Apple has chosen to temporarily disable a key feature of the Apple Watch after a critical vulnerability was discovered that could allow someone to eavesdrop on another person without their knowledge. The Apple Watch feature at the heart of the problem is Apple's Walkie-Talkie app which allows users to "push to talk" with other Apple Watch owners via...

When you are thinking about a very special holiday gift for your kid, one of the first things that spring to mind is a smartphone, tablet or laptop. It’s common knowledge that these devices aren’t very useful unless connected to the Internet. But how do you make sure your children are on the safe side when they go online? According to studies, kids...

A malvertising campaign is redirecting users to the RIG exploit kit for the purpose of loading ERIS ransomware onto vulnerable machines. Over the 5-7 July weekend, security researcher nao_sec discovered a malvertising campaign that was abusing the popcash ad network to redirect users to a landing page for the RIG exploit kit. The researcher told...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s July 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-839 on Wednesday, July 10th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-0865 This vulnerability describes a denial of service that occurs when SymCrypt processes specially crafted digital...

A security researcher found a misconfigured ElasticSearch cluster that exposed over 90 million personal and businesses data records. A map of China, with the Jiangsu Province marked in red. On 1 July, GDI Foundation member and an independent security researcher Sanyam Jain found that the unprotected...

The New York State Legislature recently passed a bill that aims to protect New York residents, regardless of the location of the business. The law, known as the Stop Hacks and Improve Electronic Data Security (SHIELD) Act is designed to address unauthorized access of data. The bill expands the definition of “Breach of the security of the system” by...

In Part I, I described some structural problems in MITRE’s ATT&CK adversarial behavior framework. We looked at a couple of examples of techniques that vary greatly in terms of abstraction as well as techniques that ought to be classified as parent and sub-technique. Both examples are borne out of the lack of hierarchical structure among techniques...

A national trade association has disclosed a data breach that allegedly took place following a successful phishing attack. On 3 July, the American Land Title Association (ALTA) said that the security incident affected title and settlement company usernames and passwords. It also noted that it first learned about the data breach on social media. As...

What's happened? British Airways is facing a record fine of £183 million, after its systems were breached by hackers last year and the personal and payment card information of around 500,000 customers were stolen. 183 million quid!? That sounds huge! Yes, it's the biggest fine ever handed out by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). In...

Speed and security. Old-fashioned thinking contended that the two were incompatible; that high-velocity development and deployment of apps and software services invariably introduced higher levels of risk. However, it has become increasingly apparent that speed is a necessary aspect of security. The stakes are sky-high, with some estimates...

If you are a security practitioner, then you may have noticed that much of the security industry exists because of vulnerabilities. Regardless of what job position you occupy, vulnerabilities are oftentimes the reason why you wake up every morning and ultimately engage infosec from within your cutting-edge working environment. Vulnerabilities will...

The United States Senate has passed a bill to help strengthen the defenses of the U.S. energy grid against digital attacks. On 27 June, the Senate passed the Securing Energy Infrastructure Act. Introduced by U.S. Senators Angus King (I-Maine) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the main purpose of the...

“It’s okay that you don’t understand.” This comment came after I was frustrated with myself for not being born a genius at math. Usually, when you don’t know a subject or you don’t understand it enough, subject matter experts (i.e. your teachers/professors/mentors/etc) put you down for it. But this time was different because I had a real subject...

A municipality in Florida fired its IT director shortly after paying off bad actors who infected its computer systems with ransomware. Joe Helfenberg, the city manager of Lake City, confirmed to WCJB that the municipality fired Brian Hawkins, who was its director of information technology. This...

As Lead Systems Engineer (EMEA) at Tripwire, I’ve had the pleasure of sitting down with and talking to many prospective customers about their security needs. I always ask about their existing digital capabilities during our talks. When I do, I usually get the following response: “We have lots of different tools but these solutions are either...

Tripwire's June 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe. First and most importantly this month are patches available to resolve 2 deserialization vulnerabilities in Oracle WebLogic. These vulnerabilities are identified as CVE-2019-2725 and CVE-2019-2729. Both of these...

Vulnerability management (VM) is an essential process through which organizations can reduce risk in their environments. But myths and misconceptions surrounding VM abound. For instance, organizations commonly approach vulnerability management in the same way as they do patch management. Others are guilty of believing that all attacks rely on...

European police have arrested six people as part of an investigation into a theft which saw €24 million (US $27 million) stolen from users of cryptocurrency exchange. In a press release, Europol described how five men and one woman were simultaneously arrested on Tuesday morning at the homes of the suspects in Charlcombe, Lower Weston and Staverton ...

Following last year’s exceedingly successful inaugural MITRE ATT&CK™ conference, this year’s highly anticipated ATT&CKcon 2.0 conference will be held from Oct 28-30 at MITRE’s McLean headquarters. MITRE’s always open to hearing feedback about the limitations of the ATT&CK framework and how to make ATT&CK more useful. Today, I want to look at the...

Cybercriminals have learnt something very valuable in the last couple of weeks: in order to regain access to their data, cities in Florida are prepared to pay out huge Bitcoin ransoms to hackers. Less than a week after the city of Riviera Beach, 80 miles from Miami, unanimously voted to pay US $600,000 worth of Bitcoins to an extortionist who had...