This month we’re introducing you to GhostSec, a hacktivist group with ties to the Anonymous collective

Application security is integral to software development, and the majority of organizations now have dedicated AppSec programs. In the past five years, there has been a marked cultural shift, with application security becoming a strategic initiative that spans departments rather than an activity, like periodic scanning, code reviews, or testing or a transactional event related to a security assessment.

Ransomware and other cyber attacks are getting more expensive every year. IBM’s recent report found that the average cost of a breach increased 2.6% from $4.24 million in 2021 to $4.35 million in 2022 — and the year isn’t over yet. Too often, data breaches are the result of routine lapses.

Ransomware is to blame for the closure of all 175 7-Eleven stores in Denmark on Monday. The retailer closed all of its stores in Denmark after its cash registers and payment systems were brought down in the attack.

Blackhat 2022, on its 25th anniversary, took place this week in Las Vegas. The most important event for the infosec community and the best place for security vendors to showcase all their innovations and products in this ever-growing ecosystem. This year, attendees come from 111 different countries. In 2020, Black Hat added the word Cloud to the existing track about Platform Security.

Zendesk Engineering consists of many teams that own a large number of different domains, ranging from engineering teams that built internal services to teams that work on our various product offerings. One concern that these teams have in common is controlling access to their APIs via fine-grained policies. Some APIs are only available to admins, others to users with a specific set of permissions and some APIs restrict access based on attributes of the data being accessed.

Open Policy Agent (OPA) can be a mighty tool for users looking to embrace a policy-as-code approach to authorization. However, learning to decouple policy decisions from your applications with OPA can be a challenge on its own — not to mention deploying and managing those OPA instances at scale.

Cyberattacks cost businesses trillions of dollars every year in lost productivity, lost business, and legal penalties. So companies try to solve the problem by signing up for as many WAFs, NIDS, and bolt-on bot bundlers as they think they need. But while these systems can help stop cyberattacks, they also cause another problem: alert overload. Alert overload happens when your security team is inundated with notifications about possible threats to your system.

In May 2021, President Joe Biden signed the 30 - page Executive Order (EO) on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity covering a host of cybersecurity issues. It mandates that Executive branch agencies deploy multifactor authentication, endpoint detection and response, and encryption. It also describes how government agencies should evaluate the software they buy and calls for these agencies to adopt "zero trust" architectures and more secure cloud services.

This blog post is the first in a four-part series in which CrowdStrike’s Endpoint Protection Content Research Team will dive into various wipers discovered by the security community over the past 10 years. Our goal is to review in depth the various techniques employed by wipers that target the Windows operating system.