Some customers of Optus said they saw incorrect information when they attempted to log into their profiles using the My Account website. On 13 February, customers of Australia's second-largest telecommunications company took to Twitter to explain that they were having issues accessing their accounts. One such user explained that the My Account...

FBI agents have arrested a 20-year-old man alleged to have been part of a hacking gang that not only launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks but also launched a wave of bomb and shooting threats against thousands of schools in the United States and United Kingdom. Timothy Dalton Vaughn of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is alleged to be...

With all the Russian election hacking scandals in the news during and after the 2016 Presidential election, curiosity consumed me to architect and run an experiment to see if I could monitor changes in the threat landscape in either Moscow, Russia or Washington D.C. during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. I have worked in four Security Operations...

With the evolution of technology comes new approaches to solving problems. Sometimes a new approach fixes the problem; sometimes it creates new ones. The good thing is as folks who work in fast-paced, high-tech environment, we information security professionals are great at quickly analyzing the new technologies and applying them to our daily lives. ....

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s February 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-817 on Wednesday, February 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-0676 The first vulnerability in the list today is an Internet Explorer vulnerability that is already seeing active...

Often claimed as a worst-case scenario, a container breakout vulnerability has been discovered in RunC, the universal container runtime used by Docker, Kubernetes and other containerization systems. Further research has discovered that a similar version of the same vulnerability affects the LXC and Apache Mesos packages. Identified as CVE-2019-5736,...

Dunkin' Brands Inc. ("Dunkin'") said that bad actors recently used credential stuffing attacks to target some DD Perks accounts. Kari McHugh, senior director of customer relations at Dunkin', wrote in a sample letter sent to the Office of the Vermont Attorney General that the company detected a wave of credential stuffing attacks near the beginning...

Two U.S. Senators expressed their concern that federal government employees could be undermining the United States' national security by using VPNs made by foreign companies. In a letter dated 7 February 2019, U.S. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) brought up the issue of VPN usage in...

Phishers are leveraging Google Translate in their attempts to steal the login credentials for users' Google and Facebook accounts. Larry Cashdollar, a member of Akamai's Security Intelligence Response Team (SIRT), received an email in early 2019 informing him that someone had accessed his Google account from a new Windows device. On his phone, the...

Today’s increasingly connected world, with access to mobile devices and cloud scale computing, is leading to disruption in business models and processes. To succeed, you have no option but to continuously deliver new value to customers at the increasing speed that they demand. Mark Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, said a few years back that ...

Anyone who has a presence on the internet is likely to be suffering from breach fatigue. Data leaks are reported in the headlines on a daily basis, and users can feel so overwhelmed by the sheer number of breaches that they feel there's little they can do to keep ahead of hackers. It can almost feel like a full-time job as you try to determine if...

Vulnerabilities in software used by 200 Vermont municipalities left town employees' Social Security Numbers and other information exposed. Brett Johnson, owner of IT company simpleroute, discovered the flaws after two Vermont towns hired him to do some work for them back in 2017. According to a report in which he wrote about the weaknesses, Johnson...

Technology has advanced to a state where clients now expect a constant stream of updates for their software and applications. To fulfill this demand, developers commonly turn to what’s known as a CI/CD pipeline. As noted by Synopsys, this practice embraces two important software development concepts of today’s streamlined world:Continuous Integration ...

Most people do not regard their cybersecurity and privacy documentation as a proactive security measure. On the contrary, many oftentimes view documentation as a passive effort that offers little protection to a company, generally an afterthought that must be addressed to appease compliance efforts. Where documentation may get some much-needed...

Scammers are now using the threat of channel suspension to coerce YouTube content creators into meeting their demands and sending over money. These digital attackers are specifically targeting YouTube's policy infringement system through which users can report a video that they feel violates the video-sharing website's policies for acceptable...

I’m excited to announce that I will be presenting at this year’s Black Hat Asia about my research into detecting and exploiting CBC padding oracles! Zombie POODLE and GOLDENDOODLE are the names I’ve given to the vulnerabilities I’ll be discussing. Similar to ROBOT, DROWN and many other vulnerabilities affecting HTTPS, these issues stem from continued...

Home design website and community Houzz revealed that a security incident might have exposed some users' personal and account data. On 1 February, Houzz published a security update explaining that it detected the security event in late December 2018. The company didn't provide exact details about how...

For the final book purchase of 2018, members of VERT decided to read "Pentesting Azure Applications: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Securing Deployments," written by Matt Burrough and published by No Starch Press. Matt has spent nearly four years with Microsoft’s Digital Security & Risk Engineering (DSRE) Red Team as a Senior Penetration Tester...