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 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 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...

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...

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...

Two smart car alarm systems suffered from critical security vulnerabilities that affected upwards of three million vehicles globally. Researchers at Pen Test Partners independently assessed the security of products developed by Viper and Pandora, two of the world's largest and most well-known vendors of smart car alarms. With both systems, they...

The U.S. government had its longest government shutdown in history between December 22, 2018, and January 25, 2019. It’s not yet clear what overall impact this closure had on U.S. digital security. In the short term, a SecurityScorecard report found that federal agencies’ network security ratings slightly declined but that both their endpoint security...

It would be hard to be involved in technology in any way and not see the dramatic upward trend in DevOps adoption. In their January 2019 publication “Five Key Trends To Benchmark DevOps Progress,” Forrester research found that 56 percent of firms were ‘implementing, implemented or expanding’ DevOps. Further, 51 percent of adopters have embraced...

A complete security program involves many different facets working together to defend against digital threats. To create such a program, many organizations spend much of their resources on building up their defenses by investing in their security configuration management (SCM), file integrity monitoring (FIM), vulnerability management (VM) and log...

The discovery of a significant container-based (runc) exploit sent shudders across the Internet. Exploitation of CVE-2019-5736 can be achieved with "minimal user interaction"; it subsequently allows attackers to gain root-level code execution on the host. Scary, to be sure. Scarier, however, is that the minimal user interaction was made easier by...

Tripwire's February 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together the top vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Adobe. First on the patch priority list this month are patches for Microsoft's Browser and Scripting Engine. These patches resolve 23 vulnerabilities, including fixes for Memory Corruption, Elevation of Privilege, Spoofing, Security Feature...

Web-based hosting service GitHub has decided to increase both the potential reward amounts and scope of its bug bounty program. On 19 February, GitHub announced its decision to raise its reward amounts. Security researchers can now expect to earn a minimum of $617 for reporting a low-severity vulnerability in the service's products. On the other end...

In the original Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles,” an unscrupulous merchant, Cyrano Jones, gives a small furry animal called a Tribble to communications officer Uhura. Uhura takes the Tribble aboard the Starship Enterprise where the animal begins to quickly reproduce, thereby threatening to overrun the ship and cause significant damage....

With the evolution of technology comes new approaches to solving problems. Sometimes a new approach fixes the problem; sometimes it creates new ones. The good thing is as folks who work in fast-paced, high-tech environment, we information security professionals are great at quickly analyzing the new technologies and applying them to our daily lives. ....

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s February 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-817 on Wednesday, February 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-0676 The first vulnerability in the list today is an Internet Explorer vulnerability that is already seeing active...

Today’s increasingly connected world, with access to mobile devices and cloud scale computing, is leading to disruption in business models and processes. To succeed, you have no option but to continuously deliver new value to customers at the increasing speed that they demand. Mark Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, said a few years back that ...