British security firm Sophos determined that malicious actors had abused a zero-day vulnerability to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on some of its firewall products. According to Sophos, the attack chain began when digital attackers exploited a zero-day SQL injection vulnerability to achieve RCE on some firewall products. They abused this...

We find ourselves in strange times. In response to the ongoing coronavirus epidemic, organizations have swiftly closed their offices and mandated that all employees begin working from home. This development has created security challenges with which many organizations are still grappling. That’s not the only impact COVID-19 has had on security. Social...

What's this Maze thing I keep hearing about? Maze is a particularly sophisticated strain of Windows ransomware that has hit companies and organizations around the world and demanded that a cryptocurrency payment be made in exchange for the safe recovery of encrypted data. There's been plenty of ransomware before. What makes Maze so special? Like...

Just a couple of weeks back I posted to The State of Security an article titled “Finally Some Good News: NERC Proposes Deferment of 3 CIP standards,” and, as suspected, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the extension officially on April, 17th with this order. Having approved NERC’s petition submitted on April 6th, FERC...

Scams leveraging coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) as a lure have stolen tens of millions of dollars from their victims. As of April 16, 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had received 20,334 consumer reports of fraud attempts pertaining to the coronavirus since the beginning of the year. Those attacks that proved successful had caused their victims...

Millions of people have moved onto the Zoom video-conferencing platform as the coronavirus pandemic has forced them to work from their homes. According to Zoom's own statistics, its daily usage has soared from approximately 10 million daily users in December to over 200 million today. And although Zoom must be pleased to see so many more people...

Anyone who has had any experience on the offensive side of security has had fun with privilege escalation. There’s something exciting about exploiting a system to the point of getting root-level access. Since I have spent most of my time on the defensive side of the fence, the magic of escalating privileges rested in Exploiting for Privilege...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s April 2020 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-880 on Wednesday, April 15th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2020-0935 A vulnerability in the OneDrive for Windows desktop application could allow an attacker to overwrite a targeted file...

Why is cybersecurity important to Education? Acknowledging recent reports of ransomware targeting educational institutions, it is no wonder that there have also been articles that attempt to lure in readers with “free” tools. What is disappointing is that these “free” tools are little more than marketing pieces that direct you to click on readily...

When I first started researching ATT&CK last year, Persistence was the tactic which made me fall in love. Even though I have been in the industry for some time, I learned more from digging into the various techniques here than any other tactic. While I knew about fun tricks like replacing sethc.exe with cmd.exe and hitting the shift key a bunch of...

Tripwire's March 2020 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Adobe. Up first on the patch priority list this month are patches for Microsoft Browsers and Scripting Engine. These patches resolve information disclosure, remote code execution, and memory corruption vulnerabilities. Next on the list are...

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....

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...

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...

First and foremost, our hearts go out to those around the world impacted by the COVID-19 virus. The director of the U.S. Center for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), who advises the country on public health, has indicated that the risk to the general public remains low and encourages Americans to go about their lives. Businesses and local...

The skills gap is weighing heavily on the minds of digital security team members. In a survey of 342 security professionals, Tripwire found that 83% of infosec personnel felt more overworked in 2020 than they did a year earlier. An even greater percentage (85%) stated that it had become more difficult for their organizations to hire skilled security...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s March 2020 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-874 on Wednesday, March 11th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs Microsoft has not identified any of the vulnerabilities released this month as having been identified in-the-wild or publicly...