As a system administrator during the early days of the “cloud revolution” I found the “cloud” metaphor an interesting choice to frame the technology stack. Clouds, in my mind, were “woolly” and hard to pin down as opposed to the omnipresent, always-available things that IT marketers were suggesting cloud services would be. But whilst I wasn’t a fan...

The time at ML:0 can be eye-opening form many organizations. There are generally a lot of assets discovered that are new or had been forgotten about. Almost every organization discovers their own Methuselah; this is the system that has been around forever and performs some important tasks but has not...

Diligent taxpayers are being increasingly targeted by con artists who are well-versed in manipulating the revenue system. The crooks usually impersonate IRS (U.S. Internal Revenue Service) officials, sending fake emails or messages on social media in an attempt to defraud the targeted individuals of their money. Unfortunately, lots of people fall...

In my previous post, I spoke about all of the different DEFCON villages where attendees can learn about and purchase all sorts of fun hacking/counter hacking tools. Even so, I covered only a small fraction of the activities at the conference. For example, attendees have the opportunity to participate in a lot of contests run over the weekend,...

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in the popular iTerm2 application, an open source terminal emulator program designed to replace the default Apple Terminal in macOS. iTerm2 often finds its way into lists of some of the best software to install on a Mac. It is especially popular with power...

The Methodist Hospitals, Inc. revealed that a phishing attack potentially affected the information of approximately 68,000 patients. According to its Notice of Data Incident, the non-profit healthcare system located in Gary, Indiana detected unusual activity involving an employee's email account back...

In the digital age, more often than not, you can be sure that some enterprise has hold of your personal information. This information could be your name, email, phone number, IP address, country and other details. This can come from submitting a form, subscribing to a newsletter, accepting cookies, accepting the privacy policy or terms and...

Normally it works like this. Someone gets infected by ransomware, and then they pay the ransom. The victim then licks their wounds and hopefully learns something from the experience. And that's what happened to Tobias Frömel, a German developer and web designer who found himself paying a Bitcoin ransom of 670 Euros (US $735) after his QNAP NAS drive...

A new sextortion scam variant is using a wallet for a cryptocurrency other than bitcoin in an attempt to evade detection. On October 8, Cofense revealed it had detected a modified sextortion scam that was using a wallet address for Litecoin instead of bitcoin. The variant thereby differentiated...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s October 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-853 on Wednesday, October 9th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs There are no in-the-wild or disclosed CVEs this month. CVE Breakdown by Tag While historical Microsoft Security Bulletin...

Instagram announced the release of a new feature that's designed to help its users identify phishing emails impersonating the social media platform. On October 7, Instagram tweeted out about the new capability and said that users can leverage it to verify whether an email claiming to originate from the social network is legitimate. https://twitter...

The developer of HildaCrypt has released the master decryption keys that would allow potential victims of the ransomware to recover their data for free. On October 4, a security researcher who goes by the name "GrujaRS" posted about the discovery of a new variant of STOP, a well-known ransomware family. https://twitter.com/GrujaRS/status...

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM). NCSAM is a great initiative to help educate and inform our friends and family on the importance of taking your digital security seriously. To help continue to support this initiative, we asked a range of industry experts to share some of their tips to help us stay safe online. Angus...

For many organizations moving to the cloud, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) like AWS EC2, Azure Virtual Machines or Google Compute Engine often forms the backbone of their cloud architecture. These services allow you to create instances of pretty much any operating system almost instantly. Unfortunately, moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud...

If I asked you what security products you had in place to manage your risk within your IT organisation 10 years ago, you’d probably have been able to list a half dozen different tools and confidently note that most of your infrastructure was covered by a common set of key products such as antivirus, DLP, firewalls, etc. But in a world with IaaS,...

Tripwire's September 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Adobe. Exploit Framework Alert A Metasploit Exploit module that targets Windows Remote Desktop Services has been recently released. This exploit module targets CVE-2019-0708 for the so-called “BlueKeep” vulnerability. This...

As ransomware attacks continue to cripple networks, most recently forcing medical centres to shut down their systems and turn away patients, the FBI has issued some unambiguous advice for organisations on how they should handle ransom demands: Don't pay. The FBI does not advocate paying a ransom, in part because it does not guarantee an...

A series of operational security (OpSec) failures on the part of attackers enabled researchers to discover the Geost botnet. In mid-2018, Virus Bulletin researchers Sebastian Garcia, María José Erquiaga and Anna Shirokova discovered Geost, one of the largest Android banking botnets known today, while...

In my previous article, we discussed how organizations are shifting how IT resources are deployed and managed. We covered three methods in particular: automated image creation and deployment, immutable image deployment and containers. We’ll now explore how organizations can make the best of these methods in a dynamic environment. Dealing with...

Digital criminals have launched a new attack campaign that they're using to target U.S. petroleum companies with the Adwind RAT. Netskope discovered the operation in the beginning of September and found that it was distributing the Adwind RAT from “members[.]westnet[.]com[.]au/~joeven/.” With this URL in mind, it's likely that the individual...