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VERT Alert: April 2015 Patch Tuesday Analysis

Today’s VERT Alert addresses 11 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-610 on Wednesday, April 15th. MS15-032 Multiple Memory Corruption Vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer MULTIPLE Internet Explorer ASLR Bypass...
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Takeaways From the 2015 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report

Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), published since 2008, has become one of the most anticipated information security industry reports. Think of it as the Data Breach Bible, as it dissects thousands of confirmed data breaches and security incidents from around the globe into emergent and shifting trends, providing us with...
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10 Steps to Improve Your Layered Defense Strategy

We have a problem in the security community – or maybe within the modern information age of humanity in general. That problem is we see security as a technology, policy, privacy or people issue, instead of an integrated combination thereof. However, despite standards, laws, best practices, lessons learned and new technology we continue to practice...
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Could Secure Technology Have Prevented the Germanwings Crash?

On Tuesday, March 24, Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed into the French Alps. All 150 people onboard were killed. After studying one of the aircraft’s black boxes recovered in the crash, investigators determined that Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of Flight 9525, deliberately locked the pilot out of the cockpit and altered the aircraft’s trajectory to...
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How to Build a Successful IT Security Awareness Program

The first step towards creating a successful security awareness program is to recognize that this is not a project with a defined timeline and an expected completion date, but is instead a development of organizational culture. Akin to “safety first” cultures that develop in manufacturing and other heavy industries, there are large economic and...
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Global Energy Sector Targeted in Reconnaissance Malware Attacks

A new Trojan-based campaign is targeting energy companies around the world in an effort to gain access to sensitive information. The majority of companies experiencing attacks are distinctly linked to the petroleum, gas and helium industries located in the Middle East – including UAE, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. However, businesses in the US...
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Potential Consequences of Hacking Tutorials on the Web

When I was about 10 years old, I read a book about Kevin Mitnick, Pengo and Robert Morris. While their exploits seemed very interesting, each story ended in jail time or at the very least, derailment of career goals. My unsophisticated Internet searching circa the early 2000s led me to the same conclusion. Hacking was a neat skill to have but the...
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Applying a Stress-Test to Your IT Infrastructure

Banks regularly undergo mandatory stress tests. These tests are clearly defined, and the results are used to determine how well each bank can maneuver through an economic calamity. If we apply the basic blueprint of a financial stress test to an IT infrastructure, we can loosely define it as: “An analysis conducted under unfavorable scenarios which...
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VERT Vuln School: Format String Attacks 101

The printf() family of functions (printf(), fprintf(), sprintf(), etc.) are surprisingly powerful and, if not properly used, can expose a class of vulnerabilities called format string attacks. These attacks can be very bad because with a well-crafted format string, an attacker could write an arbitrary value into an arbitrary memory location. This...
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Inside The Mind Of A Former Black Hat Hacker

Information security professionals are all too familiar with the work of black hat hackers. These individuals seek to gain unauthorized access to enterprises’ computer networks by exploiting security vulnerabilities – malicious activity which frequently threatens the personal and/or financial information of millions of customers. But what...
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OpenSSL to Fix 'High' Severity Security Flaw

The OpenSSL Project, a collaborative effort designed to develop an open source toolkit that implements SSL and TLS, has announced that it will be fixing a number of security flaws on Thursday, one of which it has labeled “high” severity. The initiative made the announcement in a message circulated yesterday. “The OpenSSL project team would like to...
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VERT Threat Alert: March 2015 Patch Tuesday Analysis

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-605 on Wednesday, March 11. MS15-018 Multiple Memory Corruption Vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer MULTIPLE VBScript Memory...
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The ‘ABC’ of the ‘APT’

The term APT (Advanced Persistent Threat), like many other acronyms in the world of IT/Information/Cyber Security entered our vocabulary some years ago, along with other partnering phrases, such as Advanced Evasion Techniques (AET), which at the time took the headlines as something new. Whilst these new outlined logical dangers do serve up a very...
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Demystifying iOS Enterprise Certificates

For the past several months, the major threats to mobile security, especially within large enterprises, have relied on exploiting one thing—iOS Enterprise Certificates. With this part of Apple’s framework seemingly a significant source of danger, we’re taking a look at iOS Enterprise certificates from a mobile security perspective. By examining...