On Friday May 15th, a Canadian news outlet published a copy of the application for a search warrant filed by the FBI after Chris Roberts was removed from a United flight for tweeting about hacking a plane. If you’ve never read a search warrant for electronic devices, it’s an educational read. The purpose of the warrant was to allow the FBI to search...

It seems more and more companies are beginning to understand the benefits of running a bug bounty program, encouraging vulnerability researchers to report security flaws responsibly (for a reward) rather than publishing details on the web or selling a flaw to potentially malicious parties. The latest high profile firm found running a bug bounty is...

Updated at 8:30 AM PST. A security researcher has discovered a new vulnerability that he claims could allow a hacker to infiltrate potentially every machine on a datacenter’s network, leaving millions of virtual machines vulnerable to attack. According to CrowdStrike Senior Security Researcher Jason Geffner, ‘VENOM’ (CVE-2015-3456), which is an...

Today’s VERT Threat Alert addresses 13 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-614 on Wednesday, May 13th. MS15-043 VBScript ASLR Bypass CVE-2015-1684 VBScript and JScript ASLR Bypass CVE-2015-1686 ...

Many of us have embraced the “shopping online is not safe” mentality, or at least held that mindset for a time but today, shopping locally has become (arguably) more dangerous than shopping online. When comparing current security issues, one might have a hard time choosing between risking shopping over a potentially unsafe server connection to that...

The best things in life may be free but in software, that statement isn't so true. A free database based on the code of one of the most popular enterprise databases around sounds like a great deal, but it can quickly turn into a nightmare. With data breaches becoming ever more common, storing data in...

Now more than ever, it’s evident cybersecurity risk oversight at the board level is essential to keep any business or organization afloat – and off the headlines. However, despite the abundance of data breaches and high-profile cyber attacks, C-level executives still lack understanding of these cyber risks, as well as confidence in their...

"The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.” – Albert Einstein Being involved in information security is intimidating. Not just because you are dealing with complex technology with serious implications if you fail, but everyone around you is going to be smarter than you. Even your adversaries. Especially your adversaries. Get...

You know what I don’t want to talk about any more? Responsible disclosure. The problem is that, as old as that discussion is for information security, it and the adjacent topics, remain relevant for many other industries. There’s a good chance you caught the media coverage of a recent incident...

In ages past, invading armies would poison the water source – usually a well – of a city in order to reduce the fighting capability of the enemy or to force the populace of a city under siege to surrender. This method was usually successful because an invader could have a devastating effect on a very large population with minimal yet targeted effort...

Plenty of people these days are prepared to augment their bodies with face furniture, piercings, rings and tattoos. But would you implant a chip in your hand to show how easy it is to exploit an Android phone? That's what former US navy petty officer Seth Wahle did, in an attempt to demonstrate how business networks could be compromised. Wahle took...

General Keith Alexander, the former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), is concerned that the United States’ energy infrastructure is vulnerable to targeted attacks launched by sophisticated actors. “The greatest risk is a catastrophic attack on the energy infrastructure. We are not prepared for that,” he said. According to General...

This might be hard to believe, but it is true: 59 percent of data breaches are happening not because of some smart hacker who wants to do harm to your company but because of your own employees. In order to stop these incidents, you have to focus on two things (other than investing in new technology): set your internal processes and procedures...

It could be said that the proliferation of automation is the defining characteristic of the last 100 years. In almost every area of our lives, we’ve found a way to leverage technology to increase our efficiency, freeing us up for higher-order tasks… The things we like to do, the things that are hard, the things we’re good at. A great example of this...

Earlier this month, an explosion at a power station in Maryland caused outages at the White House, the Capital, and the State Department. The service interruption, which affected between 10,000 and 30,000 people, was caused by a 230-kilovolt transmission conductor that broke free from its support structure, according to NBC News. As a result, the...

It’s that time of year, again, when the brightest minds in the business gather to talk all things cyber in the city of San Francisco. To start off the busy week ahead, BSidesSF kicked off day one with some great speakers and intriguing presentations. For those of you that didn’t make it out, here’s a short and sweet recap of some of today’s talks....

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a buzzword that many use to describe a not-so-distant reality in which devices and machines talk to one another. To some, however, the potential of IoT extends well beyond the mere notion of a “smart,” interconnected world. Included in this group of observers is Jeremy Rifkin, an author, political advisor and social...

If, on Tuesday, you find yourself in San Francisco, with access to RSA, then I know how you should spend your time from 1PM PST. Alex Cox, Ken Westin, and I will be introducing our panel: Killing the Kill Chain: Disrupting the Cyber Attack Progression. Instead of talking about how you can preemptively stop an attack, we plan to show you. With Ken...

The Verizon 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report has always had a conversational, quirky style to share some pretty technical information about the security breach data it analyzes. So if you’re wondering what Prince has to do with vulnerability management, just know that when you read the full report, you’ll understand – a lot of song titles are...

In the first installment of this blog post, I took you through how I completed level 1 of Tripwire Vulnerability and Exposure Research (VERTs) Capture the Flag contest. Now, I’ll show you how I finished level 2 and successfully completed the challenge.Level 2Going to the link above results in a registration page (pictured below), which requires a...