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Nearly Half of Employees Don't Know What to Do When Ransomware Hits

A survey revealed that approximately half of employees didn't know how to respond in the event their organization suffered a ransomware infection. In its survey of North American business employees, Kaspersky found that 45% of respondents overall did not know the proper steps they should take in response to a ransomware attack. Respondents whose...
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VelvetSweatshop Technique Used by Attack Campaign to Deliver LimeRAT

An attack campaign leveraged the Excel VelvetSweatshop encryption technique to deliver samples of the LimeRAT malware family. According to Mimecast, those responsible for this attack campaign turned to VelvetSweatshop to enhance the efficacy of their efforts. Nefarious individuals have a history of using a password to encrypt malicious Excel...
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The MITRE ATT&CK Framework: Execution

Of all the tactics that an adversary will take on in their campaign, none will be more widely abused than Execution (https://attack.mitre.org/wiki/Execution). When taking into consideration off-the-shelf malware, traditional ransomware, or state-of-the-art advanced persistent threat actors, all of them have execution in common. There’s a great quote...
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Are You Ready for the Remote Work’s Toll on Corporate Security?

Given the situation that many companies, organizations and government agencies have been forced into working remotely due to COVID-19, it is imperative to give some thought about corporate security. Using a VPN for New Stay-at-Home Workers Millions of employees are now working from the confines of their own homes in an effort to keep businesses running smoothly. In most situations, employees are...
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COVID-19 Scam Roundup – March 30, 2020

Many in the digital security community are coming together to combat malicious actors during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global outbreak. One of the most visible of these new efforts is the COVID-19 CTI League. Made up of approximately 400 volunteers living in approximately 40 countries, the COVID-19 CTI League is working to block...
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Mr and Mrs CISO: Security in the Age of the Lockdown

With so many of us frantically learning to juggle our roles as parents, workers and most recently teachers; is it just my wife and I who feel it necessary to monitor the online activity of our teenagers during this lockdown? Sure, there’s rich educational content out there, but it sits amongst social networks, streaming services, gaming consoles and...
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Now Is the Time to Get up to Speed with CMMC and SP 800-171 Rev 2

At the beginning of March 2020, Fifth Domain reported that Colorado-based aerospace, automotive and industrial parts manufacturer Visser Precision LLC had suffered a DoppelPaymer ransomware infection. Those behind this attack ultimately published information stolen from some of Visser’s customers. Those organizations included defense contractors...
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Tupperware Website Compromised with Credit Card Skimmer

Digital attackers compromised the website of kitchen and household products manufacturer Tupperware with a credit card skimmer. On March 20, researchers at Malwarebytes observed that attackers had compromised tupperware[.]com by hiding malicious code within an image file. This code activated when a user attempted to check out and complete their...
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Third-party data breach exposes GE employees' personal information

Past and present employees of General Electric (GE) are learning that their sensitive information has been exposed by a data breach at a third-party service provider. Fortune 500 company GE says it was recently informed of a security breach at one of its partners, Canon Business Process Services. According to GE, between approximately February 3 -...
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The Future is Hybrid: Practicing Security in the Hybrid Cloud

By now, many organizations have adopted the cloud in some way. We saw organizations moving whole servers over to the cloud at the beginning, but now we see small parts of a system being moved to the cloud and new cloud native offerings. We’ll use the analogies of Lincoln Logs and Legos to describe these deployment models. Infrastructure-as-a...
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Free Cyber Safety Resources during COVID-19

Whether you are reading this from somewhere in the United States or overseas, chances are you are doing it from the comfort of your home. Not because you chose to but because you were asked to do so in order to prevent Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) from spreading any further. If you are a parent, working remotely with your kids at home, you...
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COVID-19 Scam Roundup – Week of 3/16/20

Malicious actors are increasingly leveraging COVID-19 as a theme for new digital fraud attacks. In February 2020, for instance, Action Fraud received 21 reports of fraud relating to the coronavirus. This number of reports more than doubled to 46 between March 1 and March 13, 2020. Between March 14 and March 18, 2020, the United Kingdom's national...
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The MITRE ATT&CK Framework: Initial Access

Although ATT&CK is not laid out in any linear order, Initial Access will be the point at which an attacker gains a foothold in your environment. This tactic is a nice transition point from PRE-ATT&CK to ATT&CK for Enterprise. What is different about the techniques within Initial Access is that they are more high-level than some of the other techniques...
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How Organizations Can Fight to Retain Talent Amidst the Infosec Skills Gap

In a previous post, I shared some expert insight into how organizations can address the challenges of hiring skilled talent despite the ongoing infosec skills gap. Organizations can’t rest easy once they’ve brought on new talent, however. They need to make sure they hold onto their existing workforce. That’s easier said than done. Cybersecurity...
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Whatever happened to cryptojacking?

A couple of years ago it felt like you couldn't turn your head in any direction without seeing another headline about cryptomining and - its more evil sibling - cryptojacking. Countless websites were hijacked, and injected with cryptocurrency-mining code designed to exploit the resources of visiting computers. Victims included the likes of the LA...
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Food Delivery Website in Germany Targeted by DDoS Attackers

Malicious individuals targeted a food delivery website located in Germany with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Jitse Groen, founder and CEO of the Germany-based food delivery service Takeaway (Lieferando.de), announced on March 18 that his company had suffered a DDoS attack. https://twitter.com/jitsegroen/status/1240332307262832642 In...
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Nefilim Ransomware Threatens to Release Victims' Data within a Week

A newly discovered ransomware family called "Nefilim" told its victims that it would publish their stolen data within a week unless they paid their ransom. According to Bleeping Computer, Nefilim started up near the end of February 2020. The threat attracted the attention of security researchers because it shared much of the same code with version 2...
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How Organizations Can Achieve Security Availability

We have seen great strides in improving security tooling and processes over the past ten years. Via constantly maturing security models, security teams have become increasingly dependent upon an ever-more complex toolchain of products and services. But what happens when these systems fail. How much effort are we putting into planning and maintaining...
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The State of the Cybersecurity Market: Where We’ve Come, Where We’re Going

There’s an interesting trend that I have personally noticed over the past few years: organizations are starting to take cybersecurity more seriously. With the multitude of high-profile data breaches, organizations are starting to realize that cybersecurity is a significant risk to the business. This allows CISOs and other similar titles with leadership responsibilities to have a larger budget for...