Security experts have been warning companies and policymakers that systems protecting power utilities and other critical infrastructure are vulnerable to cyber attacks. Those intrusions could produce widespread damage, if they proved to be successful. In fact, as reported by Dark Reading, the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team ...

TorrentLocker, a ransomware family member, is a type of file-encrypting ransomware that significantly infected Windows operating systems. It was first observed in February 2014 and released in late August 2014. Later, it released with five new major releases. TorrentLocker encrypts the victim's data files by using a symmetric block cipher AES and...

Facebook has added end-to-end encryption in Facebook Messenger but there are a few caveats that people need to be aware of. The first is that current messages are not encrypted. You will need to start a new message in order to enable this new option. It’s also important to note that encrypted messages are not available via Facebook but only found...

A misconfigured database exposed the passwords and login details of 1.5 million people who have signed up for multiple dating websites. The MacKeeper Security Research Center spotted an unprotected MongoDB instance owned by C&Z Tech Limited, a New Zealand-based company which operates several...

"If you have done well in whatever business you are in, it's your duty to send the elevator back down and try to help bring up the next generation of undiscovered talent." As someone who has been in the security industry for over a decade, this quote from Kevin Spacey resonates with me. I have found the information security field to be particularly...

On September 26, 2016, I received my final notice of my Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP®) designation. My path to certification really began in 1996 when I first stepped into the computer world, but my decision to pursue certification began with a conversation that took place at NolaCon in 2015. I was chatting with a...

In acknowledgment of National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) 2016, we at The State of Security weighed in on how organizations can leverage the right people, processes and technology to defend themselves against common IT security threats. We covered a variety of risks, including POS malware, browser vulnerabilities and stolen IT assets....

You know you’ve got them. Employees with nearly unfettered access to every nook and cranny of your organization’s network, devices and servers. While often a necessity in the digital age, privileged users represent a huge cybersecurity risk that you should not overlook. Employees who hold the “keys to the kingdom” are an appealing target for hackers...

Reminder: VERT Vuln School guides are published for educational purposes only. In our last post, we demonstrated how an attacker could leverage a classical SQL injection vulnerability in a web application to leak database information (by reflecting the result of the database queries onto the web application itself). In this post, we are going to...

MarsJoke ransomware once posed a serious threat to users, but not as much now that researchers released a decryption tool. Kaspersky Lab's Anton Ivanov, Orkhan Mamedov, Fedor Sinitsyn said they created the decryptor by exploiting a flaw in the ransomware's code. Specifically, MarsJoke uses a function "rand()" to randomly generate an array of...

The old saying, "What you say can be used against you in a court of law," extends itself into other areas, such as business, finances and even parenting. Digital forensics is playing a critical part in court cases, executive layoffs and parenting situations. We can see why now – the mounds of data produced from digital forensics can result in rich...

Since 2003, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has designated October as National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM). Each week of NCSAM carries its own theme that is meant to help users stay safe online. To help promote those topics, the DHS partners with public and private entities. Together, they create resources, hold special events...

A company is offering to pay 1.5 million USD to anyone who submits a remote jailbreak for Apple's iOS 10. On Tuesday, the exploit broker Zerodium made the announcement on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Zerodium/status/781516292901789696 Zerodium is well known for offering bug bounty rewards whose value dwarfs those offered by Apple, Google, and other...

Everyone hates scams. That's because everyone's a target. As we all know, social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are rife with fraudsters. Most of those scammers just want a few hundred dollars or access to their target's account. But some want more. Some try to steal their victim's identity, while others attempt to exploit a...

A Syrian national affiliated with the notorious Syrian Electronic Army hacking group has pleaded guilty in a US court to charges of conspiring to hack into computers and extort money. 37-year-old Peter Romar, who was extradited to the United States from his home in Waltershausen, Germany, appears to have played an important role in the operations of...

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...

As the cyber security threats continue to evolve and expand upon both consumers and companies, we observe a shift from the traditional Trojans and Worms to more complex malware that can truly devastate a system. The contemporary viruses execute their payloads in stages and can dynamically affect different parts of the target system. The biggest...

A new report released by Europol's European Cybercrime Center (EC3) warns of the eight main cybercrime trends that investigators have seen impact a growing number of citizens and businesses this year. The 2016 Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) found that the volume, scope and...

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...

Do you remember the .Zepto Ransomware? Of course, you do. Well, you can more or less put it in the rear-view mirror. However, there is very little in the way of actual reasons for celebration. A new threat is on the rise! It’s been tentatively called .Odin File Virus. It changes your files’ extensions to match the name of the one-eyed god from the...