Summary The Great Cannon is a distributed denial of service tool (“DDoS”) that operates by injecting malicious Javascript into pages served from behind the Great Firewall. These scripts, potentially served to millions of users across the internet, hijack the users’ connections to make multiple requests against the targeted site. These requests consume all the resources of the targeted site, making it unavailable.

Ransomware, a type of malicious software or malware, is designed to deny access to computer systems or sensitive data until ransom is paid. While ransomware has been around for decades, ransomware attacks are becoming more sophisticated, spreading through phishing emails, spear phishing, email attachments, vulnerability exploits, computer worms and other attack vectors.

Docker is an awesome technology, and it’s prevalent in nearly every software developer’s workflow. It is useful for creating identical environments and sharing them between development, testing, production, and others. It’s a great way to ship a reliable software environment between systems or even to customers. However, like with any technology, one must know how to be secure when using it.

What is Sextortion? Sextortion is a way of criminally extorting money from a victim or forcing the victim to carry out an act unwillingly. More often than not, the attacker threatens to publicly release embarrassing, personal images or video footage of the victim. Pornographic blackmail is commonly the angle used in sextortion.

Security is a top concern for any enterprise to move their applications and workloads to the public cloud. AWS offers a broad selection of native security tools and as our Continuous Intelligence Report noted, AWS customers are using several of these to improve the security of their AWS environment. However, it can be overwhelming to know where to start and how to deploy best practices for detecting security misconfigurations caused by human errors and attacks from external sources.

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework provides a framework, based on existing standards, guidelines and practices for private sector organizations in the United States to better manage and reduce cybersecurity risk. In addition to helping organizations prevent, detect and respond to cyber threats and cyber attacks, it was designed to improve cybersecurity and risk management communications among internal and external stakeholders. The framework is increasingly adopted as best practice, with 30% of U.S.

If you are responsible for cybersecurity or data protection in your organization, stop what you are doing and read this report. Actually, first, go patch your servers and applications and then read this report. Much like Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), the Payment Security Report (PSR) is a must-read for security professionals.

Many of the current telephone scams use caller ID spoofing to mask the identity of the caller. A few of those telephone scams spoof caller IDs that don’t match the North American standard for legitimate numbers. These blatantly obvious spoofed caller IDs are the target of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

Organizations face an increasing number of compliance metrics. Risk management is of paramount importance and is feeding the need for governance. Terms like PCI DSS and NIST CSF are two frameworks that help enhance data security and manage risk. Often, it is the confusion on where businesses need to start that prevents them from taking action at all.

Authorization to Operate (ATO) in a day and on-going authorization are compliance nirvana. The ATO is the authorizing official’s statement that they accept the risk associated with the system running in production environments using live business data. The idea that all of the information necessary to make a risk decision is at hand and can be consumed by decision makers is what every compliance program is trying to achieve.