In 2016, the U.S. gift card industry was worth $127 billion. That figure is expected to reach $160 billion by 2018. It's little wonder why. Everyone loves them! From the retailer's point of view, customers who shop using a gift card oftentimes spend more than the initial value of the card. As for the customers themselves, gift cards allow them to...

With analyst group Gartner valuing the annual global spending on educational technology at over £17 billion ($21 billion USD) in 2015, there's no doubt that technology implementation is shaping the future of education systems. The appropriate integration of technology guides students, teachers, and administrators towards clarity and extensibility....

A system administrator is accused of having caused its former employer $100,000 in damages using malicious code equipped with a "time bomb" feature. Allegro Microsystems, a LLC company which makes and markets high-performance semiconductors, says Nimesh Patel of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts tampered with its servers back in January 2016. For his...

Take a moment to think about apps used daily on your smartphone. Facebook? Twitter? Email? Web browser? No one wants to be stalked or let anyone see their personal information from their smartphones. Think about leaving your phone unlocked while you're at home or unattended on your desk while going for meeting at work. What if someone looks at your...

Fraudsters have designed a new LinkedIn scam that uses phishing emails and a fake website to trick job seekers into handing over their CVs. The scam begins when a user receives a phishing email disguised as a LinkedIn email. In their message, the fraudsters inform the recipient that a company is "urgently seeking for immediate employment" in their...

Malicious hackers are seizing control of poorly-protected home routers, and commanding them to launch attacks designed to brute force their way into WordPress websites. Security researchers at Wordfence first determined that something noteworthy was happening when they witnessed an unusual spike in attacks originating from Algeria against its...

In part one of this series, I posited that additional integrity on a resume, as well as in interview situations, can benefit the entire information security profession by highlighting the specific disciplines in our industry. This, in turn, could serve to stop the perception of a cyber skills-gap by driving awareness that the InfoSec field is...

In March 2015, the Australian Federal House of Representatives passed laws making it mandatory for Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecommunication companies to collect their customers’ metadata and keep it for up to two years. This metadata would then be handed over to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, if need be, to help with their...

Do you know who has access to your organisation's network? Are you confident that all the users on your network are authorised to access your systems, and have a good idea of what devices have been connected to your firm's systems? If so, good for you. But not all organisations have such tight control over who gains access to their IT infrastructure...

Microsoft has announced the end of Windows Vista support and is urging customers who still use the operating system to upgrade as soon as possible. The Redmond-based technology giant finalized Windows Vista's end of term in a blog post on 11 April: "Windows Vista customers are no longer receiving new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses the Microsoft April 2017 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-720 on Wednesday, April 12th. With the elimination of Security Bulletins, the VERT Alert will be changing. This shortened version will act as a placeholder until the launch of the improved...

In January 2017, Tripwire completed a survey of 403 IT Security professionals about the most common attack types and how prepared organizations are to defend against them. You can read about the details here. There are two important conclusions from the research that I have to share for the purposes of this post. First, the top five attack types...

Alphabet, Google's parent company, recently filed a lawsuit against its former engineer Anthony Levandowski, who is now working with Uber. The company accused Levandowski of copying more than 14,000 internal files and taking them directly to his new employer. While this case is far from over, it brings about a very interesting and important...

There are many websites on the internet that are known to receive regular traffic from hackers, including a number of public forums, which are often used to release their stolen information. Hackers may release some of this information to take credit for a breach, attract buyers for the rest of the stolen information, or increase the damages to the...

Hackers accessed third-party Amazon sellers' accounts using stolen login credentials they purchased on dark web marketplaces. CJ Rosenbaum, a lawyer based in New York who is representing some of the affected Amazon sellers, told The Wall Street Journal that more than a dozen of his clients lost close to half their monthly sales due to hackers. The...

In an article we wrote for Tripwire, we discuss the advantages of encryption and tokenization. The premise of our argument is as follows: slow down your adversary by making your data meaningless to them. In other words, make yourself a “goes nowhere” project forcing your adversary to seek out a target that does not cause them the grief you do....

Before we jump in, we need to make clear the following: no single solution will ever offer complete and total security. In fact, even multiple solutions designed to provide overlapping layers of security to your crown jewels will not provide “complete and total” security. But what any reasonably implemented solution should do is the following: slow...

A cyber-attack reportedly set off all 156 emergency sirens across the city of Dallas, Texas, late Friday night. According to reports, the sirens were activated more than a dozen times between approximately 11:45 p.m. and 1:20 a.m. on Saturday until engineers manually shut down the sirens’ radio system and repeaters. Dallas’ siren warning system is...

Payday loan company Wonga has confirmed that a security incident may have affected some of its customers' personal and financial information. The Britain-based lender says it's currently working to notify affected customers that the incident may have compromised their names, e-mail addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, the last four digits of...

As new means consumers and the general public can increasingly use services such as Silent Circle, Talk a Tone, Frogger and Guerrilla Mail, digital forensics experts are being challenged to take a deeper dive into how to obtain information from devices, networks and computers. The more of these types of technologies there are, the more time it takes...