In Part 1 of this series, we introduced the concept that the most vulnerable people on the internet are our senior population. According to the FBI, elder fraud impacts millions of American seniors every year. Figures from the United Kingdom show similar levels of criminal activity targeting seniors. Most of the elder fraud schemes are financially...

If you are new to the security world, it is fair to ask yourself, “Isn’t access to data and systems always conditional? Isn’t it always granted to someone who has access to the credentials (ID and password)?” True enough, but in totality, the approach to managing access encompasses a broader spectrum of privacy policies. These policies include a mix...

On January 20, President Joseph Biden issued Executive Order (E.O.) 13990 to help protect U.S. bulk power organizations. This Order enacted a 90-day suspension of E.O. 13920 which was set by the previous administration. The new executive order empowered the Secretary of Energy (“Secretary”) to publish new criteria around pre-qualifying vendors of...

Cloud-native applications that are based on new types of infrastructure such as containers and serverless platforms are being rapidly adopted by organizations worldwide. While cloud-native applications deliver compelling benefits such as elastic scalability, unmatched resilience and rapid development velocity, they also raise challenges. Cloud...

In a world that is constantly evaluating costs, it is little wonder that there is an increasing demand for cost-effective solutions to business problems. In the real world, this means 'free,' and in the digital marketplace, it means 'open source.' Open Source aka "Freeware" Since the early days of the internet, open source software (OSS) has been...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s June 2021 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-947 on Wednesday, June 9th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-31955 This is one of two vulnerabilities fixed in today’s patch drop which were reported by Kaspersky Lab after detecting...

We all have heard and read how the pandemic has disrupted our lives, how it has accelerated digital transformation to an unprecedented extent and how it challenged the existing security policies and practices. The question is how the people responsible for fortifying their organizations experienced the whole situation. Letter from the frontline ...

The principle of least privilege in cybersecurity prescribes that no user should have access to system resources beyond what's necessary for fulfilling a specific task. Adhering to this principle has become essential, as one of the primary ways malicious actors breach a system is by compromising (legitimate) user access. The 2020 Global State of...

Like technology itself, cybersecurity is ever-evolving and encompassing more areas of our lives, including transportation. Popular science fiction movies have led us to expect flying taxis and private space travel as the future of transportation. If that is going to become an eventual reality, the first steps towards that future are “smart cars” and...

On a Mission of Protecting Abraham Lincoln is credited with saying that “A lawyer’s time and advice are his stock and trade.” Whether the quote is mis-attributed to Lincoln is irrelevant to the greater message, which is that attorneys are “knowledge workers.” To state it as bluntly as one attorney once explained to an executive where I worked, “My...

Cybercriminals are running an online competition offering big prizes to anyone who believes they have found an unusual way to help crooks steal cryptocurrency. As security researchers at Intel471 describe, an underground cybercrime forum popular with cybercriminals has issued a call for papers that will describe "unorthodox ways to steal private...

Welcome back to #TripwireBookClub. If you recall, the last book we reviewed was The Ghidra Book: The Definitive Guide, a book that I thoroughly enjoyed because I’m a huge fan of everything Chris Eagle writes. This time, we’re looking at Crypto Dictionary: 500 Tasty Tidbits for the Curious Cryptographer. I am by no means a cryptography expert, so I...

The benefits of organizations moving some or all their IT workloads to the cloud are well-known and numerous. There are several challenges to successful cloud adoption, though, and one of the most important of them is compliance. Whether your cloud use case is low-cost data storage, scaling your infrastructure for critical business apps or disaster...

The critical infrastructure of the United States includes all those systems and assets that are essential to the proper functioning, economy, health, and safety of American society. The roads and railways that we travel on; the Internet and the mobile networks that connect us; the water that we drink; the healthcare, financial services and security...

Anthony Israel-Davis joins the show to discuss what you can do with the DBIR as a practitioner and his perspective on the proposed Cybersecurity Safety Review Board. https://open.spotify.com/episode/02DRlioMrZc98rU7wlwvid?si=YY-9l1KLTbmZz82VZvTadA Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5UDKiGLlzxhiGnd6FtvEnm Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com...

Are you doing enough to prevent scammers from hijacking your social media accounts? Even if you have chosen a strong, unique password for your online presence and enabled two-factor authentication it's possible that you've overlooked another way in which online criminals could commandeer your social media accounts and spam out a message to your...

Attacks against operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS) grew dramatically in the past few years. Indeed, a 2020 report found that digital attacks against those two kinds of assets increased by over 2000% between 2018 and 2020. Many of those attacks involved vulnerabilities in Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)...

Tripwire's May 2021 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Google Chrome, Adobe and Microsoft. First on the patch priority list this month are patches for macOS (CVE-2021-30657) and Google Chrome (CVE-2021-21220). Exploits for these vulnerabilities have been recently added to the Metasploit Exploit Framework....

Cybersecurity has always been a significant challenge for businesses, mostly due to the increasing financial and reputational cost of data breaches. As a result, there has been a consistent rise in tactics and technologies used to combat these threats. These methods fulfill the need for better, smarter ways to augment enterprise-level security and...

Cloud misconfigurations represent something that’s plaguing many organizations’ cloud adoption efforts. For example, a 2020 report found that 91% of cloud deployments contained at least one misconfiguration that left organizations exposed to potential digital threats. Those weaknesses contributed to more than 200 data breaches between 2018 and 2020,...