Xavier Blasco (a.k.a Lerhan) is a 23-year old security researcher on the Detectify Crowdsource Platform. He’s passionate about security and found a way in through bug bounty programs. As an ethical hacker, he is naturally curious in security testing vendors which he is buying from and this time it led to bypassing IDOR protection using URL shorteners. In the following guest blog, he describes this security flaw that led him to access new client contracts on Jazztel’s platform.

There are Red Sox, White Sox, and Fox in Socks. At the turn of the century, a new SOX entered our lexicon: The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. This financial regulation was a response to large corporate misdeeds at the time, most notably Enron misleading its board through poor accounting practices and insufficient financial oversight. The regulation seeks to ensure accurate and reliable financial reporting for public companies in the United States.

The California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA), set to go into effect in January 2020, will have a big impact on companies that do business in California or collect the personal information of California citizens. Driven by growing public demand for privacy, CCPA is the latest in a line of regulations that gives individuals greater control over how their personal data can be collected, stored, purchased, or shared by private companies. Wondering what CCPA means for your business?

Remember when you were younger, and you wanted to do something that all your friends were doing, yet you knew your parents would never approve? Perhaps it was skating in that home-made “Half-Pipe”, or that time you wanted to try some equally dangerous stunt? Of course, your parents disapproved, to which you probably responded with the time-honored refrain: “But everyone is doing it!” That was never a convincing argument.

“It’s okay that you don’t understand.” This comment came after I was frustrated with myself for not being born a genius at math. Usually, when you don’t know a subject or you don’t understand it enough, subject matter experts (i.e. your teachers/professors/mentors/etc) put you down for it. But this time was different because I had a real subject matter expert who cared about the end goal: students educated in math.

Ransomware has been a hot topic within the cyber security industry for quite some time now. It’s an often-lucrative cyber-attack method with an attractive return on investment. The motivation behind Ransomware attacks tends to be primarily financial, as cyber criminals can’t resist such easy opportunities to achieve their malicious goals. Ransomware is effective given that almost every individual or organization owns or has access to digital assets which are valuable to them.

Security analytics is not a particular tool, rather it is an approach to cybersecurity. Thorough analysis of data in order to implement proactive security measures is the essence of security analytics. It includes gathering data from every possible source to identify patterns. Nobody can predict the future but with cybersecurity analytics, you can make pretty accurate, informed guesses about it.

Vulnerability management (VM) is an essential process through which organizations can reduce risk in their environments. But myths and misconceptions surrounding VM abound. For instance, organizations commonly approach vulnerability management in the same way as they do patch management. Others are guilty of believing that all attacks rely on vulnerabilities, while others still are under the false impression that all software patches will work without a hitch.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. Here we are again, another week and another S3 leak. I really don’t understand how this keeps happening. Either its sloppy admin or people with no technical (or security) understanding is being let loose on a complex cloud service – both are not great. You would hope that when you call in experts to help with a problem, you are dealing with someone responsible.

Would you sit back in your chair and do nothing while your systems are under attack? You may be, without even realizing it. Businesses are increasingly finding themselves under cyberattacks carried out by hackers or criminals. However, many of them fail to recognize that they have been attacked until it is too late to do anything. That is why timing is the most essential component of cyber security. Fighting attacks proactively instead of reactively can save your systems and networks.