Several of the digital twin technologies out there have grown fast in only a few years. Picture establishing a virtual model of IT infrastructure where one can identify loopholes, create attack scenarios, and prevent catastrophic attacks before the system is officially put in place. Using digital twins, it's no longer a silly idea for organizations to follow. Let's get knowledge of Digital Twin technology and how it can help to assess the loopholes in your security posture.

Hackers are highly trained cybercriminals with access to resources capable of compromising a system in an organization without being detected. And malwareless attacks – where cybercriminals access critical business networks without malware – are on the rise.

Last year, as most people were stuck at home, many of us became even more dependent on e-commerce sites than we were already. Unfortunately, that includes cybercriminals too. In 2020, scams targeting the checkout forms of online retailers rose by 20%, according to reports.

An enumeration attack is when cybercriminals use brute-force methods to check if certain data exists on a web server database. For simple enumeration attacks, this data could include usernames and passwords. More sophisticated attacks could uncover hostnames, SNMP, and DNS details, and even confirm poor network setting configurations. Every web application module that communicates with a user database could potentially become an enumeration attack vector if left unsecured.

In Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) a system or network is flooded with online traffic from multiple sources in an attempt to make it unavailable. Cybercriminals take advantage of protocol or DNS server vulnerabilities that they exploit to launch attacks. Moreover, in larger scale attacks, they may use malware that infects thousands of hosts that target the victim to block it, all of them with different IP addresses, which is known as a botnet.

The SolarWinds attack in late 2020 exposed the data of more than 18,000 businesses and governmental departments – many of which are gatekeepers for the country’s most vital infrastructure. While attacks against the software supply chain aren’t new, they are increasing exponentially.

In 2021, the cybersecurity industry was truly tested. Most notably, we uncovered the deeper fallout from the SolarWinds attacks, combatted the proliferation of advanced ransomware gangs and a surge in vulnerability exploitation, and saw fragile supply chain and critical infrastructure more targeted by attackers than ever. As global cyber defenders, predicting where the broad industry could be heading is a daunting task.

It is prediction time once again, and we’ve polled some of our esteemed experts here at Netskope to see what’s piquing their interest with 2022 on the horizon. Much like our predictions last year, we’ve broken the list out into some longer shots and some pretty safe bets. Here’s what we think is in store for 2022.

On Saturday November 13th, hundreds of thousands of recipients received an email from the FBI with the subject line of “Urgent: Threat actor in systems.” Thankfully for the recipients, it turned out the threat described in these emails wasn’t real as, unfortunately, the FBI had suffered an external email breach resulting in fake warning messages being sent out.

Iranian government-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) actors are exploiting known Microsoft and Fortinet vulnerabilities to attack targets with ransomware in the transportation, healthcare and public health sectors, according to an alert issued on Nov. 17 by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

A recently published report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has warned that official security guidance from the Department of Education is out-of-date, and needs to be refreshed to address the increasing reports of ransomware and other cyber threats.

Protecting your business against a cyberattack means diligently monitoring for activity that could indicate an attack is in progress or has already occurred. Locating these pieces of forensic data (such as data found in system log entries or files) ultimately helps you identify potentially malicious activity on your system or network.

Ransomware has quite rightly been one of biggest ongoing stories of 2021 – and not just in the world of cybersecurity. The biggest ransomware cases where major companies have been forced to a halt until they pay a ransom have made global, headline news. The impact to victim organizations is usually financial loss and reputational damage. However, in cases such as the Colonial Pipelines attack, ransomware has caused real-world impacts on the general public too.

The number of ransomware attacks continues to grow, and that trend will likely continue in 2022. Organizations will be attacked, files will be encrypted, and victims will need to decide whether to pay ransom or try to implement expensive and painful recovery techniques on their own. That much, unfortunately, should come as no surprise, but what will be different is how those attacks are carried out.

FIN7 is a well-organized criminal group composed of highly-skilled individuals that target financial institutions, hospitality, restaurant, and gambling industries. Until recently, it was known that high-level individuals of this criminal enterprise were arrested — specifically 3 of them — and extradited to the United States. This criminal group performed highly technical malicious campaigns which included effective compromise, exfiltration and fraud using stolen payment cards.

