Veracode is pleased to announce the general availability of our new Azure DevOps Workflow integration. This new integration provides our customers using Azure DevOps Services with easy-to-configure, event-driven security testing of their application and infrastructure code managed in their Azure DevOps Repos.

HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. HIPAA is a U.S. law that was enacted in 1996 to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient's consent or knowledge and is enforced by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The purpose of HIPAA is to protect the privacy of patients’ medical information and secure the handling of health information in the age of electronic health records.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world today and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we’ll discuss quick and easy steps to keep your digital payments secure. Honestly, we think the world’s transition to digital payments was unsettlingly quick. Consumers were thrust into the world of digital payments without sufficient awareness of best practices or knowledge of what is trustworthy when it comes to online transactions.

Remember asking your teachers when you would need to know history facts outside of school? They probably said that learning history is important in understanding our past and how society has changed and progressed over time, and that we can learn from past experiences and mistakes. They were right, of course (even if it might not have felt like it then). And that’s all equally true when it comes to the history of security.

Imagine for a moment that your home has a rodent problem. To address this, you install a fancy system designed to automatically detect and trap animals before they can roam around your house and cause any damage. The system seems to work well; from time to time, you arrive home to find a mouse or a squirrel caught by the device. No big deal, right? Lots of small critters about and the system is working as designed to catch them.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come a long way since John McCarthy first coined the term in 1955. Today, as AI technologies become deeply embedded in our daily lives, the potential they hold is immense – but so are the risks to safety, privacy, and fundamental human rights. Recognizing these concerns, the European Union (EU) took a proactive step in 2021 by proposing a regulatory framework aimed at governing AI.

Microsoft has disclosed a critical (CVSS 9.8) TCP/IP remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability that impacts all Windows systems utilizing IPv6. To conduct this attack, threat actors can repeatedly send IPv6 packets that include specially crafted packets. By doing this, an unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability, leading to remote code execution. Systems that have IPv6 disabled are not susceptible to this vulnerability.

Read also: Police dismantle the Radar/Dispossessor ransomware group, a data broker gets a prison sentence, and more.

The latest data from Coveware shows a slowing of attack efficacy, a decrease in ransom payments being made, and a shift in initial access tactics. According to Coveware’s Q2 2024 Ransomware Quarterly Report, we see a few interesting trends: A new data point brought to light this quarter is the data exfiltration only (DXF) payment trend, which is relatively flat despite fluctuating between 53% in Q1 of 2022 when tracking began, down to a low of 23% in Q1 of this year.

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is alive and well, and used in attacks to obfuscate malicious links in phishing emails to redirect users to threat-actor controlled websites. We saw earlier this year that phishing attacks leveraging XSS were on the rise. Now, new scams are using XSS to hide their malicious intent within emails, according to new analysis from cybersecurity vendor INKY. These attacks usually begin with an email stating the victim has won something, as shown below: Source: INKY.