In my last blog post, I discussed the five levels of preparedness for cybercrime and remarked on the sad fact that the majority of enterprises are at the reactive or compliant levels. I also discussed that reacting to cybercrime is driven by attempting to deliver security, which is predominantly built upon an over-reliance on prevention capabilities...

In a previous blog post, ICS: Next Frontier For Cyber Attacks blog, I spoke about the cybersecurity posture of industrial control systems (ICS) and the enormous implications for such attacks. For industrial organizations, it means downtime and lost business. For individuals, it means potential safety issues and lost services. For society, it means...

Microsoft has announced the release of Project Springfield, a fuzzing tool which helps customers find security bugs in software before the hackers do. According to the Redmond-based company, the service is designed to help developers find security vulnerabilities proactively. As a result, they don't need to undertake the costly effort of releasing a...

Cybersecurity has become a board level discussion, and worries about cybersecurity breaches are part of what keeps C-suite execs and BOD members up at night. So much so that many organizations have started to adopt the mentality that they’ve likely been breached already and they just don’t know it yet. It’s what’s known as the “assume breach”...

On April 7, 2014, the world first learned about the Heartbleed vulnerability. A small flaw in OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS/DTLS (transport layer security protocols) heartbeat extension (RFC6520), Heartbleed enables an attacker to unravel the encryption measures in systems protected by vulnerable OpenSSL software, which some at the time...

On June 7, 2016, the Angler exploit kit all of a sudden disappeared. It's unclear exactly what led to Angler's demise, but all reports indicate the exploit kit shut down after Russian authorities arrested 50 members of a hacker group that developed Lurk malware along with Angler. So, what did the exploit kit world do in response? It did what it always...

In 2015, Tripwire partnered with FIRST Robotics to bring on summer interns from local high schools. Our goal was to teach the students about various aspects of information security on both the offensive and defensive side. The goals I set out for our interns in 2015 were a bit lofty, to say the least. I had planned on teaching them about the various...

Looking at the cyberthreat landscape, millions of new devices come online every day. But there’s a shortage of qualified cybersecurity workers to protect those devices once they come online. Additionally, in almost every case, it takes minutes or less to compromise them. Simply running more vulnerability scans to collect more data and generating more...

It’s hard to believe that in such a relatively short period of time, smartphones and other mobile devices, such as tablets, have become so tightly woven into both our personal and work lives. And unlike desktop or laptop computers that are usually company-owned, personally-owned mobile devices are often filled with company related apps, data, email...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses 14 new Microsoft Security Bulletins. VERT is actively working on coverage for these bulletins in order to meet our 24-hour SLA and expects to ship ASPL-689 on Wednesday, September 14th. Ease of Use (published exploits) to Risk Table Automated Exploit Easy...

Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability – those are the three pillars of the CIA triad model for information security. Here's something you might not have known: in reverse order, those same pillars apply to IT Operations. Think about it. In a world of agility and enablement, the availability, integrity and confidentiality of the systems and...

Firewalls are staples of network security, and for years, they’ve played a part in keeping networks safe by restricting both incoming and outgoing network traffic. Along with antivirus software, they are among the oldest and most widely used cybersecurity tools. But what role should firewalls play in 2016 and beyond? One thing is clear: even though...

“Should we fear hackers? Intention is at the heart of this discussion.” – Kevin Mitnick In cybercrime, truth is in the eye of the beholder. And if in any other research or business field it is somehow easy to define cause and consequence, in cybercrime it is not. Perhaps it is due to its complexity and multi-layered character that cybercrime has...

We all know that cybercrime is increasing and likely to jump from a $75 billion problem last year to a $170 billion problem in 2020. Most will argue that this out of control spiral is unavoidable. It’s just the nature of the game. We will always be one step behind – that much is true. At the rate we are traveling, though, we are slipping behind by...

Crowd-sourced review service Yelp says it will award researchers up to 15,000 USD for reporting exploits as part of its newly public bug bounty program. The company successfully ran a private bug-bounty program for the past two years, during which it worked with private researchers and bug bounty hunters to fix as many as 100 vulnerabilities. But to...

Apple issued critical updates for OS X Yosemite and El Capitan on Thursday to patch security vulnerabilities resembling those discovered on iOS 9.3.5 earlier this week. Dubbed Trident, the three zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2016-4655, CVE-2016-4656 and CVE-2016-4657) could allow an attacker to silently jailbreak an iOS device and spy on victims,...

You, a creative entrepreneur with a great idea, finally launch a business. As a startup, having your own website is essential in conducting business. Startups must always take extra precaution when it comes to their web security. Because startups are the perfect targets for hackers, your website should be protected as soon as it is ready to go live....

We are moving into an era of inter-connectivity with billions of devices, including a previously disconnected industry of automotive vehicles. Vehicles were not designed with computer security in mind, and that worked just fine for the last few decades. However, now we are at a point where we can take an "unhackable" 1997 Honda Civic and add in a...

Industrial control system (ICS) security is a growing concern for organizations around the world. On the one hand, research suggests that vulnerabilities and exposures are increasingly jeopardizing the security of ICS assets. In their report Overload: Critical Lessons from 15 Years of ICS Vulnerabilities, the FireEye iSIGHT threat intelligence team...

Cisco has confirmed the legitimacy of two exploits found in a data dump of code released by the Shadow Brokers hacker group. On 13 August, the mysterious hacking group announced an auction of files allegedly containing exploit code used by the Equation Group, a sophisticated threat actor which leverages unknown vulnerabilities in multiple vendor...