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Cybersecurity in Education (K-12) with the CIS Controls

Why is cybersecurity important to Education? Acknowledging recent reports of ransomware targeting educational institutions, it is no wonder that there have also been articles that attempt to lure in readers with “free” tools. What is disappointing is that these “free” tools are little more than marketing pieces that direct you to click on readily...
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Staying Up to Speed on Your Top Security Priorities with CISO Mark Houpt

Listen and subscribe to our new podcast! Tripwire’s cybersecurity podcast features 20-minute conversations with the people who protect people from cyber threats. Hosted by Tripwire’s VP of Product Management and Strategy, Tim Erlin, each episode brings on a new guest to explore the evolving threat landscape, technology trends, and cybersecurity best...
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The MITRE ATT&CK Framework: Persistence

When I first started researching ATT&CK last year, Persistence was the tactic which made me fall in love. Even though I have been in the industry for some time, I learned more from digging into the various techniques here than any other tactic. While I knew about fun tricks like replacing sethc.exe with cmd.exe and hitting the shift key a bunch of...
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Fake Malwarebytes Site Used by Malvertising Attack to Spread Raccoon

A malvertising campaign used a copycat website for anti-malware software provider Malwarebytes to distribute the Raccoon infostealer. Malwarebytes learned of the campaign when someone notified the security firm that someone was abusing its brand using the lookalike domain "malwarebytes-free[.]com." Registered on March 29 via REGISTRAR OF DOMAIN...
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The Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst – Speaking Your Languge

One item that comes up a lot in conversations is how security teams or IT teams struggle to speak the “business language” to business leaders, mainly to members of the senior leadership that make the final decisions on spending and investments. This problem could have its roots in IT, and later security, teams historically having their management...
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Finally Some Good News: NERC Proposes Deferment of 3 CIP standards

Amidst all the pandemic doom and gloom, we finally have something positive come from the chaos: NERC filed a motion recently (April 6, 2020) to defer three Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Reliability Standards (as well as 1 PER, and 3 PRC standards) for three months due to the national emergency declared on March 13th by President Trump. As...
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L4NC34 Ransomware's Encryption Routine Reversed by Researchers

Security researchers reversed the encryption routine employed by L4NC34 ransomware by decrypting a file without paying the ransom. Sucuri Security first encountered L4NC34 ransomware when it began investigating an attack in which a malicious actor encrypted all website files and appended ".crypt" to their file names. The security firm dug a bit...
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Tripwire Patch Priority Index for March 2020

Tripwire's March 2020 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft and Adobe. Up first on the patch priority list this month are patches for Microsoft Browsers and Scripting Engine. These patches resolve information disclosure, remote code execution, and memory corruption vulnerabilities. Next on the list are...
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Misconfigured Docker API Ports Targeted by Kinsing Malware

Security researchers observed an attack campaign that targeted misconfigured Docker API ports with samples of Kinsing malware. According to Aqua Security, the campaign began when it capitalized on an unprotected Docker API port to run a Ubuntu container. The command used for creating the Ubuntu container included a shell script "d.sh." By means of...
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COVID-19 Scam Roundup – April 6, 2020

Digital fraudsters have seized upon coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) as a lure for their new scams and attack campaigns. Together, these malicious operations constitute nothing short of a deluge. Barracuda revealed that it spotted 9,116 coronavirus-themed spear-phishing emails between March 1 and March 23, 2020—a 667% increase over the 1,188 attacks...
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Results Speak Louder Than Words: A Guide to Evaluating ICS Security Tools

Why leveraging live environment simulations and putting ICS tools to the test is the best way to evaluate their fitness. Track and field was one of my favorite sports growing up. I didn’t begin competitively participating until I was a teenager, but I was instantly hooked once I started. Why? Because the clock didn’t lie. The tape measure didn’t lie...
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Nearly Half of Employees Don't Know What to Do When Ransomware Hits

A survey revealed that approximately half of employees didn't know how to respond in the event their organization suffered a ransomware infection. In its survey of North American business employees, Kaspersky found that 45% of respondents overall did not know the proper steps they should take in response to a ransomware attack. Respondents whose...
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VelvetSweatshop Technique Used by Attack Campaign to Deliver LimeRAT

An attack campaign leveraged the Excel VelvetSweatshop encryption technique to deliver samples of the LimeRAT malware family. According to Mimecast, those responsible for this attack campaign turned to VelvetSweatshop to enhance the efficacy of their efforts. Nefarious individuals have a history of using a password to encrypt malicious Excel...
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The MITRE ATT&CK Framework: Execution

Of all the tactics that an adversary will take on in their campaign, none will be more widely abused than Execution (https://attack.mitre.org/wiki/Execution). When taking into consideration off-the-shelf malware, traditional ransomware, or state-of-the-art advanced persistent threat actors, all of them have execution in common. There’s a great quote...
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Are You Ready for the Remote Work’s Toll on Corporate Security?

Given the situation that many companies, organizations and government agencies have been forced into working remotely due to COVID-19, it is imperative to give some thought about corporate security. Using a VPN for New Stay-at-Home Workers Millions of employees are now working from the confines of their own homes in an effort to keep businesses running smoothly. In most situations, employees are...
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COVID-19 Scam Roundup – March 30, 2020

Many in the digital security community are coming together to combat malicious actors during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global outbreak. One of the most visible of these new efforts is the COVID-19 CTI League. Made up of approximately 400 volunteers living in approximately 40 countries, the COVID-19 CTI League is working to block...
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Mr and Mrs CISO: Security in the Age of the Lockdown

With so many of us frantically learning to juggle our roles as parents, workers and most recently teachers; is it just my wife and I who feel it necessary to monitor the online activity of our teenagers during this lockdown? Sure, there’s rich educational content out there, but it sits amongst social networks, streaming services, gaming consoles and...