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AvosLocker ransomware - what you need to know

What is this AvosLocker thing I’ve heard about? AvosLocker is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gang that first appeared in mid-2021. It has since become notorious for its attacks targeting critical infrastructure in the United States, including the sectors of financial services, critical manufacturing, and government facilities. In March 2022, the...
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EDoS: The Next Big Threat to Your Cloud

What is EDoS? Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) is a cybersecurity threat targeting cloud environments. EDoS attacks exploit the elasticity of clouds, particularly auto-scaling capabilities, to inflate the billing of a cloud user until the account reaches bankruptcy or large-scale service withdrawal. EDoS attacks exploit the cloud’s...
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The Obsession with Faster Cybersecurity Incident Reporting

Requirements for reporting cybersecurity incidents to some regulatory or government authority are not new, but there has always been a large amount of inconsistency, globally, in exactly what the requirements are. More recently, there’s been a growing trend across government and regulatory bodies in the United States towards shorter timeframes for...
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Extra, Extra, VERT Reads All About It: Cybersecurity News for the Week of March 14, 2022

All of us at Tripwire’s Vulnerability Exposure and Research Team (VERT) are constantly looking out for interesting stories and developments in the infosec world. Here’s what cybersecurity news stood out to us during the week of March 14, 2022. I’ve also included some comments on these stories. Most Orgs Would Take Security Bugs Over Ethical Hacking...
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How to Combat Asset Blindness in OT Security

One of the main challenges of OT security is the problem of compatibility. OT components often differ significantly from each other in terms of age and sophistication as well as software and communication protocols. This complicates asset discovery and makes it difficult to establish a consistent cybersecurity governance approach. Combating asset...
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EPP/EDR: What Is It and How Can It Help to Keep Your Organization Safe?

Endpoint devices played a big part in malware and ransomware attacks in 2021. According to a study covered by Help Net Security, security researchers detected more malware and ransomware endpoint infections in the first nine months of the year than they did for all of 2020. Attack scripts leveraging PowerSploit, PowerWare, and other tools were...
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To Governance and Beyond: Cybersecurity as a Journey

How often have you heard someone say "Cybersecurity is complicated!"? If you're a practitioner in the cybersecurity industry you'll have heard these words often, probably along with "…and it's really boring too!" Complex, not complicated Let's start with the first statement. In truth, cybersecurity is a complex topic, but that doesn't mean it...
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Healthcare Providers Need to Increase Budgets for Cybersecurity

The past few years have emphasized just how important cybersecurity is. As cybercrime reached record heights and more companies went digital, industries realized their current security efforts fell short. Healthcare is a prime example. The medical sector has had the second highest number of data breaches of any industry for more than five years....
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Texas SB 820 Advances K-12 Cybersecurity Despite Limitations

Like many organizations, K-12 schools adapted to COVID-19 by accelerating their digital transformation journeys. And like everyone else who followed this path, they invited unwanted attention from digital criminals in the process. In December 2020, for instance, the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a joint alert...
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Ragnar Locker ransomware - what you need to know

What is this Ragnar Locker thing I’ve heard about? Ragnar Locker is a family of ransomware, which first came to prominence in early 2020 when it became notorious for hitting large organisations, attempting to extort large amounts of cryptocurrency from its victims. So just your bunch of cybercriminals then? Yes, although on their underground...
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Building Cyber Resilience in a heightened alert environment

There has been a lot of talk about cyber weapons and the cyber dimension of global politics after the NotPetya and WannaCry attacks of 2017 and the Stuxnet worm, first discovered in 2010, when it was used to attack the control mechanisms of Iran’s uranium enriching centrifuges. Professor Ciaran Martin CB, former CEO of the UK National Cyber...
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VERT Threat Alert: March 2022 Patch Tuesday Analysis

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s March 2022 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-989 on Wednesday, March 9th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2022-21990 CVE-2022-21990 describes a code execution vulnerability within Remote Desktop Client. The vulnerability requires that...
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The Five Stages of File Integrity Monitoring (FIM)

The benefits of a capable and properly deployed File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) solution are plentiful: If you see unexpected or unexplained file changes, you can investigate immediately and resolve the issue quickly if your system has been compromised. You can reconcile changes against change tickets or a list of approved changes in a text file...
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Extra, Extra, VERT Reads All About It: Cybersecurity News for the Week of February 28, 2022

All of us at Tripwire’s Vulnerability Exposure and Research Team (VERT) are constantly looking out for interesting stories and developments in the infosec world. Here’s what cybersecurity news stood out to us during the week of February 28, 2022. I’ve also included some comments on these stories. High-Severity Flaws Discovered in Schneider, GE...
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What Is CPS 234 and Who Needs to Comply with It?

In November 2018, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) released the Prudential Standard CPS 234 in direct response to the escalating attack landscape in the financial sector. APRA has understood these threats to be the direct result of banking services moving to more complex and heavily used digital platforms. The new Standard...
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OT Cybersecurity Concerns Are Increasing Across the Globe

2021 was the year that marked a major cyber-attack against a critical national infrastructure organization whose impact was felt by millions of Americans on the East Coast. However, the attack against the Colonial Pipeline Company was not the only incident that affected the Operational Technology (OT) systems of a critical sector for the U.S....
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Regulating a Nation’s Information Security Workforce

In a previous article, I examined Australia’s proposed Security Legislation Amendment (Critical Infrastructure) Bill 2020. This information security overhaul imposes strict reporting requirements for enterprises as well as affords the Australian government unprecedented and far-reaching powers that enables them to intervene in the operation of an...