I’ve spent a lot of time in the depths of aging industrial power plants and the control houses of transmission substations. I’ve walked the aisles of countless steel cabinets taking inventory of the gear used to protect and control what’s been described as the most complex system on earth. Within these cabinets can be found a smattering of equipment...

Ransomware had a good year in 2017. For the first time ever, we saw several "cryptoworm" variants self-propagate across vulnerable workstations around the world. We also witnessed more traditional ransomware families cause remarkable damage to victimized organizations as well as strains that embraced novel tools and techniques. Here are 10 of the...

A security breach at bicycle-sharing operation oBike has exposed the personal information of users in Singapore and 13 other countries. A spokesperson for the company said the data leak "stemmed from a gap in our [application programming interface] that allowed users to refer a friend to our platform." With the oBike app, users can send invitation...

As part of a three-part series on incorporating security into the container environment, I've talked all about containers and how to inject security into the pipeline. Let's now discuss tips on how to secure the container stack. What Do I Mean by "Stack"? What I’m calling the stack, in this case, refers to all of the layers or components involved...

Today’s cybersecurity executives have a lot of choices in how they wish to purchase and consume products and services. The traditional approach of a large up-front capex investment in perpetual licenses works for some organizations, but many are looking towards managed services to reduce their up-front costs and move the overhead of managing the...

NiceHash has temporarily ceased operations following a security breach in which a criminal gained unauthorized access to its Bitcoin wallet. The trouble started on 6 December when users of NiceHash, a service which enables people to exchange computing resources known as hashing power to mine for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, began reporting...

November didn’t shape up to be revolutionary in terms of ransomware, but the shenanigans of cyber-extortionists continued to be a major concern. The reputation of the Hidden Tear PoC ransomware project hit another low as it spawned a bunch of new real-life spinoffs. The crooks who created the strain dubbed Ordinypt should be really ashamed of...

A criminal who infected the computer systems of Mecklenburg County with ransomware has demanded a ransom payment of $23,000 for the decryption key. On 5 December, the government for Mecklenburg County, North Carolina informed its Twitter followers that it was "experiencing a computer-system outage." https://twitter.com/MeckCounty/status...

With more than 174 million Americans shopping over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, it’s looking to be a busy holiday season for retailers this year. As shoppers continue hunting for the perfect gift over the next couple weeks, it’s important to remember that cyber criminals will likely be on the hunt as well. How prepared are retailers to deal...

Enterprise access point maker Ruckus once again patched up command injection vectors that could completely compromise both the ZoneDirector controller, as well as the Unleashed AP. One of the vulnerabilities is in fact strikingly similar to an issue in another Ruckus Web-GUI I disclosed last year. While vulnerability is essentially an inevitable...

A hacker commandeered a tourism agency's Facebook page and abused that unauthorized access to make a series of bizarre postings. Early in the morning on 4 December, the Facebook page for Explore Minnesota Tourism began publishing some unusual content. The stories consisted of fake news items with headlines such as "Detroit woman gives birth to her...

We're all hopefully familiar with the notion that criminals can phish details from unsuspecting computer users by creating copycat websites. To make a phishing page appear more legitimate a scammer might create a domain with a similar looking URL - for instance, appIe.com rather than apple.com (hint: if you didn't notice, the first "appIe" had a...

Last year, I wrote a short blog post about tools I had added to my pentesting toolbox. I’ve decided to make this type of article a yearly tradition. In this post, I highlight some of the useful tools I’ve started to use this past year. Domain Password Audit Tool First, I will shamefully promote a tool I wrote myself that will generate password...

Last time, I got to speak with Claudia Johnson. She's been in the tech industry for a long time, and she got into security the same way Brian Krebs did – by being attacked. Now I got to talk to Kristen Kozinski. She knows about secure code and web vulnerabilities. She also maintains a pretty nifty website for educating end users about security. Kim...

Scammers are pushing out fake PayPal emails that use the premise of an unverified transaction to phish for customers' personal and financial information. The attack emails lure in users with subject lines stating how PayPal couldn't verify their transactions or complete their most recent payments. Here's one example: ...

The holiday season is upon us, and nearly every day, my wife asks me what I want for Christmas. As a pop culture geek with interests in most fandoms, I have dozens of items that I could ask for, but the ultimate question is what do I really want to ask her to spend money on. In a perfect and very geeky world, I would likely come up with a method of...

I recently introduced a three-part series about injecting security hygiene into the container environment. For the first installment, I provided some background information on what containers are and how the container pipeline works. Let's now discuss how we can incorporate security into the pipeline. Assessing s Before Production To secure the...

Looking for a scalable solution and not sure what to ask? The best way to start off is to get an understanding of what scalability means because it can vary depending on the problem(s) that are trying to be solved, the company, and who you are talking to. According to Merriam-Webster, scalability is “capable of being easily expanded or upgraded on...