UPDATED 19/9/17 to correct the fact that US Info Search never sold any data to Ngo Equifax made headlines on September 7, 2017, when it announced its discovery of a data breach earlier in the year. In the security incident, computer criminals leveraged a "U.S. website application vulnerability" to view some of the consumer credit reporting agency's...

As many as 200,000 websites may have been running a WordPress plugin that allowed third parties to publish any content they wished on victims' sites via a backdoor. The popular Display Widgets plugin was removed from the official WordPress.org plugin repository after it was found collecting information about website visitors and inserting content...

A new remote access trojan (RAT) known as Kedi phones home and transmits a victim's stolen data to attackers using Gmail. The malware relies on spear-phishing, one of the most common types of phishing attacks, for distribution. These attack emails spread a 32-bit Mono/.Net Windows executable, written in C#, that masquerades as a Citrix tool. It then...

Flexibility, on-demand computing resources, and speed are just some of the benefits that are driving information technology's shift to the cloud. In fact, market data shows that roughly a quarter of overall computing workloads already operate in public environments today. That figure is expected to grow to half over the next 10 years. At the same time...

Insider threat relates to malicious activity from an organization’s internal employees, contractors, or ex-employees who abused access to the company’s internal systems and applications to compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability concerns to critical information systems or data with or without malicious intent. Insider threat...

Researchers have uncovered several zero-day flaws affecting billions of Bluetooth-enabled devices, including smartphones, TVs, laptops, watches, smart TVs and more. Dubbed “BlueBorne,” the attack vector enables malicious actors to leverage the short-range wireless protocol to take full control over targeted devices, access data and spread malware to...

A data breach might have exposed the personal information belonging to approximately one million users of the Canoe.ca portal. On 2 September, the news and entertainment gateway learned of a security incident that involved some of its databases containing records it collected between 1996 and 2008. The company, operated by MediaQMI Inc. and owned by...

"Cloud computing" is not a buzz phrase anymore, but it is essential for most businesses looking to achieve sound business continuity alternatives combined with a comprehensive security model. Cloud Computing What is cloud computing, and what does it do? Very simply, for the end-user, a cloud computing experience is no different than using a...

When you, your co-worker or family member are infected with the latest ransomware, it is the “successful” end of a multi-party complex venture. Cybercrime nowadays is not a single genius guy sitting in his parents’ garage – it's an enterprise. It has the equivalents of CEO, CFO, COO, and CTO. As an example, you may think about a ransomware campaign,...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses the Microsoft September 2017 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-742 on Wednesday, September 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2017-8759 This vulnerability, discovered by researchers at FireEye, has been exploited as part of the spread of the...

Threat actors victimized more than 1.5 million computer users with cryptocurrency mining software in the first eight months of 2017. It's perfect legal for users to install software on their computers that mines cryptocurrency. But miners are unique in that many of them come with the ability to achieve persistence on a system, to automatically...

The new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the biggest shake-up in privacy legislation and data management approach for many years. It will impact any organisation throughout the world that processes personal data relating to EU citizens. Organisations that breach the regulation can be fined up to four percent of their annual global...

My interviews with women and non-males in cybersecurity here on The State of Security have been very popular. Last month, when I looked for subjects for the third "Women in Information Security" series, I got an overwhelming response! The first person I interviewed for this next wave of interviews was security engineer Keirsten Brager. We had an...

A Russian computer computer has pleaded guilty to helping to perpetrate an ATM fraud scheme in hundreds of cities worldwide. On 8 September, Roman Valerevich Seleznev, 32, submitted a guilty plea in connection with a hacking attack that targeted RBS Worldpay, a payment processing company. The hack occurred back in November 2008 when Estonian...

With the slew of massive data breaches in the news recently, like the HBO hacks or the Gmail phishing scam, many businesses may worry that they could be next. And while many breaches are easily preventable, many more are the result of complex, sophisticated cyber attacks that are hard to defend against. As more and more information moves online,...

If you have contracts with the United States Department of Defense (DoD) or are a subcontractor to a prime contractor with DoD contracts, your organization has until December 31, 2017, to implement NIST SP 800-171. This is a requirement that is stipulated in the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) 252.204-7012. In the context...

A data breach might have exposed personal information belonging to 5,400 customers of the French life insurance agency AXA. The firm began sending out e-mails notifying affected customers of the incident on 7 September. AXA expects it will send out the last of these alerts by the end of the day on 8 September. As quoted by The Straits Times, here's...

Equifax, one of the largest credit reporting firms in the nation, announced on Thursday that a recent "cybersecurity incident" may have affected 143 million U.S. consumers. The information compromised includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances, driver’s license numbers. Credit card numbers for...

Chinese security researchers have discovered a way to send secret, inaudible commands to speech recognition systems such as Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Google Home using ultrasound. A team from China's Zhejiang University devised the technique, which they have dubbed "DolphinAttack". Now, it's important to stress that this is a *potential* problem....

As I write this blog post, it’s nine months to the day until the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force in the UK on 25th May 2018. The title of this article works if you know the pop single “Murder on the Dance Floor”! It struck me as surprising when earlier this month, a hard working diligent European (mainland) colleague who...