The United States military has announced it will be launching its inaugural bug bounty program called "Hack the Army" in November 2016. Outgoing secretary of the Army Eric Fanning made the announcement in a press conference. He said the program will help the Army keep up with the latest digital threats. As quoted by WIRED: "We’re not agile enough...

Today's industrial control systems (ICS) face an array of digital threats. Two in particular stand out. On the one hand, digital attackers are increasingly targeting and succeeding in gaining unauthorized access to industrial organizations. Some actors use malware, while others resort to spear-phishing (or whaling) and other social engineering...

At least five of Russia's largest banks were hit with prolonged distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks earlier this week. Beginning on Tuesday afternoon, the attacks continued intermittently for two days, targeting the online services of Sberbank, Alfabank and several other financial...

Casino Rama Resort says hackers stole information pertaining to its customers, employees, and vendors in a digital attack. On 4 November, the casino based in Rama, Ontario first learned of a security incident that affected one of its networks. Its internal teams began working with digital security experts to figure out what happened. Following their...

Security has always been the matter of heated debates between staunch adherents and implacable adversaries of both Android and iOS. With the advent of Google’s new phone, Pixel, the heat hasn’t subsided. On the contrary, it rose to a whole new level. Right now, Pixel is under close scrutiny of active web surfers and online security gurus as per...

At some point in our lives, we have all experienced a time when we had something break, quit working, or at the very least not work the way we expected. After exhausting our personal skills in trying to figure out how to fix the problem, we end up calling the repairman – the expert that will help us get back on track. In the IT Ops and IT Security...

Business email compromise (BEC) scammers are now focusing on building rapport with victims to increase their chances of success. Just as a little background, a BEC scam begins with an actor launching spear-phishing or whaling attacks against a senior, C-level executive. If the attack proves successful, the actor spends some time researching how the...

Women in information security, being a minority, deserve a spotlight. Previously, I've interviewed Tiberius Hefflin, a Scottish security analyst who is currently working in the United States, and Tracy Maleeff, a woman who went from library sciences to infosec, who's now a host of the PVCSec podcast, and who runs her own infosec business. Recent...

In February of 2015, researchers at Kaspersky Lab disclosed the existence of a sophisticated cyber-attack group that's been in operation since early 2001, and targeted almost every industry and foreign countries with its zero-day malware. Kaspersky called this threat actor the Equation Group because of its love for encryption algorithms and the...

Google has announced it will now label websites that it continuously flags for displaying unsafe or malicious content as "repeat offenders." For more than a decade, Google has worked to protect users with the help of Safe Browsing. It's a feature that examines billions of URLs on a daily basis in search of unsafe web resources. Safe Browsing looks...

In late September, when Apple released iOS 10, it also took a dramatic step back in at least one aspect of iPhone and iPad security. Russian firm Elcomsoft discovered that local password-protected iTunes backups made of iPhones and iPads running iOS 10 were an astonishing 2500 times faster to crack than iOS 9. ...

According to new research published by Microsoft last month, one in three users fell victim to a tech support scam in the last year. One in five followed up on a suspicious interaction by downloading software or visiting a fraudulent website, while nearly one in ten lost money. The classic scam The traditional form of a tech support scam has been...

Against many experts' advice, we as users tend to overshare information about ourselves on social media. Doing so makes the job of a bad actor so much easier. Depending on the content of the shared details, an actor can leverage the information to commit identity theft. Alternatively, they can abuse it to conduct targeted phishing campaigns known as...

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-698 on Wednesday, November 9th. Ease of Use (published exploits) to Risk Table Automated Exploit ...

An Austrian security researcher recently unveiled a vulnerability affecting Netflix that allowed attackers to takeover user accounts. In a blog post published on Monday, the researcher – known as ‘Slashcrypto’ – explained the attack works when a victim’s voicemail can be hacked to bypass the password reset function of Netflix. “… When a user wanted...

A team sent by Bangladesh Bank arrived in Manila to move part of 81 million USD stolen from it in a heist back to its account at the New York Federal Reserve. According to Reuters , casino boss Kim Wong surrendered 4.63 million USD and 488.28 million pesos (10.05 million USD) to authorities after...

Just like in September, the cyber extortion epidemic keeps mutating. The crooks at the helm of ransomware campaigns are constantly experimenting with the geography of their attacks, intimidation tactics, data locking mechanisms, and payment channels. Learn how this underground ecosystem evolved last month and whether the security industry is ready...

I've added some handy tools to my pentest toolbox this year. You'll find a short description of each with links to more information below. Whether red or blue team, you'll want to know what these tools can do. Password Spraying Password spraying is guessing a few passwords against a large list of users in order to avoid account lockout. You would...

The webcam is a cherished tool of digital extortionists. With the help of a remote access trojan (RAT) like BlackShades or Dark Comet, a bad actor can "slave" a user's computer, assume control over their webcam, record the unknowing individual, and leverage that footage to get what they want from their victim. Those demands could consist of money,...

As we near the end of 2016, it’s safe to say this year has brought its fair share of notorious cyber attacks, data breaches and security incidents. We saw a rampant rise in ransomware targeting hospitals and healthcare providers; we saw attacks on industrial control systems (ICS) resulting in disruptions and outages; we saw high-profile banks lose...