A scammer has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for laundering over US $4.5 million obtained by targeting businesses and the elderly with Business Email Compromise (BEC) and romance fraud scams. Malachi Mullings, a 31-year-old from Sandy Springs, Georgia, was charged with opening 20 bank accounts in the name of a sham company, The Mullings Group LLC, to launder millions of dollars generated...

Much has been made of cyber resilience in recent years. And with good reason: failing to bounce back quickly from a security event can have dramatic financial consequences. In early 2023, Royal Mail took several days to recover from a Lockbit cyberattack, losing upwards of £10 million in the process. However, for all the talk about resilience, the industry seems to be overlooking one of its...

How can an organization prepare to be cyber-resilient in 2024? The major trends to look out for seem to focus mainly on AI. While the rise of generative AI indeed poses challenges, executives should be cautious not to miss other critical trends that will shape the cybersecurity landscape this year. AI-driven Social Engineering Since the advent of...

In early April this year, the UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) released its Cybersecurity Breaches Survey 2024. It provides a comprehensive overview of the UK's cybersecurity landscape, exploring the different cyberattacks and cybercrimes businesses, charities, and private sector educational instructions face, the...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a long and storied history. Ancient Greeks, for example, told stories of Talos, an enormous automaton that stood guard over Crete’s shores. In the 17th century, Gottfried Leibniz, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes explored the possibility that all rational thought could be as systematic as algebra or geometry. By the...

Cybersecurity is more important than ever. With a skyrocketing number of cyber threats and data breaches, organizations are always on the lookout for ways to strengthen their online defenses. However, one major obstacle the cybersecurity sector faces is a lack of diversity and representation of women. According to Cybersecurity Ventures research,...

When you think of the cybersecurity "CIA" triad of Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability, which one of those is most important to your organization? While the answer may vary by season for your organization, there is no argument that they are all equally vital sides of that CIA triangle, and each deserves the correct level of care and...

Law enforcement agencies worldwide have coordinated to take down one of the world’s largest hacker forums, scoring a victory against cybercrime.BreachForums, a notorious marketplace for stolen data, was seized by the authorities on Wednesday, according to a message on its website. BREACHFORUMS IS UNDER...

Attacks against industrial control systems (ICS) are on the rise. Cyberattacks are more prevalent, creative, and faster than ever. So, understanding attackers' tactics is crucial. The IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2023 highlights that backdoor deployments enabling remote access to ICS systems were the most common type of attacker...

File integrity monitoring (FIM) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) are two cybersecurity solutions that are often foundational aspects of organizations’ security strategies. EDR is implemented in order to stop known and unknown threats at endpoints, often with advanced functions such as behavioral monitoring and analysis, antivirus protection...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s May 2024 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-1106 as soon as coverage is completed. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2024-30040 Up first this month, we have a security feature bypass in MSHTML. More specifically, we have an Object...

“When the cat’s away, the mouse will play,” the old adage goes. Filings to anti-fraud non-profit Cifas would support that claim, as Insider Threat Database (ITD) reports rose by 14% this past year and are largely attributable to hard-to-monitor work-from-home employees mixed with “increasing financial pressures.” The report details further incidents...

It’s the fifth requirement in CIS Control 1: Use a passive asset discovery tool. Sounds simple enough. But what does it mean? And what, specifically, makes it so important that it became one of the first five requirements of the widely applied CIS Controls used by so many organizations to establish their most basic levels of cyber hygiene? The...

Cybercriminals are notoriously tricky to pin down. They are experts in obfuscation and misdirection, masters of avoiding consequences. Not since the early days of the Wild West have criminals managed to evade capture and maintain anonymity as effectively as modern cybercriminals do. Part of the reason for these staggeringly low conviction rates...

The FBI has issued a warning to US retailers about a financially-motivated malicious hacking ring that has been targeting employees with phishing attacks in an attempt to create fraudulent gift cards. Staff at the corporate offices of US retail companies have been the target of highly-sophisticated email phishing and SMS phishing ("smishing")...

The Rolling Stones wanted to protect their space; we, as security practitioners, need to protect ours. Data 'castles' in the cloud are out there, and they're constantly under siege. By drawing inspiration from a band that embodied personal freedom, we can draw some – okay, very stretched - parallels to modern cloud security. Nonetheless, they work....

As technologies advance and the world grows more complicated, collaboration and coordination have become increasingly important. Setting standards, sharing information, and bringing experts together are essential to safely developing technologies for national and global priorities, and the world needs organizations to fulfill this role. The...

In the first installment of our series on cyber resilience, we discussed what being a resilient organization means. In this installment, we'll explore why organizations need to consider how to become resilient, who's responsible for achieving this, and the processes organizations must have to prioritize actions and effectively spend their budgets. ...

In 2022, the Security team at Microsoft published a cybersecurity awareness campaign named “#BeCyberSmart”. Even though that was two years ago, the same best practices still apply. Cybersecurity is an important part of our daily lives and can enable us to accomplish more while keeping our data and identity protected. Be CyberSmart Security starts...

From more broad laws like GDPR to industry-specific regulations like HIPAA, most organizations today must comply with some kind of data protection guideline. Some businesses may even have to comply with numerous data protection regulations. As such, compliance with data protection regulations has become increasingly complicated. National Institute...