One cannot underestimate the effect that the ongoing skills gap is having on organizations’ digital security strategies. Gartner estimates that the global number of unfilled digital security positions is expected to grow to 1.5 million by 2020. Reflecting this trend, more than 70 percent of organizations feel that hiring skilled infosec personnel...

How many times has a vendor released a critical cybersecurity patch for an operating system that is in “end of life” (EOL), or the lifecycle period where the vendor no longer issues patches for bug fixes, operational improvements and cybersecurity fixes free of charge? So if a vendor takes the time and resources to break this freeze and issue a patch...

Researchers have detected a new ransomware family they're calling "PureLocker" which attackers are using to target enterprises' production servers. Intezer detected a sample of the ransomware masquerading as the Crypto++ C++ cryptography library. In their analysis of the sample, they noticed something unusual when they saw that alleged library...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s November 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-859 on Wednesday, November 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-1429 A vulnerability in the scripting engine in Internet Explorer can lead to code execution. The attacker could...

Mexican state-owned petroleum company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) said that it quickly neutralized a digital attack that struck its computer systems. In a statement released on November 11, a spokesperson for Pemex said that the company had quickly responded to digital attacks that struck its systems...

Executive Order 13636, “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity," directed the development of the voluntary Cybersecurity Framework that provides a prioritized, flexible, repeatable, performance-based and cost-effective approach to manage cybersecurity risk for those processes, information and systems directly involved in the delivery of...

What is BlueKeep? BlueKeep is the name that has been given to a security vulnerability that was discovered earlier this year in some versions of Microsoft Windows' implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). The vulnerability was described as "wormable" by Microsoft, and users were warned that BlueKeep might be exploited in a similar...

When I meet with customers, I always ask about their primary objective in moving to the cloud. The majority of these customers have the same response: “to save money.” I can’t blame customers for taking this position. Google “cloud deployment” and the headers are dominated by positive articles that offer up anecdotal evidence of how the cloud can...

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission (TX HHS) must pay a civil penalty of $1.6 million for having violated HIPAA. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) imposed the penalty in response to HIPAA violations that took place between 2013 and...

Security is both a benefit and a concern for enterprises when it comes to cloud computing. On the one hand, Datamation found in its State of the Cloud, 2019 survey that many organizations are moving to the cloud because they found that cloud-service providers (CSPs) offer better all-around security than they could achieve by themselves. Specifically,...

Helping to define and examine the top perceived cloud security threats of the day, the ‘Egregious Eleven’ is the most recent iteration in an evolving set of summary reports published by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). It follows on from the ‘Treacherous Twelve,’ which they defined for us in 2016, and the ‘Notorious Nine,’ which they presented in...

Researchers discovered a new variant of the MegaCortex ransomware family that changes a victim's Windows password upon execution. Discovered by MalwareHunterTeam and reverse engineered by Vitali Kremez, the threat seized the attention of Bleeping Computer when its ransom note stated that "All of your user credentials have been changed and your files...

Nikkei Inc. recently fell victim to a business email compromise (BEC) scam that cost the Japanese media conglomerate $29 million. In a statement released on October 30, the company revealed that an employee at Nikkei America based in New York City fell for a BEC scam. The worker transferred $29...

So earlier this year, I wrote a piece about how we as humans are so quick to give away personal information to various companies in the quest for discounts or free stuff. As I gave it further thought, I realized that sometimes we give away our personal information in search of something even more abstract: likes. We post pictures of our food, our...

Officials revealed that the IT system owned and operated by the government of Nunavut fell victim to a ransomware attack. Joe Savikataaq, premier of the most northerly region of Canada, disclosed the security incident in a tweet on November 2 and revealed that recovery efforts were ongoing. https://twitter.com/JSavikataaq/status/1190727062690115586...

The Case for Privacy Risk Management Over the past few years, there has been a massive cultural and legal shift in the way consumers view and secure their personal data online that's in line with the rise of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence. Concerned by an increasing rate of incidents that range from the 2017 Equifax hack to the...

Digital fraudsters have launched a new phishing campaign that uses a salary increase scam to trick employees into handing over their credentials. Spotted by the Cofense Phishing Defense Center, the campaign used spoofing techniques to trick recipients into thinking that the attack emails came from their HR department. Those emails claimed that the...

Two hackers face up to five years in prison after pleading guilty to their involvement in a scheme which saw them attempt to extort money from Uber and LinkedIn in exchange for the deletion of stolen data. Twenty-six-year-old Brandon Charles Glover and Vasile Meacre, 23, entered guilty pleas this week at a federal court in San Jose, California in...