In the attacker's world, all vulnerabilities and potential exploits work toward the hacker's advantage — not yours, not mine. This includes WordPress hacks. While living back east (over a decade ago), I was friends with several small business owners. One weekend morning, the owner of the local photography studio called me at 7 am and said: "I think...

On the surface, vulnerability management (VM) is nearly ubiquitous. If you ask someone whether their organization has VM, the vast majority will reply in the affirmative. In fact, Tripwire asked that very question in a recent survey on the topic. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said yes. Beneath that surface of ‘yes’ responses, however, lies a...

What is air-gapping, and why do we air-gap networks?What camp are you in? In the camp that believes in air-gaps, or the other set that says they truly do not exist? Air-gap networks are networks that are physically and logically isolated from other networks where communication between these networks is not physically or logically possible. Over the...

The purpose of this series of blogs is to guide you on your journey up the Vulnerability Management Mountain (VMM). Like climbing a mountain, there is a lot of planning and work required, but when you get to the top, the view is amazing and well worth the journey. Your progress will depend on your funding and priorities, but climbing at a quick...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s June 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-835 on Wednesday, June 12th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-1053 An issue where Windows Shell fails to properly validate folder shortcuts could lead to sandbox escape. The attacker...

A King County food bank said it will need help recovering from a ransomware infection that affected its computer network. At around 02:00 on 5 June, bad actors targeted the severs of Auburn Food Bank with ransomware. The crypto-malware, which according to Bleeping Computer was a variant of...

Microsoft is warning users to be on the lookout for a malspam campaign that's abusing an Office vulnerability in order to distribute a backdoor. On 7 June, Microsoft Security Intelligence took to Twitter to raise awareness of the operation. The campaign, which remains active as of this writing, begins when users receive a malspam email in one of...

In May 2019, Verizon Enterprise released the 12th edition of its Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). Researchers analyzed a total of 41,686 security incidents, of which there were 2,013 data breaches, for the publication. More than half (52 percent) of those reported breaches involved some form of hacking. The report listed the most prominent...

Tripwire's May 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Adobe. First and most importantly this month are the patches available to resolve the BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) Remote Desktop Services remote code execution vulnerability. As noted by Microsoft: [This] remote code execution vulnerability...

Although DNS rebinding attacks have been known for over a decade now, they are only recently receiving attention as a practical attack surface. In the last year, quite a few popular products have been shown to lack DNS rebinding protections, and as a result, someone could operate them remotely using a malicious web site. Manufacturers have made a...

It seems like only yesterday that we were packing up the Tripwire stand after another fantastic year at Infosec and here I am (literally) counting down the days until the doors open for Infosecurity Europe 2019! The Tripwire team is always excited to get on the show floor and have great conversations with clients and partners, meet new people and of...

With data breaches regularly marking the headlines, it is no surprise that digital threats constitute an increasingly significant concern for the C-Suite and cyber security experts. What is surprising, however, is that these two groups don’t seem to share the same view of information security. They have different opinions when it comes to the digital...

Security researchers have released a tool that enables victims of GetCrypt ransomware to recover their affected files for free. On 23 May, web security and antivirus software provider Emsisoft announced the release of its GetCrypt decrypter. This utility asks victims of the ransomware to supply both an encrypted copy and the original version of a...

Last time, I spoke with technology marketing communicator Stacey Holleran. Our work is similar but different. Plus, she warned me about what I might expect from the tech industry in a few years when I turn 40! For my last interview until fall/autumn, I had the pleasure of speaking with Yaz. She went from the military to a civilian career as a...

As recently as 2017, security and compliance professionals at many of Tripwire’s large enterprise and government customers were talking about migration to the cloud as a possibility to be considered and cautiously explored in the coming years. Within a year, the tone had changed. What used to be “we’re thinking about it” became “the CIO wants to see...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s May 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-830 on Wednesday, May 15th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-0863 Windows Error Reporting (WER) incorrectly handles certain files and, when exploited, could lead to the execution of code...

By now, many organizations have turned to DevOps as part of their ongoing digital transformations. This process has not been the same for any two companies. Indeed, organizations have embraced DevOps at their own place, and they’ve invested varying levels of time and budget into their nascent deployments. Such variety has helped shape organizations’...