The cutting edge of cybersecurity is moving away from a reactive defense. Instead of analysts waiting for a threat to happen, they are proactively searching out attackers in their environment. Attackers are dynamic. They are always changing and improving their capabilities, which means that defenders need to lean in and adapt even faster to keep up. Proactive defense is about predicting, understanding, and preventing as many moves as possible that an attacker could make against you.

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is a list of publicly disclosed information security vulnerabilities and exposures. CVE was launched in 1999 by the MITRE corporation to identify and categorize vulnerabilities in software and firmware. CVE provides a free dictionary for organizations to improve their cyber security. MITRE is a nonprofit that operates federally funded research and development centers in the United States.

Alien Labs and the Open Threat Exchange (OTX) development team have been hard at work, continuing our development of the OTX platform. As some of you may have noticed, we’ve added some exciting new features and capabilities this last year to improve understanding within the OTX community of evolving and emerging threats.

Email spoofing is the creation of emails with a forged sender address. Because core email protocols lack authentication, phishing attacks and spam emails can spoof the email header to mislead the recipient about the sender of the email. The goal of email spoofing is to get recipients to open, respond and engage with the email message. Email spoofing can greatly increase the effectiveness of phishing and other email-based cyber attacks by tricking the recipient into trusting the email and its sender.

Normally it works like this. Someone gets infected by ransomware, and then they pay the ransom. The victim then licks their wounds and hopefully learns something from the experience. And that’s what happened to Tobias Frömel, a German developer and web designer who found himself paying a Bitcoin ransom of 670 Euros (US $735) after his QNAP NAS drive was hit by the Muhstik ransomware.

In the digital age, more often than not, you can be sure that some enterprise has hold of your personal information. This information could be your name, email, phone number, IP address, country and other details. This can come from submitting a form, subscribing to a newsletter, accepting cookies, accepting the privacy policy or terms and conditions when creating an account or downloading software.

31 percent of companies in the USA have been subjected to cyber attacks and 43 percent of those attacks were aimed at small businesses. When workplaces are designed with cybersecurity in mind, the odds of breaches will decrease. This is good news, because some breaches have the capacity to put companies out of business. These workplace design tips will make it simpler to keep hackers out of workplace networks.