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Understanding the Purpose of Security Controls and the Need for Compliance

What are the brakes on a car designed to do? I have asked this question many times when speaking to customers or organizations who were dipping their toes into the audit space. Invariably, their answer was, “To stop the car.” At this point, I would then ask, “Then how do you get where you want to go?” What Is the Purpose of Controls and a...
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New Mac Ransomware Leveraged Piracy as Means of Distribution

Security researchers detected a new ransomware strain that leveraged piracy as a means of distributing itself to Mac users. On June 29, a Twitter user reached out to Malwarebytes about a malicious Little Snitch installer that was available for download on a Russian forum known for sharing torrent links. A close look at the installer revealed that it...
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The CSA IoT Security Controls Framework

Building the Case for IoT Security Framework The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing in technical, social, and economic significance. ENISA defines the increasingly complex IoT systems as “cyber-physical ecosystem[s] of interconnected sensors and actuators, which enables intelligent decision making.” These technologies collect, exchange and process...
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Prioritizing Changes: File Integrity Monitoring Tools & Best Practices

What does file integrity mean? There’s not enough time in the day to investigate every system change, which means you need laser-sharp focus to quickly find the greatest risks to your business. However, the ever-evolving capabilities of cyber adversaries—coupled with the dynamic nature of corporate networks—makes security prioritization increasingly difficult. To combat enterprise cyberthreats...
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What to Expect from Brazil's New Data Protection Law

The European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is one of the most influential consumer privacy laws that has affected 500,000 companies throughout the world. This law has played a crucial role in formulating another substantial privacy law known as the California Consumer Privacy Act that came into effect on January 1, 2020. Similar to the...
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Foundational Controls Make the Hard Things Easier to Do

Let’s begin with a short story. Imagine that we have two large organizations in the public sector. These entities are very similar. Both are on the receiving end of cyber threats. Both adhere to multiple compliance standards. And both need to ensure that their IT systems are functioning and working as planned. But they’re not entirely the same. Take...
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Find a PlayStation 4 vulnerability and earn over $50,000

Do you think you have found a vulnerability in the Sony PlayStation 4 or the PlayStation Network? If so, you could be heading towards a sizeable sum of money. That's because Sony announced details of a new bug bounty program that it is running in co-ordination with vulnerability-reporting platform HackerOne. Sony is inviting security researchers,...
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Lucifer Malware Abused Windows Exploits for Cryptomining, DDoS Attacks

New malware called "Lucifer" came with numerous exploits for conducting cryptomining functionality and performing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on infected Windows machines. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 research team identified two versions of Lucifer in their research. (Both variants bore the name "Satan DDoS," but for the sake of not...
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How to Reduce the Risk of Misoperations in Your Bulk Electric Systems

Reliability is essential to the functionality of an electric power grid. This principle guarantees that a constant qualitative and quantitative supply of electric power is flowing from a provider to businesses, homes and more. It’s what enables electric power to drive life forward in modern society. As a result, there’s reason to be concerned about...
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Tripwire Patch Priority Index for June 2020

Tripwire's June 2020 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together important vulnerabilities from Microsoft, BIND and Oracle. Up first on the Patch Priority Index this month are patches for Microsoft, BIND and Oracle for vulnerabilities that have been integrated into various Exploits. Metasploit has recently added exploits for BIND (CVE-2020-8617),...
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New CryCryptor Ransomware Masqueraded as COVID-19 Tracing App

Security researchers came across a new ransomware family called "CryCryptor" that masqueraded as a Canadian COVID-19 tracing app. CryCryptor emerged just days after the Canadian government announced it would support the development of a national, voluntary tracing app for COVID-19 called "COVID Alert." That official app had not yet entered its...
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State of Insider Data Breaches in 2020

Organizations protect critical assets and sensitive information from the outside world by continually updating their security controls and policies. However, the origin of a breach is not always outside of the organization, and recently, insider breaches have gained attention amid an increase in the flexibility of tools for information sharing....
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Ryuk Ransomware Deployed Two Weeks After Initial Trickbot Infection

Several attack campaigns waited two weeks after achieving a successful Trickbot infection before they deployed Ryuk ransomware as their final payload. SentinelOne came across the attacks as the result of monitoring an attack server employed by Trickbot's handlers. In the process, they discovered data for three separate attacks that occurred in the...
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NitroHack Modifies Windows Discord Client into Infostealing Trojan

Security researchers discovered a new malware threat called "NitroHack" that modifies the Discord client for Windows into an infostealing trojan. MalwareHunterTeam observed malicious actors abusing DM's from infected Discord users as a distribution vector. Specifically, they leveraged those accounts to inform a victim's friends that they could...
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Copied master key forces South African bank to replace 12 million cards

Fraudsters stole more than $3.2 million from the banking division of South Africa's post office, after - in a catastrophic breach of security - employees printed out the bank's master key. According to South African media reports, the security breach occurred in December 2018 when a copy of Postbank's digital master key was printed out at a data...
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Amazon Web Services Mitigated a 2.3 Tbps DDoS Attack

Amazon Web Services (AWS) said that it mitigated a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack with a volume of 2.3 Tbps. In its "Threat Landscape Report – Q1 2020," AWS Shield revealed that its team members had spent several days responding to this particular network volumetric DDoS attack. In Q1 2020, a known UDP reflection vector, CLDAP...