With how much of our personal and professional lives take place online, it becomes more important each day for us to understand our vulnerability to cyberattacks. Cybercriminals target emails, domains, and accounts in order to impersonate identities and scam consumers and businesses alike. In 2021 alone, email spoofing and phishing increased by 220%...

A $10 million reward is being offered for information leading to the identification or location of malicious hackers working with North Korea to launch cyber attacks on US critical infrastructure. The offer comes from the US State Department which is understandably eager to disrupt the activities of hacking gangs linked to foreign governments who...

Malware – what are the threats? Malware can come from and in a variety of attack vectors. Besides using ‘traditional’ methods of spreading malware, adversaries can leverage more sophisticated methods to turn your Power System into a ‘malware host’. The key target is your data. Data is valuable, and organisations have paid at least $602 million to...

I walked into a business the other day. After a long conversation about the client’s need for cybersecurity and the implementation of the ISO27001 security standard, we talked about their risk appetite. "We don't accept any risk. We're risk-averse" said the CEO. But, is this achievable? Given the complexity of our modern world, with diversity in...

In the two years proceeding from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the business world has been transformed on a grand scale. Organizations have created more data than ever before, data is now spread across a wider attack surface, putting it at a heightened risk of becoming a compromised risk. The manner and location of data storage and...

The Center for Internet Security’s Critical Security Controls has become an industry standard set of controls for securing the enterprise. Now on version 8, the original 20 controls are down to 18 with several sub controls added. The first six basic controls can prevent 85 percent of the most common cyber attacks, and even though the controls have...

Following a successful hybrid event in 2021 that saw more than 6,000 in-person, and more than 14,500 virtual attendees, Black Hat USA returns in 2022 to the Mandalay Bay Convention Centre in Las Vegas, Nevada. Now in its 25th year, this year’s event has three key components, each equally unmissable, namely these are Trainings, Briefings, and The...

When most people speak of any city government, they often mention words like “Bureaucratic”, “Behind the times”, and “Slow.” This is especially true when considering cybersecurity initiatives. However, a small town in Texas is changing that view. Seguin, Texas, which was once the smallest Texas city to have a full-time cybersecurity employee, was...

Tripwire's June 2022 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities for Microsoft. First on the patch priority list this month is a patch for a remote code execution vulnerability in Edge. Next are patches for Office and Excel that resolve 3 information disclosure vulnerabilities and 1 remote code execution vulnerability Up...

Three million Android users may have lost money and had their devices infected by spyware, after the discovery that the official Google Play store has been distributing apps infected by a new family of malware. French security researcher Maxime Ingrao described last week on Twitter how he had discovered the new malware, named "Autolycos", and how...

Within the HIPAA Security Rule are Administrative, Physical, and Technical Safeguards. These safeguards are as important to understand as they are to implement, so let’s get some clarifications for the non-initiated. Many healthcare entities and their business associates are routinely challenged with understanding and successfully implementing the...

In the world of modern business, companies must put extra effort into creating engaging visual content to stand out from the crowd. Social media marketing, for instance, was once deemed an easy way for companies to reach additional eyes but today, marketing is a lot more competitive than simply creating a post and hoping it goes viral. Entertaining...

Among the many challenges businesses contend with in the global marketplace today, the 11th Allianz Risk Barometer 2022 ranks cybersecurity threats as the most important business risk. This proves beyond any doubt that enterprises are experiencing increasing threats and full-on attacks to their information technology systems. To safeguard their...

Microsoft has shared details of a widespread phishing campaign that not only attempted to steal the passwords of targeted organisations, but was also capable of circumventing multi-factor authentication (MFA) defences. The attackers used AiTM (Attacker-in-The-Middle) reverse-proxy sites to pose as Office 365 login pages which requested MFA codes,...

GitOps is arguably the hottest trend in software development today. It is a new work model that is widely adopted due to its simplicity and the strong benefits it provides for development pipelines in terms of resilience, predictability, and auditability. Another important aspect of GitOps is that it makes security easier, especially in complex...

Ransomware attacks continue to plague organizations globally regardless of their size. In a press release by the NCC group that preceded the Annual Threat Monitor Report 2021 published for the year 2021, there were an estimated 2,690 ransomware attacks, a 92.7% increase from 2020s figures of 1,389. The increase of ransomware attacks builds upon the...

In 2022, the buzz phrase of the year has to be “The Great Resignation”. What is it? It’s a term coined to describe the current rise in people leaving their employer to find work elsewhere. But people have always moved on, right? Of course they have. Staff retention rates have always been a target for most HR functions. But something is different in...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s July 2022 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these Patch Tuesday vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-1011 on Wednesday, July 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2022-22047 Microsoft is reporting this month that a single vulnerability in the Windows Client/Server Runtime...

Lateral movement is one of the most consequential types of network activity for which organizations need to be on the lookout. After accessing a network, the attacker maintains ongoing access by essentially stirring through the compromised environment and obtaining increased privileges (known as “escalation of privileges”) using various tools and...