For the 14th consecutive year, IBM Security released its annual Data Breach Report that examines the financial impact of data breaches on organizations. According to the report, the cost of a data breach has risen 12% over the past 5 years to $3.92 million per incident on average. These rising expenses are representative of the multi-year financial...

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) announced that it learned of a privacy incident involving its Department of Neurology. MGH said that it learned on 24 June 2019 of an instance where someone gained unauthorized access to databases related to two computer applications used by its Neurology...

It's no secret that there are a lot of websites on the internet hosting malicious content whether they be phishing pages, scams or malware itself. Every day we hear of new attacks, there's a common denominator of either a user having clicked on a link to a fraudulent website or a site having played host to code that pulled a malicious payload down...

Visa unveiled a suite of new security capabilities designed to help detect fraud and disrupt threats targeting financial institutions and merchants. At its U.S. Security Summit 2019, the multinational financial services corporation announced that the new capabilities will be available to all Visa...

Headlines continue to suggest that organizations’ cloud environments make for tantalizing targets for digital attackers. Illustrating this point, the 2019 SANS State of Cloud Security survey found "a significant increase in unauthorized access by outsiders into cloud environments or to cloud assets" between 2017 (12 percent) and 2018 (19 percent)....

What if your job was to break things repeatedly in order to make them work better? Sounds like the dream of every curious six-year old, but it's actually an emerging software engineering trend based in the transition from devops to devsecops. It's designed to test systematic limitations with the goal of improving security and performance under any...

Cloud computing has transformed the IT industry, as services can now be deployed in a fraction of the time that it used to take. Scalable computing solutions have spawned large cloud computing companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. With a click of a button, personnel can create or reset entire infrastructure...

Just as you would map a hike or climb by creating waypoints you plan to hit each day, you must plan your vulnerability management process by creating similar goals. We call these goals Maturity Levels, from ML0 to ML5, as we defined them in the last blog. You have your asset inventory from an open-source tool, asset tracking database or maybe your...

Even though the healthcare industry has been slower to adopt Internet of Things technologies than other industries, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is destined to transform how we keep people safe and healthy, especially as the demand for lowering healthcare costs increases. The Internet of Medical Things refers to the connected system of...

As a Professional Services Consultant, I have the pleasure of traveling all around the globe meeting clients and talking to a wide variety of IT security professionals who form the front line of defence against malware. One of my favorite topics is how people got their start in their careers in IT, but when I start discussing my own early years and...

Police recovered over $300,000 stolen by phishers from Spotslyvania County Public Schools in Spotslyvania County, Virginia. On 15 August, Virginia State Police announced that it had reclaimed over half the amount of money stolen in a phishing attack against the Spotslyvania County Public Schools. The...

The IoT Threat Landscape As technology continues to pervade modern-day society, security and trust have become significant concerns. This is particularly due to the plethora of cyber attacks that target organizations, governments and society. The traditional approach to address such challenges has been to conduct cybersecurity risk assessments that...

A biometrics system used to secure more than 1.5 million locations around the world - including banks, police forces, and defence companies in the United States, UK, India, Japan, and the UAE - has suffered a major data breach, exposing a huge number of records. South Korean firm Suprema runs the web-based biometric access platform BioStar 2, but...

Researchers identified a large-scale cryptocurrency miner infection in which a new malware family called "Norman" took part. The Varonis Security Research team made the discovery while investigating a cryptominer infection at a mid-sized company. Here's what they found through this effort: Almost every server and workstation was infected with...

On the last day of July, MITRE released its most recent update to the ATT&CK framework. The ATT&CK framework is a curated knowledge base of tactics, techniques, software, that adversarial groups have leveraged when compromising enterprise systems. The July 2019 update is relatively minor compared to the April 2019 update, which saw a new tactic with...

Fraudsters launched an attack campaign that distributed phishing emails designed to target the hotel industry in North America. In summer 2019, researchers at 360 Security Center discovered that bad actors had sent attack emails to financial personnel working at various hotels throughout North America. These emails informed recipients that their...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s August 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-845 on Wednesday, August 14th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs Microsoft has indicated that none of the vulnerabilities being patched this month have been used in-the-wild nor have they been...

Tripwire's July 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Oracle. First on the list for July are patches for Microsoft's Browser and Scripting Engine. These patches resolve 11 vulnerabilities including fixes for Memory Corruption weaknesses. Next on the list are patches for Microsoft Excel and...