which an attacker gains a foothold in your environment. This tactic is a nice transition point from PRE-ATT&CK to ATT&CK for Enterprise. What is different about the techniques within Initial Access is that they are more high-level than some of the other...

In a previous post, I shared some expert insight into how organizations can address the challenges of hiring skilled talent despite the ongoing infosec skills gap. Organizations can’t rest easy once they’ve brought on new talent, however. They need to make sure they hold onto their existing workforce. That’s easier said than done. Cybersecurity...

A couple of years ago it felt like you couldn't turn your head in any direction without seeing another headline about cryptomining and - its more evil sibling - cryptojacking. Countless websites were hijacked, and injected with cryptocurrency-mining code designed to exploit the resources of visiting computers. Victims included the likes of the LA...

Malicious individuals targeted a food delivery website located in Germany with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Jitse Groen, founder and CEO of the Germany-based food delivery service Takeaway (Lieferando.de), announced on March 18 that his company had suffered a DDoS attack. https://twitter.com/jitsegroen/status/1240332307262832642 In...

A newly discovered ransomware family called "Nefilim" told its victims that it would publish their stolen data within a week unless they paid their ransom. According to Bleeping Computer, Nefilim started up near the end of February 2020. The threat attracted the attention of security researchers because it shared much of the same code with version 2...

We have seen great strides in improving security tooling and processes over the past ten years. Via constantly maturing security models, security teams have become increasingly dependent upon an ever-more complex toolchain of products and services. But what happens when these systems fail. How much effort are we putting into planning and maintaining...