419 scammers are tempting unsuspecting users with a fake offer of $60 million in exchange for adopting their teenage son. The scam begins when a user receives a Twitter DM from the account of someone who appears to serve in the armed forces. Such unexpected correspondence could (and should) strike the recipient as odd. But the United States, the...

OPSEC (Operational Security) is a term derived from the U.S. military and is an analytical process used to deny an adversary information that could compromise the secrecy and/or the operational security of a mission. The very process of performing OPSEC or protecting yourself from an adversary not only plays a very important role in both offensive...

Nobody welcomes the prospect of having our online accounts hacked. It's a pain in the neck resetting passwords, warning your contacts, and worrying about the prospect that your identity may be stolen. But for some of us, the consequences of having our Gmail account compromised by state-sponsored hackers could be even more catastrophic and even life...

Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of cloud applications is now the most popular cloud service in the world by user count. While this has fast-tracked Microsoft’s path to becoming a cloud-first enterprise software company, it has also put a bulls-eye on Office 365, making it a target of choice for hackers. Given the fact that enterprises store a...

Continuing the discussion around the skills gap our industry is facing, I’m excited to share our final set of results from the Tripwire skills gap survey. My previous post highlighted the need for technical skills. But as this next set of findings indicates, soft skills in cybersecurity are not be overlooked. Every single participant in our survey...

In my last interview, I spoke with Tarah Wheeler, who is a technology and cybersecurity executive, entrepreneur, hacker, keynote speaker, scientist, and author. She's also the author of Women in Tech: Take Your Career to the Next Level with Practical Advice and Inspiring Stories. This time, I spoke to Katherine Teitler. She's the director of content...

On 16 October, news first emerged of what's known as "KRACKs." These malicious techniques exploit vulnerabilities that affect a protocol used for securing Wi-Fi networks. Bad actors could therefore leverage KRAcks to potentially expose encrypted information exchanged over otherwise secure wireless connections. As of this writing, the computer...

American restaurant chain Pizza Hut has notified customers of a data breach that might have exposed some of their personal and financial information. On October 14, the Italian-American cuisine franchise wrote to a portion of its customer base about an "unauthorized third party intrusion" involving its website. Pizza Hut thinks that the incident...

When designing systems today, everyone is aware that security is an essential feature, even in systems that you don’t think are critical. The recent Equifax breach brought home to me one of the most important factors of designing secure systems (software or not): delivering systems with secure defaults. In today’s threat-rich environment, the...

As part of this ongoing series (previous parts, in order, here, here, here and here), I have been trying to make the case that differing interests make cooperation on cybersecurity issues virtually impossible. This is not criticism. It’s just reality. And while it would be easy to look at Brexit or Eastern European and American politics as a push...

Tech support scams are no laughing matter. They're capable of infecting unsuspecting users' computers with malware and robbing innocent people of their hard-earned money. It's therefore not surprising that we've witnessed the emergence of numerous initiatives designed to counter tech support scammers over the past few years. Many of these offensives...

Australian government officials reported on Wednesday that a hacker stole approximately 30GB of data from a Department of Defense contractor. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the compromised data included sensitive information on Australia’s next-generation spy planes, naval warships and its $14 billion Joint Strike Fighter program. A...

The TrickBot trojan evolved in the third quarter of 2017 by adding new variations to its code and to its delivery vectors. According to IBM X-Force Research, TrickBot was the busiest financial trojan during the summer of 2017. That activity, which included an expansion into Argentina, Chile, Columbia, and Peru, partly resulted from the banking...

If you've read a security blog anytime in the last year, you haven't escaped mention of the dreaded skills gap for cybersecurity professionals. There seems to be consensus that it's getting harder to hire skilled security staff, though the reason for that is up for debate – some say we're just going about it the wrong way, while others claim it is...

A new Netflix phishing attack leverages fake emails from the streaming service to trick users into handing over their credit card credentials. The attack starts when a user receives an email from what appears to be Netflix warning them that they need to update their membership information. An example...

Last week, a hacking gang abused the SWIFT banking network to steal $60 million after planting malware on a Taiwanese bank's servers. The Far Eastern International Bank has confirmed that malware had been found on it computer systems, affecting PCs and servers, as well as its SWIFT terminal. SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses the Microsoft October 2017 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-746 on Wednesday, October 11th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2017-8703 This CVE describes a publicly disclosed denial of service vulnerability which impacts the Windows Subsystem for...

Wipers, ransomware, and malicious insiders all pose a threat to organizations in that they can destroy corporate data. In response, many companies have processes in place that can help them recover from these and other types of data corruption events. But these strategies beg the question: how can organizations know that the data they recover is...

A rogue website exposed several pieces of information pertaining to students who attend a high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. On 5 October, the Palo Alto United High School posted a "Notice of Data Breach" on its website. The message reads as follows: "Staff was notified this morning about a website that exposed information about Palo Alto...

Do you go fishing? You may or may not, but we see far too much phishing going on in the Internet ocean, and it scares us. The risk of over-phishing is not necessarily our concern. Our concern rests in that phishing is so easy, and big fat phish of this Internet ocean are getting gobbled up. And that’s not good for us because many of us don't really...