Digital criminals demanded $5.3 million in ransom from the City of New Bedford, Massachusetts following a ransomware attack. Jon Mitchell, Mayor of New Bedford, explained in a press briefing that the ransom demand came shortly after the City's Management Information Systems (MIS) staff detected a ransomware attack in the early morning hours of 5...

Containers have become a popular technology for enterprises that need to create agile, scalable and reliable applications. As they’re moving containerized workloads into production, many are adopting Kubernetes for container orchestration. While containerization enables DevOps to deploy software fast and efficiently, it also creates new security...

In early July, NIST released draft versions of two new publications: NIST SP 800-171 Revision 2: Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Systems and Organizations and NIST SP 800-171B: Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Systems and Organizations: Enhanced Security Requirements for Critical Programs and...

Tripwire's August 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important security vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Adobe. First on the Patch Priority Index are patches for Microsoft's Browser and Scripting Engine. These patches resolve 12 vulnerabilities including fixes for memory corruption, information disclosure and security feature bypass...

Security researchers spotted a phishing campaign that used SharePoint to bypass email gateway and other perimeter technologies. Cofense learned of the campaign after it analyzed an attack email sent from a compromised account @independentlegalassessors.co.uk. The email asked the recipient to review a proposed document by clicking on an embedded URL....

Payment services that operate electronically should adopt technologies that guarantees the safe authentication of the user and reduces, to the maximum extent possible, the risk of fraud. In order to achieve this, the European Union in 2007 passed the Payment Services Directive (PSD). The aim of this legislation is to regulate payment services and...

As the digital economy has grown and changed, cybersecurity has become an integral part of operating nearly any successful business. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is at the forefront of the modern cybersecurity organization, and CISOs have to adapt to the changing times in front of them. It used to be that the path to becoming a CISO...

Google has decided to expand the scope of one of its bug bounty programs as well as launch another security rewards initiative. On 29 August, Android Security & Privacy team members Adam Bacchus, Sebastian Porst, and Patrick Mutchler announced that the Google Play Security Reward Program (GPSRP) will...

Lumber Liquidators revealed that a malware infection on its systems compromised neither its employees' nor its consumers' sensitive data. On 27 August, the American hardwood flooring retailer said all but a very small number of stores had regained the ability to process transactions normally using...

A joint investigatory effort neutralized more than 850,000 unique infections of Retadup, a worm known for targeting Windows machines in Latin America. In March 2019, Avast came across an interesting cryptomining payload that arrived with a advanced stealthy process hollowing implementation. The security firm decided to look into what means of...

Security researchers have released a decryption tool which victims of Syrk ransomware can use to recover their files for free. Emsisoft found that Syrk arrived with its own decryptor, but the security firm decided to release its own utility for three reasons. First, it found that the crypto-malware was still in development, which could mean that...

The cloud is a tremendous convenience for enterprises. Running a data center is expensive – doing so not only requires buying a lot of servers, cable and networking appliances but also electricity, labor costs, cooling and physical space. Services like Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, Oracle’s Cloud and Google’s Cloud Platform give businesses the...

Industrial control systems are essential to the smooth operation of various national critical infrastructure. While once segmented from the web, these systems are now becoming increasingly more networked and remotely accessible as organizations transform to meet the digital age. This development potentially exposes industrial control systems to...

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...