Cyberattacks can take many forms. Those intended to disrupt a business often happen as denial of service (DoS) attacks, and its even more disruptive cousin, the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Such attacks are often executed by a botnet, which is a network of infected machines or connected devices at the order of a botmaster. Botnet attacks present yet another challenge for security and IT teams focused on cybersecurity.

The rapid pace of technological progress has let companies around the world benefit from operational improvements that lower costs. This progress, however, also brings risks that companies must take into account to protect their stakeholders. Cyber-threats are executed by cybercriminals using various means to gain access to an organization’s digital infrastructure.

In the second half of 2021 the AT&T Managed Threat Detection and Response (MTDR) security operations center (SOC) observed an increasing number of attacks against vulnerable Exchange servers. A number of these attacks were attempting to leverage proxyshell vulnerability to gain access to customer’s networks.

Today’s cyber threat landscape is extremely challenging. Ransom this, ransom that, ransom everywhere – information technology (IT) professionals must work to protect organizations against the next big ransomware attack. Over the years, the sophistication of ransomware attacks has increased as well as the amount of money demanded and paid out in exchange for the ransom-held information.

On November 1st, 2021, a public disclosure of a paper titled Trojan Source: Invisible Vulnerabilities described how malicious actors may employ unicode-based bidirectional control characters to slip malicious source code into an otherwise benign codebase. This attack relies on reviewers confusing the obfuscated malicious source code with comments.

Supply-chain attacks may not grab the headlines in the same way as ransomware or data breaches, but these sneaky cyberattacks are just as dangerous for your business.

Threat actors are employing more advanced social engineering techniques with ever increasing frequency. All sectors are open to attacks with the financial and reputational losses being significant. Exploiting human nature is not new. The methods used by hackers are getting more sophisticated and they are becoming better at manipulating human behaviour. This guide to social engineering will help you.

A keylogger is a type of spyware that monitors and records user keystrokes. They allow cybercriminals to read anything a victim is typing into their keyboard, including private data like passwords, account numbers, and credit card numbers. Some forms of keyloggers can do more than steal keyboard strokes. They can read data copied to the clipboard and take screenshots of the user's screen - on PCs, Macs, iPhones, and Android devices. Keyloggers are not always the sole threat in cyberattacks.

In a blog post published in February 2021, Microsoft noted that web shell attacks had been steadily increasing since mid-2020. There were 140,000 monthly web shell attacks from August 2020 to January 2021, more than twice the average from 2020. The increasing prevalence of these attacks has a simple reason: web shell attacks are easy to author and launch. So, what are web shell attacks? Why should organizations be more aware of them?

Dependency confusion attacks are a form of open source supply chain security attacks in which an attacker exploits how package managers install dependencies. In a prior post, we explored how to detect and prevent dependency confusion attacks on npm to maintain supply chain security. In this article, we will present an extension of the dependency confusion problem utilizing npm’s package aliasing capabilities.

Looking back at the past year, there have been some downright spooky trends facing cyber security professionals. Ransomware attacks have skyrocketed, impacting organizations from healthcare to critical infrastructure to the suppliers of MSP suppliers and everyone in between. APT crews and criminal gangs have taken advantage of the pandemic that pushed everyone to remote work, making 2020/2021 the year that bad cybersecurity preparedness came home to roost.

Cybercrime can take many forms, and the criminals behind such attacks work with increasing sophistication — even to the point that some companies may, unwittingly, be helping criminals launch attacks against other organizations. For example, botnets are an organized network of infected devices at a hacker’s disposal, which the hacker then uses to carry out cybercrime schemes by harnessing resources available to the bots on the system.

It was 4:00 in the morning, May 20, 2021. Matthew Day, CIO of Langs Building Supplies (Langs) was excited for a long-anticipated holiday after 14 months of lockdown due to COVID-19. His wife was thrilled. His friends, ecstatic. But the day took an unexpected turn. Instead of waking up delighted to leave for his getaway, Day woke up to every CIO’s worst nightmare, the dreaded phone call: “We’ve been hacked.”