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...

Many organizations are still struggling to fill out their digital security workforces. This task isn’t getting any easier with time, either. In a Tripwire-commissioned survey of 336 IT security professionals, four-fifths of respondents told Dimensional Research that they feel it’s gotten more difficult to hire skilled personnel since 2017. That’s a...

The evolution of the cyber threat landscape highlights the emerging need for organizations to strengthen their ability to identify, analyze and evaluate cyber risks before they evolve into full-fledged security incidents. When it comes to cyber risk mitigation, the terms “patch management” and “vulnerability management” are used as if they are...

Apple announced that it will be expanding the scope of its bug bounty program and increasing its maximum possible reward payout to $1 million. Ivan Krstić, Apple’s head of security engineering, made the announcement during a presentation on iOS and macOS security at Black Hat USA 2019. He revealed that Apple's bug bounty program will begin...

Binance, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has revealed that it is being blackmailed to the tune of 300 Bitcoin (approximately US $3.5 million) by someone who is threatening to release some 10,000 sensitive photographs of its customers. And in an attempt to identify its blackmailer, Binance has put a 25 Bitcoin (approximately US ...

Insurance company State Farm revealed that a digital security incident might have exposed their customers' personal information. In August 2019, ZDNet obtained a copy of a letter in which State Farm disclosed a data breach. The insurance company specifically revealed that a bad actor had conducted a credential stuffing attack. This type of operation...

About a decade ago, organizations were hesitant to adopt cloud solutions, with many citing security concerns. Fast forward to 2019, and 81% of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy, spurred on by the desire for increased flexibility, usage-based spending and desire to respond to market opportunity with greater agility. In fact, organizations are...

The recent Tripwire blog ‘7 Habits of highly effective Vulnerability Management’ by Tim Erlin was a great read with some sage advice on the always relevant security topic of VM. I noticed, however, that although the seven points themselves were all Tim’s own, the title snappily paraphrased Steven Covey’s classic management book. This made me think....

American multinational conglomerate holding company AT&T has announced the launch of its public bug bounty program on HackerOne. Revealed on 6 August, the new program will award security researchers who submit reports on eligible vulnerabilities that affect AT&T's websites, mobile apps, devices and exposed APIs. In-scope flaws include weaknesses...

In a recent blog post for the State of Security, we asked security experts what they thought would make the biggest impact on the security of industrial control systems (ICS) in the next 5-10 years. They gave numerous answers, but perhaps the most frequent response was the ongoing IT-OT convergence in industrial organizations. Our experts felt that...

Cybersecurity breaches and regulatory compliance are this year's themes. Marriott was sued and fined $124 million for their data breach back in 2014, according to The Wall Street Journal. Capital One leaked 100 million credit applications including Social Security Numbers. Both LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics exposed millions of patients’ medical...

When malware sneaks inside your network, it needs to communicate back to the internet whether to exfiltrate sensitive datasets it found, accept commands of its evil masters or even simply let them know it has successfully infiltrated your infrastructure (with ransomware being one of the rare exceptions that doesn't need such connection). Somehow,...

The City of Murfreesboro has disclosed a security incident involving the online portal for its Water Resources Customer webpage. In early August, IT personnel for the Rutherford County municipality detected some security issues affecting the online portal for the Water Resources Customer webpage. Tennessean reported that they decided to shut down...

As someone who has worked for their entire career in the Managed Network Services space, if I had to pick out, over the past five years, two of the most impactful shifts in managing technology, it would be a shift from traditional, in-house servers to solutions where 3rd parties build “clouds” to provide similar business functions as well as the...

The Case for Security Awareness Training Cybersecurity and cyber security awareness are critical to business survival in an era dominated by growing virtual crime. It might be true that most people know about costly identity theft and reputation-destroying network hacks. Organizations spend millions every year trying to defend themselves against...

Security researchers detected and blocked over 65,000 attempts to steal credit card information from compromised online stores during the month of July. In July, Malwarebytes found that the majority (53.5 percent) of stolen credit card details originated from shoppers located in the United States. Canadians were the second most-prevalent group of...

Automotive giant Honda has shut down an exposed database that contained sensitive information about the security -- specifically the weak points -- of its internal network. Security researcher Justin Paine discovered the sensitive information after scouring the internet with Shodan, a specialist search engine which can be used to find exposed...

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned of insecure CAN bus network implementations affecting aircraft. On 30 July, CISA explained that attackers could target aircraft by exploiting insecure implementations of their CAN bus networks, tools which allow separate devices...