A new report into the state of ransomware at the tail end of 2019 has revealed that things aren't getting any better. In Q4 of 2019, according to the new study published by security firm Coveware, the average ransom payment more than doubled – reaching $84,116, up from $41,198 in Q3 of 2019. Coveware's report says that this reflects how some...

The Shlayer trojan accounted for approximately 30 percent of all of Kaspersky Lab's malware detections for the macOS platform in 2019. Kaspersky Lab revealed on Securelist that Shlayer has been the most common threat to target its macOS userbase for the past two years. During that time, one in 10 of the security firm's macOS solutions encountered...

Digital attacks are a top concern for Industrial Control System (ICS) security professionals. In a survey conducted by Dimensional Research, 88 percent of these personnel told Tripwire that they were concerned about the threat of a digital attack. An even greater percentage (93 percent) attributed their concerns to the possibility of an attack...

The United Parcel Service (UPS) revealed that a phishing incident might have exposed the information of some of its customers. In its "Notice of Data Breach" letter, UPS disclosed that an unauthorized person had used a phishing attack to gain access to store email accounts at some of its store...

As a security consultant, I’m not going into an environment to design and build an organization’s network from the ground up in most situations. For the majority of the time, I’m working with legacy environments where some old technologies might be phasing out and newer ones joining the mix of solutions. In the case of one environment I went to, for...

Requesting that a SaaS company answer a Vendor Security request has become a regular thing for companies who work in the cloud. But have you thought about how the reverse works, that is, when your customer has a VSA process focusing on you? The Vendor Security Assessment, or VSA, is the means by which your infosec team confirms that a cloud vendor,...

Health Quest announced that it's begun notifying patients whose information might have been exposed in a phishing incident. According to its website notice, Health Quest first learned of the incident in July 2018 when several employees fell for a phishing attack and thereby inadvertently disclosed...

A new survey found that regulators have thus far imposed $126 million worth of fines for data breaches and other GDPR infringements. According to DLA Piper's GDPR Data Breach Survey, data protection regulators imposed €114 million (about US$126 million / £97 million) in GDPR-related fines between May 25, 2018 and January 27, 2020. The international...

With the 2010s now over, the infosec industry is now fully invested in 2020 and beyond. The 2020s will no doubt present their fair share of challenging digital security threats. But they will also enable security professionals to discuss shared difficulties at conferences and summits. To help promote these collaborative events, we at The State of...

The NIS Directive is the first EU horizontal legislation addressing cybersecurity challenges. It is a true game-changer for cybersecurity resilience and cooperation in Europe. As we noted in a previous blog post, the Directive has three main objectives: Improving national cybersecurity capabilities Building cooperation at EU level Promoting a...

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that they have seized the domain name for weleakinfo.com. On January 16, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia announced that the FBI and DOJ had executed a warrant to seize the domain of weleakinfo.com in cooperation with law enforcement...

Canadian online pharmacy PlanetDrugsDirect.com has contacted customers warning them that their data might have been exposed in what they euphemistically describe as a "data security incident". In an email seen by Bleeping Computer, the website warned that exposed personal data could include the following: Customer names Postal addresses Email...

Security researchers observed that Ako ransomware is using malicious spam attachments to go after organizations' networks. On January 14, AppRiver Senior Cybersecurity Analyst David Pickett contacted Bleeping Computer and told the computer self-help site that his company had observed Ako being distributed via spam email. Using subject lines such as ...

The cloud has changed how we use and consume IT services. Where data resides along with how it is transferred, stored and processed has fundamentally changed and with-it new risk management challenges. Let's talk about some of those challenges. First and foremost, the cat is out of the bag. We're not going back to the data center, and any resistance...

The ISA/IEC 62443 series of standards, developed by the ISA99 committee and adopted by the International Electrotechnical Commission, provides a flexible framework to address and mitigate current and future security vulnerabilities in industrial automation and control systems. These standards not only address configuration weaknesses to harden...

The Emotet trojan recently leveraged a phishing campaign to target email addresses associated with users at the United Nations. In an email provided by Cofense to Bleeping Computer, Emotet's handlers pretended to be representatives of Norway to the United Nations (UN). They used this disguise to conduct a phishing campaign with "highly specific...

One sunny morning, my breakfast was interrupted by a phone call from a friend who is an entrepreneur engaged in the transportation of various goods. He said that $11,000 disappeared from his bank account during the night. The bank support service could not help. They advised my friend to report this incident to the police. The money transfers were...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s January 2020 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-866 on Wednesday, January 15th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2020-0601 While there are no in-the-wild and disclosed CVEs in the January patch drop, there is a lot of discussion around...

The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is urging people to no longer use computers with Windows 7 installed for banking or email. A spokesperson for the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a part of GCHQ, encouraged consumers to upgrade their Windows 7 devices. As quoted in a report by Telegraph: We would urge those using the software...